Fidelity Releases Retirement Transition Services

September 30, 2013 (PLANSPONSOR.com) – Fidelity Investments has released its new Retirement Transition Services, designed to help preretirees shift into retirement.

The new offering is intended to help both employers and their pre-retiree employees navigate the complex health and wealth decisions people face as they transition into retirement, such as how to create lasting retirement income, claim Social Security, and find and pay for quality health care coverage.

“Employers tell us they want to help preretirees understand how to both convert their savings into lasting income and secure quality health coverage in retirement,” said Chris Herman, senior vice president of Fidelity’s Workplace Marketing, Solutions and Experience Group, based in Boston. “In response, we developed Retirement Transition Services to assist people through these crucial decisions and help them create a plan to live more securely throughout the next phase of their life.”

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Help is made available to employees over the phone, through live consultations with representatives at the workplace, at investor centers nationwide, and through educational workshops and on-demand webinars.

Fidelity also offers related tools such as the Retirement Income Planner—to help participants approaching retirement develop a plan and analyze income, expenses and assets to help identify steps they can take to best prepare—and the Income Strategy Evaluator, which helps customers identify a strategy that may meet their income needs in retirement. In addition, the guidance also helps employees determine the impact Social Security will have on their monthly income, including what age they would like to begin collecting payments.

Retirement Transition Services is part of Plan for Life, Fidelity’s workplace guidance experience, which offers education on topics such as creating a retirement income plan and health care costs.

Fidelity Investments is a provider of financial services.

What Topped the List of August Mutual Fund Flows

September 30, 2013 (PLANSPONSOR.com) – New research from Cerulli Associates found that nontraditional bond and bank loan strategies topped the list of mutual fund flows in August.

According to the research, mutual fund net redemptions of -$7.9 billion in August are largely due to fixed-income outflows. Mutual funds in the nontraditional bond categories and bank loan strategies topped the list with combined flows of $12.6 billion in August.

Flows for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were also negative during August (-$21 billion), but the major drain on sales were the domestic equity asset classes. U.S. equity and sector equity ETFs combined for total outflows of -$18.6 billion. Europe stock and foreign large blend were the most sought-after ETF categories.

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The research also surveyed consultants, who expect both nonprofit institutions and defined benefit (DB) pension plans to increase their allocations to emerging market equity. One-half of these consultants expect DB pensions’ emerging market equity portion to rise, and 83% anticipate nonprofits to do the same.

In addition, research from Cerulli revealed that the largest institutions are looking to manage strategies in-house at lower cost than even outside managers can run passive strategies for them. As of third quarter 2012, the 10 largest pensions by internally managed assets run, on average, 54%, or $627 billion, of the portfolio within the organization. Of this total, domestic strategies comprise the greatest portion.

More information can be found here.

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