401(k) Fridays Podcast

This episode was a real treat for me and hopefully will be for you. I am excited share my conversation with The Honorable Phyllis Borzi, the former Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration under President Obama.  We covered a range of topics that regardless of your involvement with workplace retirement plans should keep your interest. I am also proud that while we talked about her time at the DOL, the majority of our focus was looking forward and exploring how her experience can help employers today and those who want to shape the future of the workplace retirement system.  We also hit on two pieces of unfinished business Phyllis wished she had more time to work on while she was at the DOL, what the Perez Principle is and whether employers also suffer from choice overload in retirement plans.  Finally, we cover a few topics near and dear to her heart and what she thinks of some of the current retirement proposals in front of congress today to reform the retirement system.

Maybe I'm a little early with the football analogy, but it seemed to fit. Today, we welcome back Tom Clark, an ERISA Attorney and Partner at The Wagner Law Group as we discuss five 401(k) fiduciary fumbles we see plan sponsors make.  As a return guest who I have gotten to know  pretty well, we have a little fun and share some insight along the way. Whether it is clarifying the importance of fiduciary analysis vs. process, mistakes to avoid when "outsourcing" fiduciary responsibility, or the inevitable fumbles around fees.  Oh, and Tom gives us his feedback from the front lines as to whether the tide has been turning in favor of employers or plaintiffs in ERISA litigation.    Guest Bio Tom Clark is a partner at The Wagner Law Group, a law firm specializing in ERISA & Employee Benefits. He leads the firm’s St. Louis office. His expertise encompasses all aspects of employee benefits programs, including the design, implementation and compliance of retirement plans, health and welfare plans, and executive and

Welcome back to new episodes of the 401(k) Fridays Podcast! After taking a little hiatus in July I am really excited about what we have in store for the remained of the year.  Also, during our little break I updated the podcast intro, if you skipped it go back and give it a quick listen.  We also updated the website, thank you Jonah and Annie at Puddlecreative. Go to 401kfridays.com and check that out, and while you are there don’t forget to subscribe to our email list.  All done with housekeeping, now onto the episode at hand.     Its always fun to welcome back a returning guest.  Jeff Bograd was one of my favorite guests from last year, if you haven’t listened to his episode scroll down on your podcast app and look for Retirement Plan Design The Next Frontier it is a good one.  Today, we tackle some thoughts for employers as they plan for 2019.  Recent tax reform brought about a few changes to 401(k) plans that everyone should be aware of.  Also, we hit on a few plan design options to think about as you con

We are taking a brief summer hiatus. Enjoy this episode from the archives. New episodes will resume again in August. Enjoy! This episode is fresh out of the 401(k) Fridays Podcast experiment lab.  Today my guest JD Carlson, the President & CEO of the legendary Third Party Administration firm Plan Design Consultants and Host of the Retireholi(k)s show we poke a little bit of fun with 401(k) speak.  Each of us took the time to prepare a few statements that are full of retirement plan terms, or maybe not, and then put the other person on the spot to determine if the statement is Jargon, Gibberish, or Jumbled.  We had a lot of fun recording this but want to make sure we weren’t the only ones.  Please share your feedback on whether this was entertaining, informative or both or neither.  Shoot us an email to feedback@401kfridays.com or leave a comment on LinkedIn to me, Rick Unser or JD Carlson.  If the feedback we get is encouraging, we will tackle some additional retirement plan related topics using this form

Employers consistently want to know what other employers are doing in their 401(k) plan. In this episode we drill into the decisions employers are making about plan design, investment options, fiduciary process and employee retirement outcomes. The heavy lifting is done by Derek Wallen, a SVP at Fidelity and architect of their annual Plan Sponsor Attitudes Survey.  Derek does a nice job highlighting the key finds of this years survey which is hot off the presses and comparing result to prior years.  He also does all of this in a way that is easy to understand and compare contrast what is going on in your plan.  If you would like a copy of the survey go to 401kfridays.com/wallen and we will have a link. Or, if you are an email subscriber we will send that out to you. If you are not an email suscriber, go to 401kfrisays.com/subscribe today to get that taken care of.   Finally, we are going to take a little summer hiatus so this will be the last new episode for a few weeks. Don’t forget we have over 120 episodes

