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April 05, 2012 at 11:38 AM
To address the significant challenges faced by most Americans to achieve their retirement objectives, Prudential Financial has outlined steps for individuals and companies can take to significantly improve retirement security prospects in America. The company is sharing these steps in a new white paper, a TED conversation, and a video.
The white paper, “Achieving Retirement Security in an Age of Uncertainty: Three Important Steps,” authored by President of Prudential Retirement, Christine Marcks, highlights challenges facing Americans as they prepare for retirement. These challenges include saving enough to cover longer life-spans, generating retirement income from those savings, achieving adequate investment returns in an environment of low interest rates, market volatility, and managing rising healthcare costs.
The white paper outlines three specific steps to achieving greater retirement security. At a time when fewer and fewer people have access to the guaranteed income of a traditional pension plan, the first step is to bring back guaranteed income, but make it flexible. Specifically, Prudential encourages employers to offer guaranteed income solutions within workplace retirement plans. In addition, with the help of their financial advisors, individuals should add guaranteed retirement income solutions to their personal investment portfolios.
The second step is to improve saving and investing behavior. One way to improve savings behavior is to give more employees access to workplace retirement plans. The Multiple Small Employer Plan concept makes offering a retirement plan easier for the many small employers who are not able to offer such plans today. For employers that already offer retirement plans, another way to improve savings and investing behavior is to add enrollment and automatic contribution escalation features to those plans.
