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.
Basic Members
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.
Risk capacity anchors 401k advice in hard data—income stability, net worth, liquidity, and retirement timeline. Unlike tolerance, which shifts with market moods, capacity reflects what participants can afford to lose, aligning with ERISA’s fiduciary duties.
Viewing this content requires a Basic (Free) Membership or better. You are not currently logged in. If you have an
For fiduciaries, the comparison process must go deeper than surface-level performance. Yield is important, but transparency, diversification, and liquidity provisions matter just as much.
