You Own Wall Street › Employer plans › Principal Financial Group
Principal Financial Group 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $2.96bn of the $3.03bn in the Principal Financial Group plan votes in secret. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, the most common fund in the plans we track, publishes every vote: answer 3 of its ballots, then see your result.
The question on the ballot
As filed
The Principal Financial Group 401(k) holds $3.03bn. Of the $2.96bn we could identify from the plan’s own filing, every dollar sits in a fund that publishes no record of how it voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.
SourcePrincipal Financial Group’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing
| What the plan holds | Vehicle | Voting record | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Large-Cap Stock Index Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $766m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Mid-Cap Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $374m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Large-Cap Growth I Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $275m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Diversified International Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $256m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Small-Cap Stock Index Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $222m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Equity Income Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $195m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Blue Chip Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $192m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company U.S. Property Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $150m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Global Emerging Markets Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $131m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Core Plus Bond Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $125m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in insurance company Small-Cap Growth I Separate Account” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $105m |
| Principal Life Insurance Company*listed as “Deposits in guaranteed interest accounts” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $63m |
The 12 largest holdings in the plan. “Vehicle” is the description the filing itself gives each investment.
Why there is nothing to show
A mutual fund has to file Form N-PX every year listing every vote it cast on your behalf. A collective investment trust does not. It is a bank-run vehicle sold only inside retirement plans, it is cheaper, and it is now where most 401(k) default money sits — including most target-date funds, which is where savers who never chose anything are put.
So the shares bought with Principal Financial Group employees’ retirement savings are voted every proxy season — on executive pay, on board seats, on climate and workforce proposals — and there is no public document anywhere recording how. This is not an oversight by Principal Financial Group; it is what the disclosure rules currently require, which is to say: nothing.
What you can do
Check whether your plan offers any registered fund as an alternative — those publish their records, and you can read them here. If it does not, the menu itself is the thing that has to change, and that is a decision made by the plan’s fiduciary committee, not by you alone.
See how funds that do publish voted →
CoverageWe classified 97.8% of this plan’s assets from the filing. The figure above is the share of the money we could classify; anything we could not identify is excluded from it rather than assumed either way.
Other employer plans
The largest employer plans on the site, and a few more. Each page shows what the plan’s funds did with the shares its savers paid for.