Its getting to be that time of year again, no not that time of year, its time to plan for benefits open enrollment. Over the last several years all the changes and activity in health plans has grabbed the headlines and the lions share of the focus of employee meetings. This year, and going forward where does the 401(k) plan fit? To shed some light on this I am happy to have Peg Knox who today is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of DCIIA. But not so long ago she was the global retirement plans manager at Bechtel Global Corporation, where she worked to generate and implement new ideas for Bechtel retirement plans to enhance retirement security for its employees. She shares some great thoughts right out of the gate on 401(k) plans and open enrollment. We also delve into the hot topics of financial wellness, whether HSAs should be tied to health plans or retirement plans and much more. Guest Bio Peg Knox is Chief Operating Officer (COO) of DCIIA. Prior to joining DCIIA, she was the global retirement plans manage

There has been vast improvement by retirement plan fiduciaries when it comes to reviewing fees and investments.  We even see more retirement plan committee who check the box on other important fiduciary tasks. But does that mean they have a good governance process?  With that said, what is fiduciary governance, what does good governance look like and can you be a top notch fiduciary but leave yourself exposed to risk with poor governance? We tackle this and more today in my conversation with Andy Larson, Director of Retirement Education at the Retirement Leaning Center.  Right out of the gate Andy shares what he feels the key missing ingredient to good governance is. We also tackle many common questions we get from employers about governance such as who should be on a fiduciary committee, how often should you meet and what should you address every year. Stay tuned because some answers you have heard in the past have been updated based on what we have learned from ERISA litigation and other trends.  You will a

Believe it or not, but it has been over six months since we have tackled about financial wellness on the podcast. Today, Chris Whitlow, the Founder & CEO of Edukate, address the red hot topic. In our conversation today we tackle an interesting thought on financial wellness, despite nearly everyone talking about it, are employers actually embracing it? We share some thoughts on that along with four steps to start an effective financial wellness program, if financial wellness is a product or process, how to evaluate VOI & ROI and thoughts for employers to knock down silos between their physical wellness and financial wellness programs and embrace a program based on overall wellbeing.  Chris and I also had a few good laughs as he picked away at my compound questions. Guest Bio Chris Whitlow is the founder and CEO of Edukate, a workplace financial wellness provider on a mission to give every person access to expert financial guidance. Chris works with the Edukate team to solve problems that ease the finan

In case you hadn’t noticed, Target Date Funds (TDFs) are kind of a big deal in workplace retirement plans.  My guest, Jeff Holt, a Director of Multiasset Strategies at Morningstar and one of the authors of their 10th annual Target Date Landscape report cites their use as default funds in retirement plans as one of the key reasons they hit $1 Trillion dollars in assets in 2017.    During our conversation today, we discuss the significance of that accomplishment and hit a few other highlights including thoughts on the flood of money into “passive” target date funds, how TDFs are actually performing, whether you can glean useful information by evaluating the underlying holdings in TDFs and how the competitive environment in TDFs is affecting the industry.  Also, don’t miss our discussion on a newer statistic Morningstar has developed comparing the cost of a target date fund with the percent of that fund that is index based.     Whether you are TDF novice or expert, there is something here for you.  If you feel l

With the continued focus on fees in workplace retirement plans I thought it might be good to pivot the conversation and tackle some of the realities around the what actually goes into running a successful and compliant plan.  To add some muscle to the conversation I have Ed Murphy, President of Empower Retirement.  Ed and his team are responsible for over 30,000 of thousands of retirement plans and over 8 million participants.  Our conversation ranges from what it takes to keep the proverbial trains running on time, why scale is important in retirement services, how they predict where the puck is going to allocate discretionary spending, and much more.  I learned a lot during our conversation and hopefully this will provide you with some helpful perspective when you face the inevitable questions about your retirement plan fees.     Before we get started, we have some exciting new episodes in store where tackle where 401(k) fits in your open enrollment strategy, is financial wellness working, trends in target

