There's an ever louder chorus of professionals who are questioning the idea of foisting these complex investment products onto the already burdened shoulders of employees (see "A Growing Fiduciary Concern: Have 'State-of-the-Art' Investment Menus Backfired?" FiduciaryNews.com, September 1, 2015).

The unfortunate reality is that many employees don't have the time to learn the basics of traditional investment options, let alone the other-worldly nature of these more sophisticated products.

It's true that, in a theoretical sense, things like Alts can maximize returns and things like QLACs can insure against certain risks.But, is maximizing returns and insuring against risks the real purpose of retirement savings plans? No.

The objective of all retirement savings plans is to provide a vehicle for employees to save for retirement.

They're not a vehicle to maximize investment returns. They're not a vehicle to provide insurance.

Yes, maximizing returns and buying insurance can be reasonable objectives when appropriate, it's just neither represents the primary purpose of the retirement plan.

We fret about educating employees and financial literacy in general. Yet, we bypass the intro course and insist on pushing them into advanced classes that require them to make decisions many professionals will find difficult. 

At the same time, we know employees, if they only save enough, can retire in comfort without the need to maximize returns nor the need to insure against running out of money.

If you're a fiduciary, you'll breathe a sigh of relief knowing a simple three-option 401(k) menu is more than enough to provide the breadth of investment choices to meet the needs of retirement savers. (Likewise, if you're a product pusher, you won't be happy knowing this.)

In the very beginning, 401(k) plans generally had only three options (the minimum required to qualify for safe harbor provisions). These were either a stock/bond/cash triad or a growth stock/value stock/stable value mix.

In both cases, retirement savers had at least one good, solid, long-term growth option and at least one good, solid, "safe" option. Employees were free to mix it up from there, allocating their retirement savings in a way most appropriate to their circumstances.

This was a perfectly acceptable situation. Since employees could only change their options a few times a year, they were less concerned with the day-to-day volatility of the market and more concerned with their saving.

Need proof? Anyone remember the crash of 1987? Already 401(k) plans had already overtaken pension plans as the preferred corporate retirement vehicle by that time, you didn't see headlines decrying the end of retirement.

Quite the contrary. The crash quickly brought headlines of buying stocks on the cheap and calls for privatizing Social Security. If anything, the crash emboldened 401(k) savers, who knew they had the opportunity to get in at a low price.

The simple three-option model worked.

That model didn't last long, though, when the industry decided it was better to "fix" 401(k) plans before it broke. Very quickly we went from a leisurely paced valued-once-a-year (or once a quarter or once a month) retirement savings vehicle to a turbo charged machine that demanded daily pricing.

Of course, unitized portfolios (which most 401(k) plans had back then) couldn't handle this sudden "need" for daily pricing. But a certain investment product could. In that instant, 401(k) plans shifted from being the retirement saving vehicles they were intended to be and, instead, transformed into the greatest mutual fund sales device ever created. With this, we saw a proliferation of investment options (we had to fill every possible square in the style box after all).

Best of all for the product sellers, if last year's model proved disappointing, there was always this year's new and improved model to take its place. Was this good for the retirement saver? Maybe yes, maybe no. But there's one thing we know for sure–it was certainly good for the product seller.

Perhaps now would be a good time for 401(k) plan sponsors to seriously consider "unfixing" their 401(k) plans by revisiting the idea of simple three-option menus. They may just discover this could spur increased savings by employees. And that, Charlie Brown, is what retirement savings vehicles are all about.