Middle-class retirement ‘under siege’: IMCA 2014

Wagner noted that target-date funds didn’t take off until they became the preferred qualified default investment alternative. If annuities became the default of choice, though, she said it would “kill the QDIA market.” Doing so would require a change to the Department of Labor’s Interpretive Bulletin 96-1, which lays out the difference between education and guidance. “People aren’t going to want to become fiduciaries to talk about annuities,” Wagner said.

Wagner also talked about the DOL’s proposal for lifetime income disclosures. The proposal requires a quarterly statement of projected monthly income assuming a 7% return and 3% annual contribution increase, and using a 3% discount rate to convert future dollars into current dollars.

Under those assumptions, a 50-year-old plan participant with $125,000 in 2014 would end up with $500,000 in 2029, but that would fall to $321,000 after the discount rate. That leaves the participant with an estimated $1,800 per month.

It could be the “beginning of massive lawsuits if this becomes law,” Wagner said.

The “real crux of change” is what we want for retirement and what we can afford, she said. There are two kinds of debate to that end: tax reform and pension system reform.

Wagner reminded attendees that plan limitations can increase or decrease based on societal need, and have done so in the past as with the Tax Reform Act of 1986. That act increased revenue, but Wagner said it “took a solid decade for the 401(k) industry to recover.”E. Thomas Foster, national retirement spokesperson for MassMutual’s Retirement Services Division, spoke as well. “To be successful, you have to be a student of the game,” he told attendees, encouraging them to “take advantage of what the law allows now” in retirement planning.

He said he encourages advisors to “be more holistic in growing your practice and look at accumulation and decumulation as a whole.” He said the common differentiators — being good at plan design, well-versed on fiduciary requirements or fee disclosure — are no longer good enough. They’re all part of the “sea of sameness” and advisors have to redefine their value proposition.

To do that, advisors need to be able to describe what they do and how they do it, but also why they do it, he said.

The single biggest risk for advisors, Wagner said in response to an attendee’s question, is that “plan documentation is old and cold. Make sure you have a plan document.” 

Another attendee asked about the probability of Social Security moving to a means-tested formula. Foster said such a move would be a “bait and switch.” Wagner agreed, adding, “Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that’s a function of desperate we are.” Social Security benefits may not be enough to live on by themselves, but Wagner said “some people actually do rely on” those benefits. If they were means-tested, it could “drag back to middle-class people who have clawed their way into the lower wealthy.”