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How 401(k) plan sponsors can help employees avoid the 1st deadly sin

With no less than the Magna Carta setting precedent for prioritizing income, American fiduciaries for more than a century followed the principles set forth in an 1830 court ruling. A watershed 1969 report, later confirmed by research, forever changed the landscape and pointed the fiduciary away from income and towards...

By Chris Carosa | Updated on June 01, 2011

You can’t blame the average investor for confusing an investment’s annual return with its annual yield. For centuries, trustees and their beneficiaries have focused on the income an estate yields, not the growth in its value. Indeed, as explained in “7 Deadly Sins Every ERISA Fiduciary Must Avoid: The 1st Deadly Sin – ‘Income Matters’,” the barons of medieval England forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215AD partly because the king’s trustees had been looting the estates of widows and orphans in part to help the king fund various unpopular policies. Back then, an estate’s yield didn’t come with decimal points and percentage signs. It came in bushels and on bones. It didn’t fill abstract things like bank accounts. Instead, it filled the very real need of hungry stomachs.

A solid six centuries later in 1830, one of the seminal cases of American trust law (Harvard College v. Amory) re-emphasized the predominant importance of income and asset safety. Over the next hundred years or so, trustees and remaindermen (those beneficiaries who inherit the assets of the estate once the income beneficiaries die), discovered the rules of trustees as promulgated under the agricultural economy did not transfer too easily in the industrial age. Whereas the assets in an agricultural estate (i.e., land) tended to naturally appreciate, the assets in an industrial estate (i.e., securities) often did not.

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