As you might recall from our executive summary report, the SECURE 2.0 Act included several important changes to retirement plan rules. One of those changes, scheduled to take effect in plan years beginning on or after 01/01/2024, involves high-income earners making age 50+ catch-up contributions. Currently, anyone age 50+ can elect to make catch-up contributions as pre-tax or Roth. The Act requires catch-up contributions for anyone who earns $145,000+ in 2023 (indexed in future years) to be made as Roth contributions. There was also a technical error in The Act language that could inadvertently eliminate the ability of anyone to make catch-up contributions altogether.

For retirement plan employers, 401(k) nondiscrimination testing is one of the most critical functions of operating a healthy retirement plan—and it’s also an important mandate of ERISA. Here’s a look at some commonly asked questions and need-to-know terms and concepts, as well as how this important task affects your company’s retirement plan.

Reposted from 401(k) Specialist by John Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief

Understated isn’t a term generally associated with Alex Assaley, but he managed to pull it off when describing current market conditions.

“It’s been a really interesting year for investors and advisors,” Assaley, Managing Principal with AFS 401(k) Retirement Services, said from the floor of the Wealth@wor(k) conference in Las Vegas.

In today’s digital world, we all have a lot of data and personal information stored online – information like e-mails, phone numbers, personal contacts, and even financial asset values and information. Most of us trust companies (like banks, financial institutions, social media, and tech firms) to manage and protect this information and provide us with it in a matter of seconds. This raises some concerns about “who has access to this data,” and how can they protect it.

On August 16, 2022, the Retirement Advisor Council recognized Wiley|Wilson, as an honoree of its Financial Wellness Excellence Awards. This recognition was presented at the Retirement Advisor Council’s 2022 Annual Planning Meeting in Des Moines, IA. Connie Burnette of Wiley|Wilson accepted the award on behalf of her team and was recognized for her thoughtful leadership and dedication to providing the best possible employee financial wellness program to her organization.

We sat down with some of the team members of AFS and here's how they answered the following questions...

1. What advice would you give your younger self?
2. What's the worst piece of financial advice you're ever received?
3. What's the best piece of financial advice you're ever received?
4. What does AFS stand for? (wrong answers only)
   

Bethesda, MD — Alex Assaley and Kevin Phillips of AFS 401(k) Retirement Services recently participated as delegates to the National Association of Plan Advisors’ (NAPA) Annual DC Fly-In Forum, an exclusive gathering of the nation’s leading retirement plan advisors.

What is our Employee Benefits Symposium?

Since 2006, we have challenged our partners and clients to think differently about the employee benefits landscape.

A little excerpt on the first 100 trading days of 2022 from Bespoke, my favorite market newsletter: 

“While everyone knows that the U.S. equity market has performed horribly in 2022, did you know that it has actually been the second-worst first 100 trading days in a year since the five-day trading week began in late 1952? Through early trading today (5/25), the S&P 500 is down 17.3% YTD, which ranks second only to 1970 for the worst start to a year when the index declined 23.7% in the first 100 trading days. Not only that, but this year has seen the worst start on record for both the Nasdaq (since 1972) and the Russell 2000 (1979), which have declined by 27.9% and 21.4%, respectively.”

After reading that, my first thought was: Are things really that bad to warrant what, collectively, is the worst start to a year in stock market history?

We have relayed this message in the past: Wall Street hates uncertainty, and, right now, we seem to have an unlimited supply of it – uncertainty regarding inflation, uncertainty regarding Fed policy and interest rates, uncertainty surrounding when the supply chain will remedy itself, uncertainty regarding whether the Federal Reserve can engineer a soft landing for the economy, and uncertainty regarding China’s ability to control the virus and keep its economy running, which continues to compound the world’s supply chain issues. All of these uncertainties are on top of the unknowns surrounding Russia and the war in Ukraine.