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Explore why target date funds are increasingly repurposed for retirement income and how to assess their effectiveness in supporting retirees.
Why Personalized Target Date Funds Matter Industry experts Philip Chao (Nexus338) and Julie Doran Stewart (Sentinel Group) explain why one size fits all retirement investing is falling short. As personalization becomes the norm in everyday life, they make the case that traditional target date funds—built on a single factor, age—leave value on the table. By combining today's technology and participant data, personalized target date solutions can tailor asset allocation to each individual's real circumstances and drive better retirement outcomes.
The Evolution of Target Date Funds: From One Size Fits All to Personalization Julie Doran Stewart traces the shift from one size fits all investing toward personalization in in-plan retirement. She explains why moving beyond a single age factor better reflects each participant's life circumstances, and why personalized target date funds can outperform managed accounts by removing the need for participant engagement. Because they draw on data already held by the recordkeeper, they require little implementation from plan sponsors—needing only a middleware provider to connect participant data to the investment solution.
The Five Factors Behind Personalized Target Date Funds Philip Chao breaks down how personalization improves on the traditional model built on averages. Rather than relying on average age, salary, and savings, the approach infuses real individual data across five factors—date of birth, salary, account value, deferral rate, and employer contribution—to project each participant's likely outcome. As a participant's data changes, allocations adjust automatically to keep them on track. The goal, Chao notes, is "not perfection, but improvement."
The Next Frontier in Personalized TDFs Chao and Stewart look ahead to what's next for personalized target date solutions. They frame retirement as a savings challenge as much as an investment one, pairing personalization with auto enrollment and auto escalation features (advanced by SECURE 2.0) to lift savings rates over time. The conversation then turns to decumulation and longevity risk, positioning guaranteed lifetime income as the next frontier—recreating a pension-like stream of income for retirees.
Target date funds provide an asset allocation that changes over time based on the average participant’s savings profile, which can lead to suboptimal outcomes. myTDF® takes the simplicity of TDFs and adds the power of auto-personalization so that plan fiduciaries can seek to more closely align a participant's allocations with their individual circumstances.
myTDF represents an evolution of traditional target-date funds by incorporating up to five demographic factors beyond age in seeking to deliver a more personalized default asset allocation with the same ease as traditional TDFs.
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