It happens often in sports. After a particularly brutal game, the fantasy league hero, a member of the losing team, cites his just-garnered outlandish statistics and brags to a player from the winning team. And that member of the winning team shoots an impertinent glare and curtly replies, “Scoreboard.”
Sadly, such statistical aficionados inundate the 401(k) industry. From regulators to service providers to naïve plan sponsors to the mass media itself, there's an overemphasis on those infamous metrics of fees and investment performance. Easily measured isn't the same thing as meaningful. At the end of their careers, employees don't care about fees of other metrics, they only care about one thing: “scoreboard” or, in this case, their own personal retirement readiness.
This doesn't absolve the 401(k) plan sponsor from ensuring the plan gets appropriate value for the fees paid or that the investment selections have been made with sufficient due diligence. Those are still critical items within the realm of their fiduciary duty.
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Christopher Carosa
Chris Carosa has been writing a weekly article and monthly column for BenefitsPRO online and BenefitsPRO Magazine since 2011 and is a nationally recognized award-winning writer, researcher and speaker. He’s written seven books, including From Cradle to Retire: The Child IRA; Hey! What’s My Number? – How to Increase the Odds You Will Retire in Comfort; A Pizza The Action: Everything I Ever Learned About Business I Learned By Working in a Pizza Stand at the Erie County Fair; and the widely acclaimed 401(k) Fiduciary Solutions. Carosa is also Chief Contributing Editor of the authoritative trade journal FiduciaryNews.com and publisher of the Mendon-Honeoye Falls-Lima Sentinel, a weekly community newspaper he founded in 1989. Currently serving as President of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and with more than 1,000 articles published in various publications, he appears regularly in the national media. A “parallel” entrepreneur, he actively runs a handful of businesses, including a small boutique investment adviser, providing hands-on experience for his writing. A trained astrophysicist, he also holds an MBA and has been designated a Certified Trust and Financial Advisor. Share your thoughts and story ideas with him through Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christophercarosa/)and Twitter (https://twitter.com/ChrisCarosa).
