Daniel Houston
Analyst · Jimmy Bhullar with JPMorgan
Yes. When we just look at just startup plans, if you go back to the era of '05, '06 and '07, there were 1,500 to 1,800 startup plans. If we look at where we're at year-to-date, startup plans was about 820. If you annualize it, you kind of get to that 1,100 or so plans for our full-year 2011. So in terms of just contributing to positive case count growth, we're only running about 65% or 70% of where we had historically been running for those startup plans. The second negative impact that you have on plan counts are just the plan terminations. Again, we've talked about this on previous calls. But it's businesses that have gone out of business, and therefore they've terminated the plan. When we look at the ongoing flow of new cases relative to those that we've lost, we've had 6 consecutive positive quarters now of growth for case count. So again, I think this has far more to do with the external environment about the lack of startup plans and plan terminations due to going out of business than anything else. In terms of deferrals and matches and participation, participation is about where it has historically run, recognizing there's a little bit of downside. There's a bit of a positive upside on participation due to some of the plans having auto-enroll, auto-escalate and those kind of come in at 25% to 30% range. If we look at average deferrals it's up a little bit, which is a very positive component when you think about the number of new people that might be -- being added at the low end of the range. Hardship withdrawals are flat. And then if we look at loans, loans are up about 5% relative to a year ago but those loans, again as a percentage of the total assets, is still a relatively small number. So again the fundamentals of the business, both from case count participation, deferrals look good. My closing comment would be around matching contributions. We've said in previous calls that about 80% of our plans are discretionary, about 20% are stated matches. And of those stated matches that someone had previously made a change in either decreasing or suspending their match, about 1/3 of those individuals or those corporations have now put their match back in place either at the same level or increased it. Hopefully that helps, Jimmy.