Unum Group Sees Early Success With Emergency Savings Program

Since launching an emergency savings program in the spring of this year, financial insurance provider Unum Group has seen significant success, with nearly 500 employees—out of the company’s 10,500 U.S. employees—participating in the program.

The program is offered through Unum’s 401(k) plan, administered by Fidelity, allowing participants to contribute any amount up to $10,000 to a fund that can be utilized to pay for any unforeseen expenses, without having to dip into retirement funds or use credit cards.

Initial Success

A total of 491 employees have enrolled in the program since its initial launch, with combined contributions of $943,285, according to Unum, with the average savings per employee at $1,414 through November.

When designing the emergency savings program, Carl Gagnon, Unum’s assistant vice president for global financial well-being and retirement programs, explains that he wanted to add automatic enrollment and go beyond what the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022’s optional provision offered.

One of the SECURE 2.0 emergency savings provisions allows a plan sponsor to create a sidecar emergency savings account to which participants can contribute up to $2,500 per year. Gagnon felt that amount of savings was not substantial enough to help with unexpected expenses, so Unum’s program has a $10,000 limit, with participants contributing on an after-tax basis.

“In addition to our pre-tax 401(k) plan and our Roth post-tax plan, we added a true non-Roth post-tax source to our 401(k) plan,” Gagnon says. “We decided, since safe harbor plans exist for a reason:  to leave the investment structure open for [the emergency savings account].”

Unum worked with Fidelity, the firm’s third-party administrator for its 401(k) plan, to build the emergency savings account into the 401(k). Gagnon says Fidelity did not have the infrastructure available until April to institute a second auto-enrollment feature for the emergency savings account. As a result, Unum launched the program voluntarily in ,almost one year before SECURE 2.0 became law, which saw a lot of interest from employees right off the bat.

Employees are now automatically enrolled into traditional retirement savings at a 5% deferral rate, , with any new hire or rehire who started on or after April 3 defaulting into the post-tax emergency savings plan at 1%.

“We’ve seen our post-tax source, which was at $0 just a while ago, climb to almost $1 million during this period through the end of October,” Gagnon says.

As the automatic enrollment portion of the program was launched in April 2023, most of the employees who were automatically enrolled were not officially enrolled until 45 days after hire. So far, Unum only has three months of data but found that about 35% of new hires have kept the automatic enrollment in place.

Participants Take Advantage of Program’s Flexibility

The program comes at a time when the majority of Americans say they cannot afford a $1,000 emergency expense, according to Bankrate.

Similar to its 401(k) plan, Unum allows employees to set a deferral percentage that ranges from 0% to 50%. The emergency savings program has the same investment options as the company’s 401(k) plan, which means employees’ emergency savings have the opportunity to grow.

Employees can start or stop deductions and can withdraw funds from the account at any time. If an employee does not use the funds, they may be used as additional retirement savings. Since the emergency savings program is a post-tax source within the 401(k) plan, money in the plan can also be used toward retirement savings.

Gagnon says current participants have been withdrawing funds from their emergency accounts—to date, Unum Group employees have withdrawn $329,888 from the emergency savings program—but notably, 85% still have a remaining balance.

“We’re pretty pleased with that, because it goes to show that people are using it for its intention,” Gagnon says. “People are saying, ‘I have $2,000 in emergency savings, but I need that new transmission or four new tires for my car and I don’t have a source, so I’m going to take out $800 or $900 and leave the [remaining] balance in emergency savings.’”

Time will tell whether the program will cause people to stay in the plan and how many participants will utilize emergency savings, but Gagnon predicts that over the next three to four years, 50% to 60% of Unum employees will have an emergency savings account.

“We’re really pleased with the early results,” Gagnon says. “We think it’s the way to go, [and] we think it’s an easy way to implement [emergency savings].”

Unum conducts a total well-being survey of employees every 18 to 24 months, and Gagnon says there will be a correlation analysis of the people who started recently emergency savings accounts to see if their well-being scores increase.

In addition to the emergency savings program, Unum has plans to add an in-plan annuity to its 401(k) plan by the end of the first quarter of 2024, as well as a qualified longevity annuity contract in early 2025.