Lamenters of the 401(k) Revolution

The 2017 media-bashing of the 401(k) is off to an early start.

The most recent is a Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) whose headline notes that “The Champions¹ of the 401(k) Lament the Revolution They Started” (the third-most read article on the WSJ site as I write this).

It’s fair to say, I think, that their regrets aren’t so much about the 401(k) itself, but their sense that the existence of the 401(k) – which transformed the notion of retirement savings in so-called savings and thrift plans by allowing regular workers to defer paying taxes on money they set aside for retirement – led to the demise of the traditional defined benefit plan.

Well, maybe.

Trust me, I “get” the affection for the promise of a DB plan. Who wouldn’t like a plan that is funded (and paid for) by your employer, invested by your employer, and at retirement, produces regular, predictable distributions without you having to do anything except making sure they know where to send the check(s)?

That, of course, assumes that you had one. Even in their heyday, DB plans not only weren’t available to everyone, they weren’t even available to most workers in the private sector. The WSJ article acknowledges that just 38% of all private-sector workers had a traditional pension in 1979 (13% do today). Where were the headlines in 1979 about fewer than 4 in 10 workers being covered by a pension plan?

And that was just being “covered.” While coverage like that in the WSJ article tends to equate coverage with receiving benefits, that’s just not the way it was. To get that full benefit from that DB plan back in their heyday, you’d likely have had to work there at least 10 years, if not 15. And while we seem to think that 40 years ago Americans worked for a single employer their whole career, that wasn’t the case in the private sector, even in the DB’s heyday (and certainly today) didn’t.²

The data show that for the very most part we have long been a nation of relatively short-tenured workers. How short? Well, the median job tenure in the United States — how long workers stay at one job — has hovered around five years for the past three decades. Indeed, according to the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), in recent years it has ticked up, to about 5.5 years, but that’s because women are staying in their jobs longer; job tenure for men has actually been dropping.

What that means is that even workers who were “covered” by a pension plan in the private sector weren’t working with that employer long enough to get much – or any – of that promised pension benefit.

That doesn’t mean that those who were, and those who continue to be, covered by DB plans shouldn’t be grateful. But it’s time to stop lamenting the demise of DB plans – and it’s well past time to stop blaming the 401(k) as the culprit. Let’s be honest: It was changes in accounting rules, fueled by the occasional market turmoil, and exacerbated by artificially constrained interest rates over a prolonged period, done no good by the stricter (though well-intentioned) funding requirements in the ironically named Pension Protection Act of 2006. Not to mention, though some may dispute this, a workforce that, writ large, never seemed to fully understand or appreciate the value of these programs (perhaps because so many of them left before vesting).

As for those who want to blame the 401(k) for the nation’s retirement readiness – well, as has been said before, that’s a bit like blaming the well for the drought.

There is little question that the reality of the 401(k) struggles to live up to the myth of the defined benefit plan. No doubt that the voluntary design (even with auto-encouragements), sporadic availability among smaller employers, and the inherent complexity of individual savings and investment decisions provide challenges.

Regardless, and despite a plethora of media coverage and academic hand-wringing that suggests they are wasting their time, the American public has, through thick and thin, largely hung in there – when they are given the opportunity to do so.

The good news is that far many more American workers have that opportunity today than ever before. But not everyone.

And that really is lamentable.

- Nevin E. Adams, JD

Footnotes

1. Who are these champions? The real surprise is the article’s framing of the New School’s Teresa Ghilarducci as a former champion of the 401(k) concept (she claims to have once told unions that people only needed to save 3%, assuming 7% returns. Her position may have changed, but her math doesn’t appear to have – see “Rescuing Retirement from the ‘Rescuers’.”
2. A 2013 analysis by EBRI reveals that a defined benefit is not always “better,” at least not defined as providing financial resources in retirement. In fact, if historical rates of return are assumed, as well as annuity purchase prices reflecting average bond rates over the last 27 years, the median comparisons show a strong outcome advantage for voluntary enrollment 401(k) plans over both stylized, final average DB plan and cash balance plan designs.

5 Ways to Boost Retirement Confidence

With increasing regularity, the financial services industry pumps out surveys that purport to capture America’s sense of confidence regarding its readiness for retirement, at least on a financial footing. Mostly, however, they seem to focus on the symptom, rather than dealing with the underlying cause(s).

However well-intentioned, these all seem designed to highlight a persistent strong undercurrent of concern — one that, certainly when juxtaposed against the generally disappointing preparation levels reported by respondents, seems completely warranted.

