The calendar flipped to 2026, and with it came a fresh crop of 401k new year opportunities. Will this be the year 403(b) plans finally shed legacy costs, SECURE 2.0 provisions hit their stride, and markets remind participants that risk never really sleeps?
Basic Members
Viewed through that lens, a 401k Christmas wish list isn’t just about outcomes, but about predictability. A stable rulebook can make it easier to design, monitor, and maintain plans that work in practice as well as on paper.
In many small employer 401k plans, those pressures combine with poor vendor selection, weak oversight, and minimal participant education to create environments where employees pay more and get less.
That sense of distinctiveness opens the door to a deeper look at how automation has evolved in accumulation and how far that logic can be pushed into decumulation. AskFiduciaryNews.com approached the question by surveying patterns across FiduciaryNews.com coverage.
The broader plan-design conversation, including “Beyond Auto-Mania,” shows a shift from simple auto-features to guided, retirement-readiness approaches. That trajectory supports treating embedded income as part of a holistic, user-friendly design rather than a fringe option.
Seasoned advisors caution plan sponsors not to confuse delegation with disappearance. Every fiduciary duty can be shared. None can be erased.
Ask FiduciaryNews.com answered a sponsor’s lifetime-income panic in seconds using only our 16-year archive. See the full prompt-by-prompt example.
If you’ve ever lost an hour chasing a quote you couldn’t comfortably reference—or hesitated to send a summary because it didn’t feel “file-worthy”—the FiduciaryNews.com Reference Librarian solves that.
The key is embedding quantitative prompts inside onboarding experiences so participants perceive personalization while fiduciaries collect the data they actually need.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About Their 401k Anymore?
When participants assume alignment without verification, problems remain hidden until they are too large to ignore. Misalignment doesn’t announce itself—it compounds quietly, year after year.