The resulting benefits include:
Every company is unique and so is every retirement plan. Creating a plan to meet the needs of your company and your employees is the basis for effective plan design.
A well-designed plan addresses key issues for business owners such as: maximizing tax-deferred contributions, selecting the appropriate type of plan, and ensuring employee costs remain reasonable.
Working with your record keeper and/or TPA, we will help determine if changes to the overall plan design are needed to ensure your plan clears the annual non-discrimination testing. Additionally, our experience with participant behavior helps us create effective strategies to increase employee participation.
With each plan, RPS provides a detailed step-by-step plan design process that includes:
An often-overlooked component to the health of a retirement plan is the ability for your employees to retire on time and financially secure. One of the most-cited reasons for a failing retirement plan is the lack of a clear savings and investment strategy for participants. In addition, ongoing personal advice and support for retirement is crucial. Having RPS Retirement Plan Advisors on your side is a big advantage. As the named 3(38) fiduciary to your plan, we have the unique ability to provide one-on-one advice to your plan participants, develop a customized retirement path, and provide the ongoing support that is critical in a volatile market.
At RPS, preparing your employees for retirement is the ultimate goal. Our Retirement Readiness Program is designed to increase your plan participants’ chances of retiring on-time and financially secure. Through a multitude of engagements, we’ll work with your participants to develop a savings, investment, and retirement strategy that provides security in retirement.
The resulting benefits include:
ERISA (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974) takes your role as a plan fiduciary very seriously. There are compliance requirements that can be complicated and punitive if not followed properly. At RPS, we’re experts at retirement plans and compliance requirements, providing you with peace of mind by ensuring that your plan meets all of your duties as the plan’s fiduciary.
RPS assists in making sure you and your service providers are following ERISA compliance standards including:
RPS has the resources to stay up to date with the rapidly changing compliance standards. Our process for ongoing compliance with ERISA rules will help you avoid costly mistakes.
Your duty to provide an effective retirement plan includes making sure the services provided by your vendors – like the record keeper and fund companies – are delivering real value to your participants. RPS has extensive experience in evaluating and monitoring vendor fees and services. We will help you select and manage your service providers to ensure you are fulfilling your fiduciary duty.
As a plan fiduciary, you have likely experienced how confusing the service offerings and fee arrangements can be from service providers. Because we are your fiduciary, and always working in your best interest, we can interact with vendors and advocate on your behalf through the entire due diligence and selection process.
The RPS value doesn’t end there. We will help you evaluate your service providers on an ongoing basis to ensure they are charging reasonable fees, benchmarked by industry standards. We will also monitor service quality, so you can use your valuable time managing your business – and not your company’s retirement plan.
Providing your employees with quality investment choices is critical to their ability to reach Retirement Readiness and a cornerstone of your fiduciary responsibility as a plan sponsor. If you do not have internal expertise in the selection and monitoring of investments specific to defined contribution plans, Department of Labor regulations require plan sponsors to enlist the services of a qualified third party.
By utilizing the investment committee of our parent company (Richard P. Slaughter Associates, Inc.), RPS Retirement Plan Advisors has many decades of experience in the selection and monitoring of investments that are appropriate for your 401(k) plan. We use a proprietary screening and monitoring process to ensure only the highest quality funds are made available to your participants. Included in our screens are data points evaluating:
Using proprietary and state-of-the-art investment tools, we ensure your plan is always in compliance with your Investment Policy Statement and Department of Labor standards. Our investment experts will create an investment lineup that makes it easy for your employees to choose an investment path that is right for them.
Determining if your 401(k) plan is cost efficient for your employees, and how it measures up from a competitive nature of delivering a valuable benefit to your employees, is important. Fees aren’t the only consideration, but they are important. And there is more to the total cost of a plan beyond explicit, billable fees.
To determine if your plan is cost efficient, it is crucial to determine all sources of revenue that your service provider receives. Do your plan investments include revenue sharing? How does your provider make that revenue sharing available to the plan to offset fees?
If your plan contains a stable value fund, or fixed account, it is possible there are additional sources of revenue your provider receives that are not disclosed.
In working with you to evaluate the total cost of your plan, we benchmark all of your plan fees, hidden or explicit. We can then negotiate with your providers to make sure you are receiving true value for the fees you and your participants are paying.
