Tool Helps Participants Visualize Retirement Goals

An interactive Retirement Wellness Planner from the Principal Financial Group helps users manage, visualize and plan for their retirement savings goals.

The Retirement Wellness Planner includes interactive sliders, intuitive prompts and a real-time savings graph that focuses on monthly income in retirement and how long that income may last. Participants can take immediate action—such as increasing deferrals—within the planner itself.

Detailed, participant-specific attributes—such as desired retirement age, employer match, salary and Social Security assumptions—are included in the planner. Users can adjust inputs to see immediately how changes would impact their monthly income in retirement.

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The planner incorporates the Retirement Wellness Score, introduced this fall, which represents the percentage of a participant’s pre-retirement income that they are able to maintain at retirement, ranging from 0% to more than 100%. The score is embedded in an intuitive, color-coded band that represents different ranges of income replacement.

For participants with plans administered by The Principal, the Retirement Wellness Planner is pre-populated with participant-specific information. A public version of the planner, where users enter their own information, is available here.

The Retirement Wellness Planner is a key feature in a new, mobile-friendly digital experience for participants, that includes improved account management, a simple online and text enrollment process and new educational resources and services. The refreshed design and functionality are based on feedback from participants, plan sponsors, advisers and experts in behavioral finance and digital design.

“Now that the new digital platform has been rolled out to all participants, we are excited to receive feedback and continue to improve upon the experience,” Jerry Patterson, senior vice president of retirement and investor services at The Principal, said in a statement.

The enhanced online experience is part of Principal PlanWorks, a new approach to workplace retirement readiness that includes a platform of capabilities and services designed to make retirement plans work better for both participants and plan sponsors.

“Personalization of the online experience is where we can deliver the greatest value to our participants,” Patterson says. “We want users to quickly and easily see how adjusting their own specific inputs can help boost their financial security in retirement.”

The Principal Financial Group is a global investment manager offering retirement services, insurance solutions and asset management.

Addressing Mistakes in Tax Treatment of Employee Deferrals

An updated IRS web page tells retirement plan sponsors how to correct the mistake of using the wrong tax treatment of employee plan deferrals.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) says a common mistake it has encountered when employers have a Roth feature in their 401(k), 403(b) or governmental 457(b) plans, is that the employer does not follow the employee’s election as to whether deferrals are pre-tax or after-tax. 

In an updated web page on the IRS’ website, the agency says to fix the mistake of not following an employee’s election to designate the contribution as a Roth contribution the plan sponsor must transfer the deferrals, adjusted for earnings, from the pre-tax account to the Roth account. 

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There are two options for reporting this transfer:

  • The employer issues a corrected Form W-2 and the employee must file an amended Form 1040 for the year of the failure.
  • The employer includes the amount transferred from the pre-tax to the Roth account in the employee’s compensation in the year it’s transferred. If the employer elects, it may compensate the employee for the additional amount he or she owes in income tax. This amount must also be included in the employee’s income.

If an employee makes an election to defer salary to the plan on a pre-tax basis, but the employer treats the deferral as a Roth deferral, it can transfer the erroneously deposited deferrals, adjusted for earnings, from the Roth account to the pre-tax account. The employer would file a corrected W-2 and the employee would file an amended 1040 for the year of the failure. 

The IRS says plan sponsors can use the agency’s Voluntary Correction Program (VCP) (if the error is significant and it meets the other conditions of voluntary correction). The error can be self-corrected, without IRS approval, if the mistake is insignificant or, if significant, if the plan sponsor corrects the mistake within two years. A plan sponsor can use self-correction only if the plan has practices and procedures in place designed to promote overall tax law compliance.

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