Auto Enrollment Plan
No, it's not a plan to create a car that you can roll up like a sleeping bag. Instead, it has to do with retirement savings.
The concept is relatively simple, once its broken down. "Auto" is short for "automatic." "Enrollment" refers to signing up for (you guessed it) a retirement plan (which, by the way, provides the "plan" part). So an "auto enrollment plan" is a retirement program where an employer automatically deducts money from an employee's paycheck and puts it into a retirement account, such as an IRA or a 401(k).
The employee can choose to opt out of the program, but if they don't say anything, they will automatically get enrolled.
The general motivation for these programs: people get lazy about retirement. If you leave it up to employees to actively sign up for a plan - go into HR, get the paperwork, fill it out, then bring it back by whatever deadline - they probably will end up binge watching Game of Thrones instead.
So instead of making them do work to get into the program, the employer makes them do work to get out of it. A vast number of people will stay in the program from there, meaning their retirement accounts could be growing even while they watch Ned Stark get his head lopped off.
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Finance: What is a 401(k)?51 Views
Finance a la shmoop... what is a 401k plan? okay say it with me tax deferred savings
that's it it's really not all that complex for the fancy numbers there all [Complex formula scribbles]
right well when you make money at work you get to defer the tax that you'll pay
on your income or earnings to be paid much later in life and you get to invest
that dough and let it ride tax-free until you take it out of your 401k plan [Money coming out of deferred savings piggy bank]
brokerage account and then at that point well you'll pay ordinary income tax on
your gains well the 401k was a part of the tax code
that was put into motion in the 1980s as the government began to painfully
realize that Social Security wasn't all that secure and that a whole generation
of people who had paid money into Social Security wouldn't get anything back so [People protesting outside the white house]
the government opened the door and made it easy or at least easier for the semi
wealthier masses to save money for their retirement and this was a new idea at
the time a whole new concept like a flying car before then it was mama [Man talking and flying car goes by a window]
corporation who managed the pension money for her employees you know that
sucking off the corporate teat and all that stuff well it fostered a sense of
long-term lifetime loyalty to the company and was all just very you know
IBM like a born in pinstriped blue diapers IBM employee with a hard loyal [Baby boy playing with a flashing rattle]
workforce working away there toiling in the IBM salt mines for 35 years
then retiring at 60 and having smoked a lot dying at age 65 and then that was
all she wrote well that was then this is now it's a different era different
financial pressures so companies don't generally offer pensions today and they
don't generally manage them themselves because the cost of buying real talent
like people who consistently beat the stock market in good times and
bad managing that 401k money is astronomically expensive and generally [Boxing gloves punching the stock market]
speaking corporations can't afford to pay those people nine times whatever
the CEO makes so companies generally contribute some amount of money to a
401k and then they leave it up to the employees to figure out how they want to
invest their retirement savings on their own and that's a good thing most of the
time and you know hopefully it's there when they want to go take it out and
they need the money when they're old and decrepit like like I'm getting...
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