Pentegra Retirement Services Blog
Parents may want to investigate strategies that can help them save for their children's education at the same time they're saving for their own retirement. When you created your financial plan, saving for a new car or a first home may have seemed like your most pressing goal. Sure, you put some money in the pot for a new baby's future college expenses. And you probably started saving for retirement in your employer's tax-deferred plan. But chances are good that your more immediate goals were ...
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Posted September 11, 2020 at 11:18 AM
It is no secret that these are tough – and confusing – times for most people. Officials inside and outside of government are issuing sometimes contradictory messaging; the economic effects of the pandemic are one of our great unknowns; and data on when – or even if – the crisis will pass is open to debate. In the midst of all this, retirement plan fiduciary responsibilities haven’t gone away. The $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act has made some important a...
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Posted September 04, 2020 at 09:33 AM
Even with the ongoing uncertainty about the possible expansion of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) definition of the fiduciary standard created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), now is still a good time for plan sponsors to understand and plan for a potential new reality when it comes to fiduciaries. As explained in our original white paper on this topic, Game Changer Revisited, the Final Conflict of Interest Rules following five years’ worth of developm...
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Posted August 29, 2020 at 06:55 AM
The “Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice” policy paper issued earlier this month by former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) may not sound like something that those concerned with retirement should necessarily worry about. However, if ones goes through its whopping 110 pages, it turns out that it includes recommendations about various retirement-related issues that probably will be part of t...
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Posted August 21, 2020 at 09:41 AM
The US economic headlines on July 30th were quite ugly. Second quarter 2020 US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 32.9% on an annualized basis and confirmed that we are in a recession this year. This decline was driven by an annual drop of nearly 35% in consumer spending for the quarter. Although a decline was expected given the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was the largest GDP decline since at least the 1940s. By comparison, GDP dropped by 8.1% in the fourth quarter o...
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Posted August 15, 2020 at 04:21 AM
On July 27, 2020 the Senate Republicans rolled out their Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools (HEALS) Act, which would be another $1 trillion relief package for a nation still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. What does it do for retirement policy? Not much, especially when compared with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act that was signed into law on March 27, 2020, details of which are available here. On a retroactive basis, HEALS do...
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Posted August 07, 2020 at 09:40 AM
What is a MEP? A Multiple Employer Plan (“MEP”) is a special type of retirement plan in which employers that are not commonly owned join together to pool their purchasing power within a single plan. A MEP is created by a group of employers— represented by the Plan’s Board of Directors who want to share the costs and burdens of providing a retirement plan for their employees. “Open” MEPs are available to any type of employer. “Closed” MEPs are for associations or groups of related em...
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Posted August 01, 2020 at 06:33 AM