Confidence about retirement is one thing, of course, and preparation something else, though the two are logically intertwined. That said, for those looking to shore up confidence levels, data from the granddaddy of such surveys — the non-partisan Employee Benefit Research Institute’s (EBRI) Retirement Confidence Survey — provides a roadmap:

Work for an employer that offers a retirement plan.

Data indicates that workers — even workers of modest means — are 15 times more likely to save for retirement if they have access to a retirement plan at work than those who don’t have that option. It is perhaps not surprising then that in recent years, the RCS has tracked a huge gap in confidence about retirement between those who have a retirement plan and those who don’t; in the 2015 RCS, 44% of workers without a retirement plan are not at all confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement, compared with only 14% of those who have a plan.

Furthermore, among those with a plan, the percentage of those who are very confident increased from 14% in 2013 to 28% in 2015. In contrast, the percentage of those who are very confident remained statistically unchanged among those without a plan (10% in 2013, 9% in 2014 and 12% in 2015).
Workers reporting that they or their spouses have money in a defined contribution plan or IRA or have a defined benefit plan from a current or previous employer were more than twice as likely as those without any of these plans to be very confident (24% with a plan vs. 9% without a plan in the 2014 RCS).

Figure out how much you’ll need.

The RCS has found that workers reporting that they or their spouses have a DC, DB or IRA plan are twice as likely as those who do not have such a plan (60% vs. 23%) to have tried to do a calculation to estimate what they will need to finance their retirement.

And despite higher savings goals, workers who have done a retirement savings needs calculation are more likely to feel very confident about affording a comfortable retirement (33% vs. 12% who have not done a calculation). Moreover, worker households with a retirement plan are more likely than those without such plans to report having saved for retirement (90% vs. 20%).

That said, as recently as the 2015 RCS, fewer than half (48%) of workers report they and/or their spouses have tried to calculate — even a single time — how much money they will need to have saved by the time they retire so that they can live comfortably in retirement, a level that has held relatively consistent over the past decade.

In other words, while many have (or had) a retirement plan, they don’t seem to have a plan for retirement.

Talk with an advisor.

Anecdotally, when you ask someone about their interest in engaging the services of an advisor, they are likely to tell you that they will wait until they need one — by which most seem to mean that, once they have accumulated enough savings to make it “worthwhile,” they’ll consider getting some help. What’s often overlooked is the role that a financial advisor — particularly one whose expense is covered by an employer plan — can play in helping make that account growth a reality.

In the 2015 RCS, more than three-quarters (78%) of respondents who had talked with a professional financial advisor about retirement planning were either somewhat or very confident that they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years, far more than the 49% who did not use an advisor. The 2013 RCS found that nearly two-thirds (65%) of those who used either online calculators or asked the advice of financial advisors were either somewhat confident or very confident that they will have enough money to live comfortably through their retirement years.

On the other hand, nearly half (44.6%) of those who simply guessed were also somewhat confident or very confident.

It seems that, as noted above, the calculation/determination itself has a positive impact, though the kind predicated on real assessment clearly does more for confidence (and probably for the actual basis of that confidence as well).

Retire.

One might expect that the financial realities of being in retirement might well shatter the fragile levels of confidence expressed ahead of crossing that threshold — and yet the RCS has consistently chronicled that retirement confidence is higher among those already in retirement than among those still working. In the 2015 RCS, 37% of retirees were very confident about having enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years (up from 28% in 2014 and 18% in 2013), and a third were somewhat confident.

This is despite a consistent finding that individuals are frequently forced to leave the workforce earlier than planned, and that they are less likely to work in retirement than pre-retirees anticipated (in the 2015 RCS, 67% of current workers plan to work for pay in retirement, compared with just 23% of retirees who report they have actually worked for pay in retirement. In the 2015 RCS, 37% of retirees were very confident about their prospects, up from 27% in 2014 and 18% as recently as 2013.

However, as one might expect, workers who are not confident about their financial security in retirement plan to retire later, on average, than those who express confidence.

Save for retirement.

Retirement confidence, like confidence generally, is a state of mind, and one not always grounded in an accurate assessment of reality. As noted above, the mere act of guessing about retirement needs seems to be enough to provide a boost in confidence, certainly in the short run.

Regardless, it’s hard to deny that the best, most secure, means of assuring retirement confidence is establishing a solid foundation for that belief by:

• taking advantage of the opportunity to save and having the discipline to do so;
• establishing a goal and revisiting that goal on a regular basis; and
• enlisting the help of professionals in establishing those goals and in making sound, diversified investments.

Because ultimately, of course, what really matters is not how confident you feel, but whether you have a reason to feel confident.

- Nevin E. Adams, JD