During Benefits Canada’s annual DC Plan Summit, plan sponsors participated in interactive sessions. They split into small groups and were given questions to discuss. Based on these discussions, moderators later offered their insights and relayed key take-aways.
Nadia Darwish, vice-president, market development, Sun Life Financial shares the best ideas from the topic they discussed.
The Challenge:
Much attention is paid to how to accumulate savings in a DC plan, but not enough work is being done to advise members on what happens when they start to take the money out. As life expectancy grows, so, too, do concerns about people outliving their retirement savings. Should plan sponsors assist members in their de-accumulation strategies?
Survival Tips for Employers:
- Plan sponsors, at the very least, should have the conversation and decide whether or not to offer support for members around de-accumulation.
- Regardless of the decision, plan sponsors should ensure that they are offering access to information and communications that are relevant to plan members and focused on the income phase of retirement planning. There are some great tools and channels available to share this information.
- Plan sponsors should also consider in-plan fund solutions, as well as access to products and tools to assist plan members in de-accumulation.
Additional videos from the DC Plan Summit can be found here.