Best Practices and Plan Design
We help you take advantage of the best practices that can benefit your plan, your employees, your business, and help satisfy your fiduciary duties. With today’s plans, only 36.7% of sponsors allow employees to participate in the plan immediately upon hire, 40% have auto enrollment, and 25.5% mandate auto-escalation.1
Retirement plan success is no longer just about participation rates, fees, investment performance, and retirement account balances. Instead, most plan sponsors are more concerned with participant retirement income adequacy, which is a much more difficult goal to achieve. By working with The Plan Advocate and our professionals, we can help you establish some of the best practices when implementing a retirement plan and develop strategies for helping employees increase their retirement income.
Our three goals are to help participants save now and save more, invest properly, and increase their financial literacy. In an effort to accomplish these, some best practice include:
- Early eligibility
- Automatic enrollment
- Re-enrollments
- Automatic contribution escalation
- Stretched employer match formulas
- Auto rebalancing
- Understanding withdrawals and loans
- Consolidation of participant retirement accounts
- Simplified investment choices
- Roth 401(k) contributions
- Managed accounts
- Education, tools, and technology
- Investment advice
- Financial Wellness Assessment
We want to help you incorporate behavioral finance techniques into your plan design, simplify your investment choices, and provide more access to participant education and help. Contact us today to get started.
1PLANSPONSOR magazine, “DC Plan Benchmarking Survey” (2014)
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