Your retirement plan may allow you to borrow from your account—but before you do, it’s important to understand how it can impact your future savings. Think of it like a U-turn on your savings highway. It could cost you more time and money than you expect.
In today’s workforce, the demographic ages range from Gen Z to Baby Boomers. This is a gap of approximately 60 years! Plan sponsors should be adjusting their communication strategies to better reach each generation.
Retirement planning starts with numbers such as savings targets, contribution rates, and investment returns. These kinds of foundational metrics guide the structure of retirement strategies and inform plan design. Yet even the most precise calculations don’t exist in a vacuum. Factors like geography, public policy, and life expectancy function as contextual forces, offering mitigating variables that can shape how those numbers play out in real life.
No matter how old you are, it’s never too early (or late) to save money for retirement. Each decade comes with different goals, investment types, and risk factors, but understanding the difference can help you be prepared for when your retirement comes around.
Threats of financial penalties and legal liabilities heighten the need for proper compliance with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). Let’s go over the basics of what it means to be a fiduciary in an organization’s retirement plan.
Retirement plans have long subjected employer contributions to vesting schedules, rewarding tenure by increasing the participant’s ownership in those contributions in proportion to their years of service. However, several law firms have recently challenged this long-standing and common practice, arguing that using forfeitures to offset employer contributions is not in the best interests of participants or beneficiaries, as ERISA requires.