Financial Advisors Oppose Obama’s Auto-Retirement Plan

Financial advisers are making it crystal clear that they’re against the Obama administration’s call to enroll individuals in retirement plans automatically.

Roughly 84 percent of advisors recently polled by investment firm Brinker Capital Inc. of Berwyn, Pennsylvania, said that the federal government should not require participation in defined-contribution retirement plans such as 401(k)s, even though the same advisors also reported that their clients’ top financial concern was their inability to retire on time.

Most advisors polled said their clients’ retirement savings are “off” because of deteriorating market conditions. But at the same time, they cited “general procrastination” and the fact that clients did not start saving early enough as two of the main reasons clients are not prepared to retire.

Despite this, advisors still opposed the administration’s proposal to mandate participation in defined-contribution retirement plans.

Separately, only about 9 percent of advisors said they believed that the government had a responsibility to “make whole America’s defined-contribution plans as part of the financial bailout.”

Filed by Mark Bruno of Investment News, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.