NewsDash – July 7, 2015

July 7th, 2015

Benefits & Administration

A new report from UMB Healthcare Services, “HSAs Build Long-Term Wealth with Tax-Favored Savings,” looks at the balances of 440,000 health savings account (HSA) investors in 2014 and found they had an average balance of $1,874—far lower than the annual maximum contribution the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows. Most employees who have access to HSAs mistakenly think these work like flexible spending accounts (FSAs)—if they don’t use their balance in a given year, they will lose it. Thus, the majority of HSA holders use them only for current health care expenses.Read more >

The aggregate funded ratio for U.S. corporate pension plans increased to 86.2% for the month of June, according to Wilshire Consulting. Ned McGuire, vice president and member of the Pension Risk Solutions Group of Wilshire Consulting, said: “The improvement in funding levels was driven by a 3.5% decrease in liability values versus a 2.8% decrease in asset values. The asset result is due to negative returns for most asset classes, while liability values fell due to an increase in corporate bond yields.”Read more >

Retirement Plan Onboarding for Younger Employees

“We’ve got basically three significantly different types of generations that want information in different ways,” says Gerald Erickson, principal, Milliman Inc., in Minneapolis. In general, Baby Boomers want to receive retirement plan materials printed out: “Even if you could give them a website, they’d want to print it out and save it,” he says. Generation X is “the website generation,” he adds, and Millennials want mobile applications (apps). “How you craft certain messages, and how people receive those messages, is definitely different among those three different generations,” Erickson believes, but most retirement plans do not account for Millennials in their plan design and communications.Read more >