Do You Trust Your 401(k)? Have You Ever Thought About It?

In the financial advisor world, we get numerous opportunities throughout the year to take a break, attend a conference, learn a few things, and recharge the batteries a bit.  This week I had a chance to do just that, and was able to listen to a very impressive speaker discuss “Trust” – what is it, how do we earn it, and what’s it mean.
 
The speaker was Dr. Jeff Hancock, Professor of Communications at Stanford University and Director of Stanford’s Center for Computational Social Science.  Suffice to say, he is a pretty bright guy, and what he does is study human psychology and the meaning of trust.  I didn’t even know that was a thing until this week, but after listening to him, I am glad the we have someone like him.

Dr. Hancock’s work is even more important in a world where many of us are inundated regularly through digital information.  A thousand years ago, “trust” was more or less limited to those in our small communities.  Maybe we had to trust someone a town over, but that was it for most folks.  Now we have to trust, or not trust, information from all over the world that is hitting us relentlessly all day. How do we deal with this?

In the most succinct way possible, Dr. Hancock distilled trust into this simple statement – “Trust is the confidence in one’s expectations.”  Beautiful, right?  If I have a high confidence in what I am hearing, seeing, reading, etc., then I trust it.  He was discussing trust in general, but, of course, I couldn’t help relate this back to what I do – assist employers and employees with their retirement plan.

All this made me think about the trust employers and employees have in their own 401k plan, and can they “trust it.”  The first step in such an analysis would naturally be what do they expect from it.  Without expectations there can be no confidence, which means there can be no trust.

So I ask you, what are your expectations for your 401k plan?  How much confidence do you have that those expectations will be met?  If you are struggling at all with these two questions, then how can you trust your retirement plan?  And if you are struggling with these questions, how much do your employees trust the company’s retirement plan?

I have a thought.  A good place to begin building up trust in your plan is to sit down with a competent advisor to clearly understand what expectations you should have for your retirement plan.  Once you begin building trust in your plan, you can help your employees build trust in the plan, which is really another way of saying you would help your employees build trust in their future.  And isn’t that a good thing?

Need help beginning this journey?  Give me a call, I would love to work with you…trust me!
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Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy