Teaming up with Colorado to launch Maine’s state-facilitated retirement savings program has worked remarkably well to get it quickly off the ground, said the program’s executive director Beth Bordowitz during a webinar sponsored by the National Institute of Retirement Security on May 16.
Since it launched this year, the program known as the Maine Retirement Investment Trust has already completed outreach to the first wave of employers required to enroll their workers in the auto-IRA program if they don’t offer a workplace retirement savings program themselves.
“We are right where they were when they were in our position,” Bordowitz said, referring to Colorado’s program, which launched in January 2023. “I’m feeling good about that because they got off to such a tremendously fast and promising start.”
The Colorado SecureSavings Program has nearly 55,000 funded accounts and 15,000 registered employers, which the program’s director, Anna Stevens, described as “amazing,” and has $55 million in assets under management.
“We expect those numbers to continue to increase,” Stevens said.
Maine was the first of three states to join the Colorado-led retirement savings interstate partnership in a bid to lower costs and implement their programs faster. Delaware joined the consortium in December, followed by Vermont, which joined in April. Maine made the pioneering move in August.
Courtney Eccles, vice president of state and client relationship management at Vestwell who ran the Illinois Secure Choice program, noted the speed with which Colorado’s partner states have implemented their programs.
“The speed of implementation and launch” she said, “has been really significant compared to where many of us were in the early days,” she said.
The interstate partnership and other innovations, along with growing support for the programs, are propelling the programs forward, added Tyler Bond, director of NIRS.
More than 3 in 4 Americans (77%) agree that state-facilitated retirement savings programs are a good idea, he said, citing a national survey of 1,208 working-age Americans conducted by Greenwald Research in October.
“This was our highest level of support,” he said, adding that support is strong across party and generational lines.
In addition, the overwhelming majority of Americans (82%) also say they would participate in state-facilitated programs, up from 75% in 2020, according to the survey.
Bond also plugged recent research from the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives showing that the programs significantly increased private-sector employment between 1.8% and 2.3%. The research, which was released in May, also indicated a potential increase in wages of between 2.0% and 4.0% after the introduction of these programs.
“It’s promoting more people to be working in the labor force in the states that have these programs,” Bond said.
