A bipartisan group of senators introduced a package of retirement savings bills Tuesday that includes making it easier for small employers to join pooled employer plans and giving employers incentives to use automatic enrollment and automatic escalation features. Some of the features of the four bills in the package mirror ideas advanced by the Senate Finance Committee in the proposed Retirement Enhancement and Savings Act of 2018. RESA, introduced in March, also would ease nondiscrimination testing rules for plan [...]

Richard Dever had swabbed the campground shower stalls and emptied 20 garbage cans, and now he climbed slowly onto a John Deere mower to cut a couple acres of grass. “I’m going to work until I die, if I can, because I need the money,” said Dever, 74, who drove 1,400 miles to this Maine campground from his home in Indiana to take a temporary job that pays $10 an hour. Dever shifted gently in the tractor seat, a [...]

House Resolution 67, which Donald Trump signed last week, rolls back a rule that the Labor Department finalized late last year, which would have made it easier for cities and counties to run retirement savings plans for citizens who couldn’t get them through work. It is an odd choice for Republicans to kill plans that would encourage private, voluntary, tax-deferred saving, which they tend to approve of. But a trade group for investment funds opposes the city-run retirement plans. [...]

A shift to defined-contribution retirement plans, such as 401(k) plans, has led to an income and education gap in pension savings that could exacerbate future economic inequality, according to a study that will be presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). “The movement towards voluntary, contributory employer pensions has increased the influence of socioeconomic factors, such as education and income levels, on retirement fund accumulation,” said study co-author ChangHwan Kim, an associate professor of [...]

Online financial-planning tools have a habit of spitting out terrifying numbers when people use them to figure out how much to save for retirement. Most tools, from the AARP’s to the Social Security Administration’s, yield similar answers when one enters spending estimates, expected salary increases, and assets: They tend to advise their users (most of whom are workers in their 40s or 50s) to have 10 times the amount of their salary in savings before they retire. It’s a cutoff that some [...]

What is a pension? Simple question and a slightly more complex answer than you may think. When most people think about pensions, they imagine someone who spent 30 years working at the factory, then getting a gold watch and a monthly check when he or she retires. And while that may be true for some people (except for the gold watch nowadays), pension benefits are a little more than that. As a matter of fact, plenty of people who [...]