How to Guide Participants Through the Retirement Crisis

Bryan Platz

We talk a lot about the “retirement crisis”—usually framed as a participant savings shortfall. But there’s another, often overlooked crisis unfolding beneath the surface: a shortage of good, accessible retirement advice. With the industry reliance on defined-contribution plans, participants are taking full ownership of their saving and investing strategies, often without the skillset or time to do so alone. This advice gap can leave participants adrift, uncertain how to turn their savings into the retirements they want and deserve. Plan sponsors can help bridge this gap and provide their participants with the services they need to guide their retirement planning.

While a successful retirement is sometimes reduced to simply not outliving one’s savings, the reality is far more complex. Many interdependent decisions factor into a person’s retirement wealth: how much to save, where to save it, and how to invest it, as well as when to retire, when to take Social Security, and how much to withdraw during retirement.

For the average Joe, this can be too complicated and time-consuming to navigate. According to researchers at the Morningstar Center for Retirement & Policy Studies, 45% of households are projected to outlive their retirement savings. While the leading reason was identified as a lack of access to DC plans, that alone cannot explain the crisis. Notably, 16% of savers who have saved for more than 20 years are still projected to run out of funds. This suggests that the act of saving alone is not always sufficient; how a person saves and spends down their savings can also have a large effect on their retirement outcome.

An Outcry for Advice

Savers seem to know that they are out of their depths and are clamoring for advice on how to improve their retirement strategies—or to outsource them completely, like they might do for home repairs or tax filings. A 2025 Cerulli report on retirement savers in the US shows that 89% of people found online savings tools and calculators provided by their plan provider to be somewhat or very helpful. When asked about advisor services, 70% of respondents rated retirement planning (i.e., creating a saving, Social Security, and spenddown strategy) as a very valuable service, second only to investment management. What makes these services so desirable is how hard it is for participants to find these answers on their own. A Google search won’t consider enough about a person’s specific finances to provide information beyond the surface level, let alone advice they can act on.

Even though many savers recognize the value of working with an advisor, many find the barrier to entry too high. Cerulli found that 63% of DC participants still don’t have an advisor, with the top reasons cited being not feeling like they have enough assets, uncertainty about how to vet an advisor, and a reluctance to pay high fees. Yet something seems to change when they approach retirement, as 50% of these individuals say they will consider working with an advisor to plan their decumulation. While there is value in figuring out how to make the most out of what one has saved, consulting an advisor only near retirement may be too late to meaningfully improve financial outlooks.

A Plan Sponsor’s Role

Plan sponsors are uniquely positioned to help fill this advice gap. Per Cerulli, 86% of workers view their employer as a somewhat or very trustworthy source of financial information. This level of trust means that employees may be more likely to take advantage of the tools and services their employer provides than those offered by less familiar sources. By adding a tailored financial advice service, like managed accounts, at the plan level, plan sponsors have an accessible way to help connect their participants with the guidance they need.

Managed accounts is an all-in-one retirement planning service that can help lead your participants through every step of the retirement journey. The service provides personalized advice based on data provided by the recordkeeper (salary, savings rate, location, etc.) and the participant themselves (held-away assets, retirement goals, spousal information, etc.). This guidance can help demystify the retirement planning experience, starting with saving advice that can compound to make a world of difference for people in the early and mid-stages of their careers. Managed accounts can further help clarify late career questions, like when one can realistically afford to retire and when to consider investing in “guaranteed income” sources, such as annuities. Seeing participants through retirement, managed accounts additionally provides guidance on when to start taking Social Security and how to optimize their withdrawal strategies. Not to mention, these participants can reap the benefits of this advice even if they only signed up for the service for its more well-known investment allocation functions.

The advice is also dynamic. Managed accounts acts as a GPS to help savers get to where they want to go from where they are today, rerouting as circumstances change. In this way, managed accounts avoids one of the main pitfalls of point-in-time alternatives: participants latching onto guidance that was appropriate when delivered but no longer fits their situation, like keeping an aggressive portfolio well into retirement. This adaptability helps ensure that participants stay on track for retirement.

Filling the Need

Harking back to the three primary reasons why individuals opt not to work with a financial advisor, managed accounts can be a more accessible alternative. Unlike the difficulty of finding a trusted advisor, managed accounts is pre-vetted and offered by their plan sponsor, so savers do not have to appraise the service to the same extent that they would if they were searching independently. The service is also not gatekept by account balance, so savers with few assets are still able to benefit from the value of its advice. Not to mention, fees are proportional to account balance, so those with fewer assets pay less. And for those with higher balances, managed accounts is still a fraction of the cost of an advisor. Although by no means a one-to-one equivalent to an advisor, managed accounts can provide a comparable service to participants who may otherwise not receive advice.

Gone are the days of the average plan sponsor providing a pension and taking full onus of its participants’ retirements. However, even if the participant is taking on a larger role in their own financial future, that does not mean plan sponsors should completely check themselves out of the equation. A managed accounts service offers an accessible way to address the advice crisis by guiding savers through every step of their retirement journey.

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