First, let’s define what I consider the small business market. My definition is a company with less than 150 employees. You can have one or multiple owners. Revenue is not relevant to the plan design conversation except that you need excess revenue to fund items like employer contributions.
There are usually three pieces to any small business retirement plan: the record keeper, the advisor and the plan administrator. The record keeper is the entity that holds the plan assets, has the investments to choose from, creates the statements, and for the good ones, has employee education materials. The advisor is the person who helps pick the record keeper, the funds on the platform, does enrollments and employee education, and helps the employer keep the plan in compliance. The plan administrator’s main jobs are to create and update the plan documents, help develop the best plan design, track employee values, do the discrimination testing and complete the annual tax filings. (For related reading, see: Is Your 401(k) Administrator Competent?)
Solutions for this market are usually offered in two different service models: bundled and unbundled.
Bundled Retirement Plan Solution
This is where the record keeper not only does their job, but also incorporates the administration piece into their service model. They often claim to perform the administration functions for free or at a reduced rate. To a lot of small business owners this sounds like a great idea. They have less people to deal with and they get something for nothing or for very little. The devil, as always, is in the details. First, the plan design tends to be cookie-cutter, antiquated or both. This results in a plan design that isn’t efficient or customized and as a result, costs the employer more in contributions than the actual savings of combining the two. In addition, cookie-cutter plan design doesn’t allow for rewarding your best employees or the business owners with additional contributions without having to contribute equally for everyone. Bundled can be a good deal, but it’s mostly useful for companies with a lot of employees (200 or more), where it makes sense to keep the plan very simple or where the employer is never going to make profit-sharing contributions.
Unbundled Solution
Like the name suggests, unbundled retirement plans separate out the functions of record keeping and administration. The administration piece is done by a third party administrator (TPA for short). The benefits of having a third party administrator are all the things that having a bundled solution tend not to provide. First is customized plan design to meet the goals of the business owner. Is it to maximize their own contributions? Is it to take care of key employees? Is it to encourage participation? Second is the ability to keep up with new strategies and be proactive in introducing them to said business owner. Third is working with the business owner’s other professionals (financial advisors, CPAs) to potentially create additional retirement plans, like cash balance, that only work well when the 401(k) plan design is on point. (For related reading, see: Plans the Small Business Owner Can Establish.)
Here’s a personal example – a local TPA and I met with a medical practice that had three partner doctors and 25 employees. They were with a bundled cookie-cutter plan with a well-known record keeper. They were getting hammered with bad plan design and a record keeper whose fees were in excess of 1.7%, which is high for the amount of plan assets. The TPA was able to redesign the plan to save them close to $12,000 in employer contributions. We were then able to leverage those savings by putting the additional funds into another retirement plan (in this case a cash balance plan) for the employees. This allowed the doctors to each put another $75,000 away pre-tax for their retirement over and above the $59,000 they each put into the 401(k). We then found an investment platform that brought the cost down well below 1%.
Again, with the focus on fees and not total cost or value derived, small business owners might be saving money in one pocket to spend more in another.
(For more from this author, see: Small Businesses: Hire and Keep the Best Employees.)
cr. https://www.investopedia.com/advisor-network/articles/right-retirement-plan-saves-small-business-cash/
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