The DOL Fiduciary Rule died, or did it?  Maybe its coming back to life in another form, through another government agency or even the states will take a crack at it.  What should employers know? How will this impact employees?  In this timely and action packed episode I am excited to have Fred Reish, ERISA Attorney extraordinaire with Drinker Biddle and the closest follower I know of the long and winding path of the fiduciary rule.  For many, Fred requires no introduction.  If you are not familiar Fred is perennially listed as one of the most influential individuals in the retirement industry, he has been named one of the “Legends” in the development of retirement plan by PLANSPONSOR Magazine and given multiple lifetime achievement awards and other honors.  On top of that, Fred is a great guy with an easy to follow communication style as he shares his insights today.  If you want to learn more about Fred or subscribe to his blog that we reference today you can find him at fredreish.com As a quick aside, I wor

With so much focus on employee engagement and financial wellness, what happens when you actually get your employees attention and they use the tools they are provided to help calculate what they need to do to have a successful retirement, and they are given bad information? My guest today, Tom Kmak, CEO of Fiduciary Benchmarks has thought a great deal about it, so much so that I think he even admitted talking to retirement calculators, but in all seriousness he has some timely input and food for thought for employers.  This is the third time I have had Tom on the podcast and love when he shares his perspective from over 30 years in the retirement industry which includes running JP Morgan’s retirement business and founding Fiduciary Benchmarks a decade ago.  When Tom invests a lot of time and gets passionate about something, that usually means its important and things will change in the future.   Guest Bio CEO and co-founder of Fiduciary Benchmarks, 2007 to current. Fiduciary Benchmarks (FBi) is a premier benc

My conversation with Lynn Avitabile, Managing Director in the the Multi-Asset Group of J.P Morgan Asset Management and Wei Hu, Vice President of Financial Research at Financial Engines really cleared some things up for me on the role of Target Date Funds and Managed Accounts in workplace retirement plans.  We have talked about Target Date Funds several times on the podcast, but Managed Accounts not so much.  As we are accustomed to doing we start with some definitions of terms and then quickly jump into how they compare and contrast with target date funds, how to determine if your plan participants could benefit from one or both strategies.  Great dialogue and good input all around.  After listening you tell me, do target dates and managed accounts go together like oil & water or peanut butter and jelly? Hope you enjoy, and you don’t want to miss next weeks episode.   Guest Bios Lynn Avitabile, managing director, J.P. Morgan Asset Management is a Client Portfolio Manager within Multi-Asset Solutions, b

Unfortunately, mistakes are made when running workplace retirement plans.  My guest, Marcia Wagner, the founder of The Wagner Law Group brings her over thirty years of experience working on ERISA matters to the podcast today and shares her list of the top 10 mistakes she sees retirement plan sponsors make.  For a little background, Marcia is perennially listed as one of the most influential people in the retirement industry, is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal and other publications and regular guest on FOX, CNN, Bloomberg, NBC and other news shows.  You can find out more about Marcia and this episode at 401kfridays.com/wagner.   Back to our conversation today, not surprising, her top ten list is spot on and she does an excellent job explaining the issues, how they happen and probably most importantly how to avoid and thoughts on how fix them if needed.  Along the way, we also have a little fun and share some laughs.  As far as top ten lists go this one makes my personal list top ten list!  Guest

The inspiration for this episode came from a request for proposal I received recently from a company in my day job as a workplace retirement plan consultant  After giving it a quick read through, my initial reaction was wow, this company is in a fiduciary defensive shell.  Their entire focus was on managing and limiting their fiduciary liability.  I guess if you consider the lawsuits and fiduciary messaging I can understand their positioning.  So, that got me thinking, should workplace retirement plan fiduciaries be thinking defensively or offensively when making plan decisions?    To bring some perspective to the conversation I was excited to have Jaime Fleckner, a Partner and Chair of the ERISA Litigation Practice at Goodwin Proctor join me.  He has a pretty impressive background and experience defending retirement plan fiduciaries which you can check out at 401kfridays.com/fleckner.  I won’t steal Jaime’s thunder but I will tell you that if you’re looking for some fresh thoughts on the current retirement p

