Retirement research and thought leadership

Retaining top-tier talent in specialized roles typically requires more than standard benefits. Offering thoughtfully designed, customized retirement plan options is a way to address the unique needs of these professionals, helping ensure they feel valued and motivated to stay.

When interpreting retirement plan data and statistics, a simple guideline is to flip the numbers to see the full story. This simple test can help employers and financial professionals better understand if plan design changes might be needed.

Data shows that automatic features, such as automatic (auto) enrollment, auto-increase, and re-enrollment can significantly improve participation rates and help employees save for retirement.¹ Explore cost-neutral ways of adding such auto features to your plan design.

A significant shortage of registered nurses is projected through 2036. As health care administrators face challenges in both hiring and retaining nurses, there are opportunities to offer enhanced employee benefits to reduce nurse turnover.

Retirement plans today tend to be designed with features so the average person can begin saving with little effort. Yet, it’s seemingly not working for many employees. Instead of easier, do we need to make it harder to avoid?

Designing a retirement plan that helps all health care workers save for retirement can be challenging. Using ownership structure and tax status, Marc Howell presents plan designs to help participants save more, pass nondiscrimination testing, and watch the bottom line.

Should you lock in healthy funding levels?

A comparison of the risk management options for defined benefit plans: liability- driven investing, annuity buy-outs, and annuity buy-ins.

Defined benefit plan sponsors can save on their PBGC premiums.

Let’s dispel some of the common myths about Social Security and its funding status. Here we explore the program’s structure, demographic challenges, and possible outcomes if no legislative action is taken soon.

In the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 there’s now an option plan sponsors can add allowing participants to elect to receive employer matching and nonelective contributions as Roth contributions. While initially expected to follow the same process as employee Roth contributions, recent IRS guidance reveals a different tax treatment for employer contributions, prompting important considerations for implementation and potential tax impacts for employees.

Student loan debt is hindering employees’ retirement savings. To help, a new provision within SECURE 2.0 lets employers match student loan payments with contributions to the employee’s retirement account.

Find answers to trending questions and answers about the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, including required minimum distributions (RMDs), Roth catch-up contributions, hardship self-certification and more.

Discover the latest IRS guidance on the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. Get clarity on matching qualified student loan payments (QSLP), automated features, using financial incentives, and treating certain funds as Roth contributions.