Before you get all excited and look to replace your home equity loan with a 401k loan, you should consider these things.
Tag "plan participant"
Nobody’s perfect. It’s unfair to expect recordkeepers to be. Everyone makes mistakes—even recordkeepers. The problem is what happens when a mistake occurs.
Retirees should think for themselves and what alternatives they have regarding their retirement assets. These aren’t the same as they were when they were working.
More sophisticated plan participants who can afford to hire their own adviser. They don’t ask more from the plan. They ask for less, in hopes of gaining more control over their own destiny. For a variety of reasons, this isn’t as easy as some participants would like it to be.
Just as these changes come bearing down, so, too, does a need for greater hand holding. Pressures within the provider industry, however, appear to be reducing the number of available hands.
This doesn’t mean you shoot haphazardly for the stars when you can have the moon. After all, you’ve got to know your limitations. Seeking unreachable goals will only make your retirement seem hollow and pointless.
If you’re a fiduciary of the acquiring plan, you want to make sure you’re not burdened with any unknown liabilities. If you’re a fiduciary of the acquired plan, you want to make sure the merger process doesn’t introduce new liabilities.
It’s not just plan sponsors and plan participants that need convincing. The entire retirement plan infrastructure must also get on board. That doesn’t mean the hurdles can’t be overcome.
The decision to retain and service company retirees appears (at first blush at least) to be a no-brainer. But that includes a very important assumption.
Clearly, you wouldn’t pay more for 2 apples if you could get 3 for the same price, but would you pay more to get 2 oranges instead?
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