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ABG: Helping America Retire

Best Practices In Retirement Services

This blog is designed to showcase the expertise of Alliance Benefit Group (ABG) through its recordkeeping, consulting and compliance services. Delivered locally to retirement advisors and plan sponsors. All blogposts are derived from actual client situations. Enjoy!

All Plan Designs Are Not Perfect…

10/03/2017

Problem Encountered

We ran into a 401k plan sponsor who had been routinely refunding over $30,000 in plan contributions made by their highly paid group. We met with the Advisor and sponsor to obtain their objectives in sponsoring the plan, and what they hoped the outcome could be.

 

ABG Solution

By focusing on the top 20% of highly paids as opposed to just the defined term “Highly Compensated Employees”, we were able to reconstruct the plans formulae and eliminate the refunds. Our consultative approach rather than a one size fits all plan design is now making the plan far more effective for the sponsor, and for the executive group. 

 

BEST Practice Learned

Many, many plans you run into out there contain minor or major design flaws. Advisors and sponsors need to find qualified consulting firms who have experience with many types of plans, sponsors and are solution providers. There is often times a nice solution for most plan issues.

More Like This

Watch Your Matching Contributions!

Apr 27, 2017

Problem encountered – we were brought into a plan situation by a new CFO who had discovered issues with their prior plan provider. There was an Advisor who was not a fiduciary, an insurance company recordkeeper, and a Third Party Administrator.

Refreshing a Stale 401k Plan

Mar 17, 2017

We received an RFP from a manufacturing plant owned by a foreign based company. Their HR team had totally turned over in the midst of our proposal opportunity. They were being serviced by a name brand mutual fund, but it had no advisor. They had mostly target date funds, low participation and low contribution rates.

Doctor Group Mergers

Mar 9, 2017

Problem Encountered – We had a longstanding client relationship with a 12 partner Orthopedic group. As is happening in the health field, they wanted to merge practices with four other Ortho groups to form a super group with 50 partners. We had established a 401k plan and a cash balance pension plan for our group, and the partners were projected to end up with $2.5-3.0 million in each of these plans by retirement.