Today we take a little detour from talking about the usual 401(k) or workplace retirement plan topics and focus on the challenge for many people around the country who are gainfully employed but don’t have access to a retirement plan at work.  Personally, when I first heard some of the stats we discuss today they were surprising to me.  I have two guests which both shared great perspective today, Lisa Massena, the Executive Director of OregonSaves the first state retirement plan to go live and Andrew Biggs, a resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has a wealth of data and research about retirement savings at his finger tips.  As hopefully you have heard in prior episodes when I have two guests on that usually means they are not always going to agree on everything.  Our conversation starts with a conversation around the data, what options individuals who don’t have access to a retirement plan at work have today and how the conversation will evolve in the future.  With Lisa here, we also spen

This episode is fresh out of the 401(k) Fridays Podcast experiment lab.  Today my guest JD Carlson, the President & CEO of the legendary Third Party Administration firm Plan Design Consultants and Host of the Retireholi(k)s show we poke a little bit of fun with 401(k) speak.  Each of us took the time to prepare a few statements that are full of retirement plan terms, or maybe not, and then put the other person on the spot to determine if the statement is Jargon, Gibberish, or Jumbled.  We had a lot of fun recording this but want to make sure we weren’t the only ones.  Please share your feedback on whether this was entertaining, informative or both or neither.  Shoot us an email to feedback@401kfridays.com or leave a comment on LinkedIn to me, Rick Unser or JD Carlson.  If the feedback we get is encouraging, we will tackle some additional retirement plan related topics using this format with future guests.  The fate of Jargon, Gibberish or Jumbled  is in your hands! We also have another first with this epi

It has never made a lot of sense to me how retirement plan participants go missing and lose track of sometimes thousands of dollars of their money.  My conversation today with Spencer Williams, the President & CEO of Retirement Clearing House shed a lot of light on just how this happens.  We tackle a host of related issues in a face paced back and forth dialogue which highlights some interesting findings from their recent study on the topic, we also hit on how missing participants factor into the concern around retirement plan leakage and what the impact is on both employers and employees when participants go missing.  Of course, before we wrap up we provide some concrete thoughts on how to address the issue in your plan and look forward to a few new concepts that might help with this in the future.   Guest Bio Spencer is Retirement Clearinghouse’s Founder, President and CEO. Retirement Clearinghouse is a specialized provider of portability and consolidation services for America’s mobile workforce and has

Some tricky schedules got in the way of my production calendar so no new episode this week.  However, as I searched through our archives I thought this episode had some great messages that would be good for some of our new subscribers to hear and for our long term listeners to have top of mind.  Enjoy! I'll have to admit, when I first heard of Don Barden and the "Perfect Plan" I was pretty skeptical.  What does "perfect" mean?  Who gets to judge "perfect"?  My analytical mind was going crazy.  However, as I became more familiar with Don and the concepts and elements he believes in, I felt it definitely made sense to bring him onto the podcast.  My hope is that you will take away a few kernels of knowledge to help you rethink what retirement means along some motivation and inspiration! Be sure to check back next week as we have a great line-up of new episodes where we will address some new topics, revisit some popular ones from new angles and have differing viewpoints on the same topic get together to share so

Somewhere in the lifecycle of most retirement plans, employers are faced with the inevitable decision, should I bundle or unbundle the administration of my plan?  There are several different perspectives on that question and some important considerations that employers should keep in mind.  To help sort though this, I was excited to welcome back Doug Van Galder, he would call himself a recovering Third Party Administrator and is now a compliance analyst with the ERISA law firm Boutwell Fay.  During our conversation we define the difference between recordkeeping and administration, discuss the profiles of groups who are more to unbundle administration and leave everyone with a few more thoughts to help guide you through the inevitable decision to bundle or unbundle the administration of your retirement plan.  Guest Bio Douglas Van Galder is a Compliance Analyst who is committed to the favorable tax-qualified status and success of the private and public pension systems in America. Therefore, Doug assists Boutwe