DB Your 401k Plan?

There is much going on in the retirement plan community as we kick off 2020.  New Legislation (the SECURE Act), new Regulation (the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest effective this summer), and all kinds of new research.  
 
With respect to research, Russell Investments just published their newest study around anticipated changes that are likely to happen to your 401k plan in the next few years.  The good news about most of the anticipated changes is that they will be “good.”  “Good” being defined as a change that will better enable employees to prepare for a comfortable retirement.  Everyone can get behind those kinds of changes.
 
One anticipated change that stuck out to me was their “prediction” that as a matter of best practice, employers will begin to conduct retirement readiness reports of their plans to better understand the “funded status” of their participants.  The term “funded status” is generally used in defined benefit (“DB”) plans to indicate the extent to which the plan has the money to pay out benefits.  This is another way of saying that in the future, employers will start to look at their employees’ savings and ask “are they on track.”  I’m oversimplifying a bit, but not much.
 
The reason this stuck out to me is that I already do this with my clients.  And have for quite a while.  A prediction of something that is already occurring isn’t much of a prediction.  However, as I thought about this, it occurred to me that maybe the majority of advisors do not assess retirement readiness, e.g. “funded status”, for their clients and that what Russell was saying is that “in the future” they might.   Well, if this is what they are saying, then there is a problem.
 
If you are company that sponsors a 401k plan, I have to ask, does your advisor conduct periodic reviews of the plan’s retirement readiness?  Are you aware on a quarterly basis how your plan is doing to prepare your employees for retirement?  Does your advisor have a framework to assess these questions and provide you with objective reporting?
 
If the answer to the above is “no”, then I would respectfully suggest you have two options.  The first option is to wait about 5 years as the authors of the research believe the probability to be 100% that such reporting will be in place by 2025.  The second option would be to give me a call and we can start discussing how you can get this information today.  After all, why would you want to wait 5 years when you can get a "future best practice” today?
 
Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy