When Was the Last Time You Reviewed Your 401(k) Plan?

Do you run a small business that provides a 401(k) plan benefit for your employees? Do you ever wonder if you are following all the right steps to ensure that you are meeting your fiduciary responsibilities as a plan sponsor? Have you reviewed your current service providers and the fees you’re paying in the last three years?

These may be questions you’ve asked yourself and depending on how you answer them, it might make sense for you to dig into them a little more. If your business isn’t in the financial services field, then it’s likely that reviewing 401(k) plan proposals can seem like a daunting task. It can be difficult to even know where to begin. And once you decide which providers you’re going to evaluate, how do you analyze the proposals and fees and compare them to one another or to your current plan? Every 401(k) provider formats their proposal information a little bit differently. At Foster Group, we spend a lot of time helping to answer these questions for both existing and prospective clients. We help benchmark plans to identify any potential shortcomings and to see where businesses may be able to save costs.

Conducting a plan review can serve a couple of additional purposes.

1. You can take advantage of the latest and greatest solutions available for your employees.
2. You might also be able to simplify the administration of your plan, along with saving costs for your organization.

Our process at Foster Group

Whether you are a client or simply need a review, is to do the necessary due diligence and share our findings. We do the heavy lifting, synthesize the information, and present it to you in a simplified format. This helps you to meet your fiduciary responsibilities without becoming a retirement plan consultant, when that isn’t what you do for a living. It is what we do for a living.

Looking to the future

Imagine having complete confidence that your employees are well cared for and that your 401(k) plan offers your employees the best solution possible at a fair price. Gone are the days of wondering why you are even paying a plan advisor. Instead, Foster Group will help enable you to outsource an important yet-time consuming task that is not within your area of expertise. You will be engaged in a partnership that ensures your fiduciary processes will be well documented and maintained, and which may lead to better outcomes for you and your employees. You may finally feel proud of the positive impact your 401(k) benefit has had helping employees maximize their savings and ensure they retire comfortably.

And remember. As a fiduciary (which you are if you sponsor a plan), you have the responsibility, periodically, to benchmark your 401(k) plan service providers. If you are not doing this and get a complaint from an employee about your plan costs, services, investments, etc. you could find yourself on the wrong side of a DOL inquiry. Some things to consider in a review are changes in laws or regulations, new technologies that might be available, new competitors, expanded services and improved pricing to name a few.

If you’re interested in exploring this type of analysis to better understand the things a retirement plan advisor can do to help make your life easier and to make sure you are meeting your fiduciary responsibilities, give us a call.

Foster Group provides transparent, fee-only, fiduciary expert advice to small businesses throughout the country. We’re one of a few CEFEX (Centre for Fiduciary Excellence¹) certified firms in Iowa and our client retention rate happens to be nearly 98%². Start a relationship with Foster Group and find out what it’s like to be Truly Cared For^®.

¹Disclosure: The Centre for Fiduciary Excellence, LLC is an independent certification organization. CEFEX works closely with industry experts to provide comprehensive assessment programs to improve the fiduciary practices of investment stewards, advisors and managers. CEFEX certifications help determine the trustworthiness of investment fiduciaries. Foster Group obtained its CEFEX certification in August 2007, and has renewed each year since. In order to achieve certification, Foster Group pays an annual assessment fee of approximately $5,000. These fees are a requirement for certification and cover the cost of the independent audit. The fees paid do not have any bearing on the outcome of the assessment. For more information on CEFEX, please visit the CEFEX website.

²As of 1/1/2022