It’s become widely-accepted that retirement savings portability is proven to address the small account problem for 401(k) plan sponsors, as well as preserve participants’ savings currently lost to cashout leakage.

However, the concept of retirement savings portability is relatively new. At year’s end, most plan sponsors’ attention will be focused on other plan design issues, such as auto enrollment/escalation, the lineup of investment options, enrollment, education, retirement income solutions and so forth. 

On May 12^th, Retirement Clearinghouse announced the National Retirement Savings Cashout Clock, a virtual clock that calculates 2017 year-to-date cashout leakage from America’s defined contribution system in real time.

If you’re like most homeowners during these dog days of summer, you’re not just basking in the sunshine or swimming in the pool with your family. You also have a fight on your hands—the war against the dandelions that invade and attempt to occupy your entire lawn every year at this time.

On July 11^th, 2017, a small group of retirement services professionals at Retirement Clearinghouse (RCH)  successfully conducted the first-use of a new and important financial technology.  Known as “locate & match” -- the technology represents a breakthrough in the ability to automatically move small balances forward in America’s defined contribution system, and forms the backbone of RCH Auto Portability.

In January 2016, this blog published a post on the November 2015 letter from Senator Patty Murray (D–WA) of the Senate HELP committee, signed by a bicameral group of Congressional members, urging then Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Thomas Perez to encourage the DOL’s Employee Benefits Security Administration to issue guidance on auto portability.

If you think of retirement savings as a key part of a healthy retirement, then anyone who has prematurely cashed out 401(k) savings during their working life has suffered a compound fracture that will require several stages of therapy to fully rehabilitate. But a cash-out isn’t the only impediment to a financially secure retirement for these hardworking Americans.

Auto Portability is the routine, standardized and automated movement of an inactive participant’s retirement account from a former employer’s retirement plan to their active account in a new employer’s plan. By dramatically reducing cashouts and improving retirement readiness, Auto Portability will deliver broad benefits to America’s defined contribution system, its participants and to the entire American economy.

But who benefits from Auto Portability, and how? 

How Big is the 401(k) Cashout Leakage Problem? 

We’ve known for some years now that 401(k) cashout leakage is a very big problem, but have lacked a thorough understanding of its many dimensions. 

Half a century ago, the global medical community united to wipe out smallpox, an infectious disease that afflicted mankind for millennia. In 1966, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the Smallpox Eradication Programme, which sent Western doctors to vaccinate the populations of nations and communities around the globe where smallpox was still rampant. No place where smallpox cases had been reported, or where the local population was not vaccinated, was overlooked by WHO medical teams, no matter how remote the village or how dangerous the journey.

On Thursday, May 11^th, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) conducted their 80^th Policy Forum.