Is all hell about to break loose in your 401(k)?

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Is all hell about to break loose in your 401(k)?

Shielding employees from high risk and high fees is still a fiduciary duty for company retirement plans. – Getty Images

Is your 401(k) about to get too risky?

The Labor Department is now officially neutral on whether companies should allow

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, and, in general, the government is in favor of private equity and annuities as investment options. But there are many, many steps before people can possibly buy bitcoin or a piece of the initial-public-offering market or a complicated long-term insurance contract through their employer.

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“It can take years to get a fund added,” said David O’Meara, head of defined-contribution investment strategy at WTW, a workplace consulting firm.

Most workplace retirement plans have a very limited menu of investment options available to participants, usually 15 to 35 carefully curated mutual funds. The majority of these slots are filled with target-date funds, which are professionally managed portfolios designed to get more conservative as a worker approaches retirement age. So 10 out of the total might be a different-year version of the Vanguard Target Retirement Fund 2050 VFIFX. A participant might also have the Vanguard Target Retirement Fund 2055VFFVX, and so forth.

The rest are likely a mix of sectors and other indexes, with one each of a large cap, small cap, international and bond fund. Many workplaces also allow employees access to what’s called a brokerage window, which allows them to put some or all of their contributions into a self-directed account within their retirement plan, usually for extra fees and with a lot of paperwork involved.

There’s a deliberate process for changing anything to do with a workplace plan like a 401(k), 403(b) or 457, because employers are held to a strict fiduciary standard. That means they not only have to act in the best interests of their employees, but they must act as a “prudent financial investor for the exclusive sole benefit of the employee,” said

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, an attorney who has spearheaded landmark cases against high fees in employer plans. Any fund or option an employer adds has to be thoroughly researched and deemed to be in the best interests of their workforce.

“It’s a very high bar for fiduciaries to change what they are doing and justify new additions,” O’Meara said.

Most large employers or worker groups have an investment advisory committee that evaluates the elements of a retirement plan and its ongoing performance. I’ve been an employee representative to such a committee, which had quarterly meetings to go over spreadsheets of return data and employee engagement. Considering whether to add a new fund involved a long process.

Most of the time, changes only happen when something has gone wrong in a fund, a company or the economy, and it’s an emergency.

Katie Hockenmaier, defined-contribution research director for Mercer, a workplace consulting firm, has seen swap-outs get decided on in six months or so, including about 90 days for implementation with the recordkeeper. But in general, she said, most plan fiduciary committees are doing a broad look every three years where they take a step back and see if they’re still offering appropriate choices for their demographics.

“If a change requires changes to the plan document or to operational infrastructure, in theory, these could take a year or longer, depending on all of the elements you need to consider,” she said.

Fiduciary investment committees are bound by law to take their jobs very seriously, and if they don’t, there are lawyers like Schlichter to hold them accountable. That’s why Schlichter is among those who do not foresee crypto or private-equity investing opportunities coming directly to employees in 401(k) plans as one of their menu options. The more likely scenario is that they would be added as an option for the portfolio managers of the funds that are in the menu. Those fund managers would then have to manage the risk-reward balance, and all of them would be accountable if they were not careful with employees’ life savings.

“They have to be the gatekeepers to make sure fees are reasonable and investments are sound,” he said. “Let’s say 20% of a target-date fund was in crypto. Is that going to jeopardize return or provide excess risk compared to something more stable or more predictable? The underlying duty of the fiduciary is to take into account that it is part of the investment.”

On the private-equity and annuity side, he cautioned that the illiquidity of those kinds of investments could mean that the fund is keeping a higher amount of cash as a cushion. Think of a scenario where a company is acquired and the employees all cash out their retirement accounts in the process of rolling them over to a new custodian. If their money is tied up in a private-equity investment that can’t pay out for a few years, they’d be broke. On top of that, Schlichter noted that a large cash holding might be losing ground to inflation and high fees. “The whole point is that you were supposed to have a better return with private equity, but you burn it out of the box with 25% earning nothing,” he said.

While funds have been slow so far to add crypto to holdings, some plan administrators have nonetheless signaled their intent to add access to private-equity holdings to their funds, like

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recently did. But just because the government allows access to certain investments and then the plan administrator does, that does not mean portfolio managers are necessarily jumping on board yet. And the employee always makes the final choice on the investments for their retirement savings — that is, if they can wade through the materials and understand how the funds work instead of going with the default option.

If you are worried about risk and high fees, it’s best to keep your retirement investments simple. Going forward, that may mean making sure that the target-date fund you select based on your prospective retirement date doesn’t take undue risks. You may need to dig a little and look at the holdings, which you can do by looking up the ticker symbol or searching on your custodian’s website. If you don’t like your choices, you can petition your employer to make changes.

If you do want access to these investments, especially crypto, then you might want to look into the brokerage window your custodian provides. There may be some restrictions, however, Hockenmaier said. Your company could limit the amount you can invest, the types of investments you can access or the number of transactions per month. Many companies restrict employees from investing in company stock, for example.

The fiduciary obligation extends to these brokerage accounts, too, according to Schlichter. “The employee is relying on the employer, and not to be out there in the Darwinian market to sort through thousands of investment options,” he said. “If there is a brokerage window that says you can invest in the whole market, you have to curate. Otherwise it’s the Wild West, and the whole purpose of the law is not being accomplished.”

Got a question about investing, how it fits into your overall financial plan and what strategies can help you make the most out of your money? You can write to me at . Please put “Fix My Portfolio” in the subject line.

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#hell #break #loose #401k

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