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Encourage employees to be proactive about retirement savings.
Do you have retirement savings strategy? Do your employees?
The 17th Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey of Workers lists a broad range of factors to include in a written retirement savings strategy. A basic strategy includes plotting out retirement income needs, projected costs and expenses and risk factors.
However, only 16 percent of the nearly 4,200 U.S. workers surveyed said they had a written retirement strategy. Forty-seven percent said they had an unwritten strategy.
Of those who said they had a written or unwritten strategy, here are the percentages that included the following key factors:
- Social Security and Medicare benefits (55 percent);
- ongoing living expenses (52 percent);
- savings and income needs (52 percent);
- total retirement savings and income needs (49 percent);
- healthcare costs (46 percent)
- plan to ensure savings last throughout retirement (40 percent);
- investment returns (37 percent);
- inflation (37 percent);
- pursuing retirement dreams (27 percent);
- long-term care insurance (27 percent);
- tax planning (21 percent);
- estate planning (19 percent); and
- contingency plans for retiring sooner than expected and/or for savings shortfalls (14 percent).
What percentage of your employees do you think have a written retirement savings strategy that includes these critical factors? If your credit union works with retirement planning advisors and/or has information and tools employees can use to create a comprehensive written plan including the critical factors, be sure to promote these resources regularly.
Tom Eckert is a vice president at CUESolutions Platinum provider CUNA Mutual Retirement Solutions, Madison, Wis. Reach him at tom.eckert@cunamutual.com. Learn more about CUESolutions by emailing kari@cues.org.
