401k / Retirement Plan
Work with us to deliver a 401k retirement plan that will serve employees well, minimize your costs and simplify your work.
Critical to any good benefits package is a solid 401k retirement plan. But often they are costly and complex. Whether you’re big or small, you deserve access to a simple, hassle-free 401k plan with Fortune 500 pricing and sophistication. Leveraging the BenefitGuard 401k platform, or in partnership with other plan providers such as Principal, American Funds, Securian, or VOYA, we ensure your plan is low cost and high performing, and requires less work. The result is more savings and higher satisfaction from employees!
Lower Costs
The most excessive fees in a 401(k) plan are usually being paid by employees, while 70% of them think they pay nothing!
- The average cost of plans under $2M in assets is 2.11% of assets! A good portion of this is generally paid by employees, dragging down returns and reducing savings. *Employee Fiduciary 401k study
- An extra 1% in fees paid by employees will decrease the size of their eventual retirement savings by over 20%!
Just a few extra percentage points of annual fees can mean the difference between $360,000 and $640,000 over 25 years.”*
*Annual fees are assumed at 0.99%, 1.22% and 2.08% for BenefitGuard, Online, and Typical Full Service, respectively. Assumes participant with $75,000 at age 40 saving $5,000 per year until age 65. Rates of return based on a Burgess and Associates study examining the performance of 14,487 retirement plan participants from 1997-2006. 5.30% gross return assumed for Online and Typical Full Service plans (non lifestyle, self directed investments). 7.2% gross return assumed for BenefitGuard plan. All rates of return are hypothetical and are not meant to represent any particular investment. BenefitGuard, Inc. does not guarantee investment performance.
Low Administration Costs
Together with BenefitGuard – an industry leader in providing low-cost 401(k) plans – we’ve created a better solution. We leverage new technology and volume purchasing to drive down administrative fees. Then we charge a fraction of what other plan advisors charge for plan setup, maintenance, and employee communication. The net results are plan administration costs that run 30-60% below traditional 401(k) plans.
Low Investment Fees
Leveraging institutionally priced Index-based investment options keeps costs low for your employees. Very low. And we eliminate indirect compensation. Nobody but the mutual fund companies get paid from your investment options.
Less Work
We don’t just give you tools to do 401(k) work, we do it for you. And we take on ALL of the fiduciary risk too! Working through the Benefitguard platform, we will:
- Prepare, file, and even sign your 5500. Acting as your 3(16) plan administrator, 3(21) named fiduciary, and 3(38) investment manager, there’s zero risk for you.
- Track eligibility, approve loans and manage distributions
- Perform compliance testing and manage your audit
- Run enrollment meetings and answer employee questions
- Track and report on investments, and much more.
High Performing Investment Options
Index-based funds, over time, outperform actively managed funds 99% of the time.
“This simple investment strategy - indexing - has outperformed all but a handful of the thousands of equity and bond funds that are sold to the public.” source: The Elements of Investing; Malkiel and Ellis, 2013.
Because Index funds are heavily diversified by buying all or a portion of the total market, based on an established index, there is no market timing nor human error that can reduce returns.
This chart compares the average annual return of the S&P 500 Index Fund (8.43%) vs. average managed equity funds (7.0%) over 20 years, from 1992-2012.
Source: Elements of Investing, 2013
We use the largest and most reputable low-cost, index based fund families in the country — Vanguard and Dimensional. At wholesale prices, these funds are often ⅕ the cost of retail managed funds!
Payroll Integration
No need to reinvent the wheel or double key data. Partial and full integration with a number of payroll providers already exist, including (but not limited to):
And we’re more than happy to work with your provider to make 401(k) uploads as easy as possible.