Retirement plan loan activity nudged down for most of last year, contribution levels dropped ever-so-slightly and withdrawals inched up just a smidge, the Investment Co. Institute said in its latest report.
The report, based on trends in 25 million participant accounts at employer-based defined contribution plans from January through September 2014, offered mostly good news, though not the sort to cause champagne corks to pop.
For starters, the percentage of participants with outstanding loans, 18 percent, was down a tad from where it was for year-end 2013, when it was 18.2 percent. The less-good news: compared with year-end 2008, when just 15.3 percent had such loans, it's still up considerably.
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Elsewhere, the percentage of participants who had stopped making contributions to their plans was said to be a "negligible share," just 2.7 percent. On the other hand, that share has been on a slow upward trend since 2012, when it stood at 2.1 percent for the same three quarters.
That's still not as high as it was in 2010 (3.4 percent) or 2009 (5 percent). That may be why the ICI noted that "it is possible that some of these participants stopped contributing simply because they had reached the annual contribution limit."
However, given the difficulty people say they have in saving for retirement, and the economic hardships they say they still face even in an improving economy, it's difficult to know.
The worst news in the report, relatively speaking: the percentage of those taking withdrawals was up last year to 3.1 percent.
It was 3 percent in 2013 and 2.8 percent in 2012 and 2011. The good news (well, sort of): the percentage of people taking hardship withdrawals has been the same, at 1.4 percent, since 2010.
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