Millions of visitors flock to Niagara Falls each year to see one of the world’s greatest natural attractions, and to tempt Lady Luck at Casino Niagara and Fallsview Casino Resort. But Niagara Casinos’ executive team wanted to ensure that luck had nothing to do with securing a strong financial future for its employees. A review of the employees’ DC pension plan in August 2011 showed that significant changes were needed to achieve that goal.
More important today than ever before is having a retirement savings portfolio that’s balanced between capital preservation and capital accumulation. To help members achieve this, plan sponsors need to consider TDFs, a relatively underappreciated asset class.
When it comes to DC investment issues, plan sponsors need to think about their members first. That was the message Marcus Turner of Towers Watson stressed yesterday at the ACPM’s Ontario Regional Council spring session—The New Normal for Investments and Other Updates—in Toronto.
Canadian employers are listening to their employees' concerns about achieving retirement income adequacy and are finding new and better ways to encourage retirement savings, according to a survey by Benefits Canada and the Canadian Institutional Investment Network, and sponsored by Great-West Life Assurance Company.
It appears CAP investors are keen for target date funds (TDFs). According to Vanguard’s Target-Date Fund Adoption in 2011 report, nearly one in four 401(k) plan participants invest solely in TDFs—marking a six-fold increase over the past five years.
With a standard planning tool, we can plug in RRSP savings of a million dollars and an assumed investment return of 5% a year and determine that we can generate an income of about $76,800 per year, including government benefits, indexed to 2% inflation, and our money will run out in about 20 years.
What does the “new world order” mean for individual investors? Colin Ripsman, vice-president with Phillips, Hager & North, delved into that question at the firm’s trustee education seminar last week in Toronto.
DC plan members who use target date funds as part of their investment strategy feel more secure about reaching their retirement goals, according to a study by ING U.S.
Sponsors of DC and other capital accumulation plans have long struggled to persuade their employees to take full advantage of corporate savings programs and play a more active role in their own retirement readiness.
With the erosion of assets in many retirement portfolios in recent years, plan sponsors are starting to wonder if members might never be able to retire.