Pension Plan Design

Discovery: We begin with a face-to-face "discovery" meeting between our retirement planning professionals, you and your business partners. We aim to understand your current circumstances, identify short and long-term objectives, uncover any potential hurdles, and pinpoint the issues of greatest concern. This helps us develop a realistic framework for subsequent planning that considers the state of affairs of your business and your ultimate goals.

Design and Implement the Plan: We help you choose from a variety of pension plans, including defined benefit, cash balance, profit sharing for 401(k) plans. We identify what is most important to your company's key individuals and their families, as well as what is critical to the future of the business itself. We recommend that you begin planning and contributing right away, as accumulating enough assets for retirement takes years.

Investment Selection and Management: Our investment advisory team can help you choose the appropriate investment vehicles for your plan. We use an independent, unbiased request-for-proposal process to identify the providers of investment products, fund choices, and fee structures that best suit your company's needs. Our fund scoring system, updated quarterly, helps you provide "best of class" offerings to your participants, supporting them in reaching their retirement goals and providing the necessary criteria for compliance with Department of Labor mandates. We make distinctions between the structure of defined benefit/cash balance plans and pooled profit sharing plans when determining risk management.

Plan Administration: We are a full-service, third-party retirement plan administration firm and provide a range of administrative services to facilitate legislative compliance with IRS and Department of Labor requirements, including document preparation and tax filings. We also keep abreast of any legislative changes that may affect your plan.

Employee Education and Communications: We work closely with our clients' human resource departments so that plan participants understand the benefits of their retirement plan. We provide comprehensive on-site meetings to educate and enroll eligible employees and offer guidance and risk tolerance. Plan participants have access to educational support material, retirement planning tools, and calculators.

Fiduciary Compliance: Our advisory and fiduciary support team provides documented compliance with ERISA 404(a) and 404(c), assisting plan sponsors in identifying and minimizing their fiduciary liability. We draft customized investment policy statements to establish firm guidelines for decision-making, clearly defining investment objectives, selection criteria, procedures, and the underlying philosophy. Our 401(k) fund scoring system helps in selecting, monitoring, and evaluating the plan's investment options. We have a disciplined process of monitoring investment performance, which includes regularly scheduled and documented investment policy committee meetings and a reliable system for replacing poorly performing funds. Funds are evaluated on ten criteria, including investment performance in a variety of market conditions, risk-adjusted returns, reasonable and competitive fees, and qualitative characteristics, such as acceptable manager tenure.