The road to a secure, dignified retirement begins here

Cory Scholefield, age 64, doesn’t feel like retirement security is within her reach anymore. It’s not for a lack of effort. Cory saved diligently in her employer plan most of her 30-year career as an administrator in higher education, even working a part-time job as a fitness instructor to make ends meet while also saving. Then, she found herself in a messy divorce in her early 60s, which forced her to dip into her retirement savings to buy a place to live amid skyrocketing real estate prices. 

“I made all the right decisions until my life didn’t go as planned. Now I’m working longer just to save more to afford retirement,” Cory shared. “It’s a lot to manage and it makes me worried.”

Americans have reached a tipping point with retirement. Today more than 55 million Americans don’t have a workplace retirement plan,¹ but even those with an employer retirement plan may fall short due to insufficient savings and longer lives. A national survey on consumer finances pegs the median retirement savings of Americans nearing retirement at only $185,000.² Meanwhile, longevity experts give today’s 67-year-old a 25% chance of living to age 95.³

“Big issues, yes. Insurmountable, no,” says Bret Hester, general counsel and head of TIAA Government Relations. “It requires all of us—public and private alike—working together toward commonsense solutions. And that’s the point of the Retirement Bill of Rights.”

Focused on a common goal

The idea for the Retirement Bill of Rights came to Hester during an evening with TIAA CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett in December 2022. At the time, Congress was on the verge of passing the SECURE 2.0 Act—the second of two major retirement reform bills since 2019. For months, TIAA’s government relations team lobbied lawmakers to enact policies aimed at improving access to retirement plans to save and create guaranteed retirement income. Hester saw SECURE 2.0 as a positive step forward but like most people, knew it wasn’t going to fix everything.

At dinner that evening, Duckett talked about the moment in college when she first saw her father’s retirement plan statement and realized he could never afford to retire. She started asking questions. What happened? Why, after working 35 years packing boxes, did her father not have enough saved? Why didn’t her father know he wouldn’t have enough? Where were the gaps in the process?  

Duckett and Hester went on to talk about the millions of Americans without access to workplace retirement plans, especially Black and Hispanic Americans and those working for small businesses. (See Figure 1.) They talked about the potential reduction of Social Security benefits for future retirees, the stark income and longevity differences between men and women, and the enormous gap left by disappearing pension plans. “Thasunda's passion fueled all that followed,” Hester says. “She is laser-focused on the notion that everyone who works a full career deserves the right to retire with dignity.”

By the time the evening ended, Hester had mentally drafted the Retirement Bill of Rights. On his way home, he pulled out a note card and wrote down four short statementsOpens pdf to align all parties around a set of core principles. 

“No matter how we approach the issue, we all share the same goal,” Hester says. “And everyone—policymakers and employers alike—can do something and together as one coalition, we can close the gaps that stand in the way of that goal.”

Policy progress

Legislators on both sides of the aisle continue to push for new policies designed to help workers save for retirement and allow them to turn their savings into retirement income. The first SECURE Act, passed December 2019, cleared some of the hurdles employers face when choosing annuity providers for their retirement plans. Lawmakers looking to build on that policy introduced the Lifetime Income for Employees Act in June 2023, which would make it easier for employers to include a broader array of annuity options in the default investment choice. 

Another bipartisan bill announced in July 2023, the Auto Reenroll Act of 2023, clarifies current ERISA safe harbors and encourages plan sponsors to reenroll any nonparticipating employees once every three years, unless they opt out again. Many see these bills as a reaffirmation of the importance of automatic enrollment and lifetime income to build retirement readiness. 

“Policy changes are an important step to create access to the tools workers need to overcome the big challenges we face when it comes to retirement,” says Chris Spence, managing director of government relations at TIAA. “But policy gets us only part way there.”

Commonsense solutions at work

The Retirement Bill of Rights arrived at an important inflection point for many employers and consultants. The recent passage of SECURE 2.0, along with the original SECURE in December 2019, brought a tidal wave of new opportunities—more than 140 new items to evaluate—some optional, some mandatory. All of it forced many employers to reexamine their plan design and ask themselves some hard questions about their priorities. 

“A lot of goes into plan design decisions, not the least of which are the fiduciary responsibilities to the plan and the employees,” says Jill Popovich, senior managing director of TIAA Retirement Solutions. “The Retirement Bill of Rights adds a different lens to that decision-making process. It helps us look critically at the retirement plan and find ways to deliver an even better plan for the employees.” 

“For example, many institutions offer generous employer contributions with no strings attached,” Popovich explains. “And some have long wondered whether that plan design will help employees save enough for retirement. The Retirement Bill of Rights helps gets that conversation underway.”

Using plan data in the TIAA Plan Outcome Assessment can help identify those areas for improvement, especially when it comes to participation, contributions, and number of participants invested in the default. It’s also a matter of asking the right questions to see how the plan can do more to help champion workers’ rights (See below).

“This is an important moment for retirement plans,” Popovich says. “The Retirement Bill of Rights encourages all of us to find ways to be part of the solution—big or small—to deliver better retirements for American workers.”