Pension Consultants, Inc. has been honored, for the second year in a row, as a finalist of the W. Curtis Strube Small Business Award. The Springfield Chamber of Commerce selects the finalists based on factors such as staying power, response to adversity, innovative products or services, business philosophy and contributions to the community.
Our President and Founder, Brian Allen, talks about Pension Consultants in this video produced for the Strube Small Business Award.
In November 2009, I wrote about the “first set of teeth” that bit into the 401(k) fee lawsuit landscape when Caterpillar, Inc. announced they would settle their 401(k) fee lawsuit. Now we have a class action 401(k) fee lawsuit that has been tried with a decision, which finds the defendants liable for over $35 million.
In Tussey v ABB, Inc., the Western District of Missouri Central Division Court found that ABB violated their fiduciary duties to the Plan in several areas including failing to monitor the retirement plan vendor fees and revenue sharing, and allowing the Plan to subsidize other corporate services received by ABB from their vendor, Fidelity.
Failure to monitor the retirement plan vendor costs
Fidelity began providing services to ABB in 1995; however, beginning in 2001, ABB did not monitor the vendor’s fees and did not calculate the amount of compensation that was received by Fidelity through revenue sharing. The bottom line from this case is the arrangement ABB had with Fidelity was not reasonable. Read full article »
As of April 1st, we have officially reached $2 billion in assets under advisement. 2 billion of anything is a lot, and sometimes a number that big can be hard to grasp… perhaps this will help:
• 2 billion inches is 31,566 miles
• 2 billion dollars in pennies would cover approximately 28 square miles
• 2 billion is the record number of views on a YouTube channel
• 2 billion seconds is approximately 63.4 years
On a more serious note, Brian Allen, President and Founder of Pension Consultants, commented that, “This milestone was accomplished through hard work, with the help of loyal clients, and by maintaining the mentality that honesty and fairness go hand-in-hand with good business.” Brian noted that from the start, he was not concerned with what the competition was doing—but, instead, set out to provide products and services that truly benefited employer-sponsored retirement plans. Read full article »
After our recent Educational Series webinar Everyone Makes Mistakes: A Review of Common Plan Failures and Corrections, Chase Tweel, J.D., LL.M., a Pension Consultants ERISA Analyst responded to the questions the audience asked. Here’s what he had to say.
Question: At the end of the presentation, when you were describing common types of plan mistakes, you distinguished between mistakes that affect participant’s benefits from those that do not. Are there harsher consequences for mistakes that affect participant’s benefits?
Chase: Not technically, but mistakes that affect participant’s benefits are more likely to be determined “significant” and significance is a key factor in determining whether or not a VCP filing will be necessary. Also, the remedial steps for this type of failure, even if no filing is needed, may involve the Employer making participants whole, which could involve actually cutting a check out of corporate funds.
Question: If we suspect our plan is experiencing a failure that could result in disqualification, should we notify participants? Read full article »
By far the most important thing you can do to get ready for retirement is to just get started. But after you decide to begin saving, you must decide where to invest that money.
First, let’s review some of the choices you are likely to have inside your retirement plan. Every retirement plan should at least have three investment types: cash, bonds and stocks. Within each of these types you will probably have several more choices. The majority of your investment return will come from how you divide your money among these categories, referred to as asset classes. Read full article »
Risk was definitely rewarded in Q1 2012. Equities of all types posted robust returns and significantly outperformed their fixed income counterparts. While much attention has been given to the strong returns of the equity markets, fixed income (high quality fixed income specifically) found it difficult to post positive returns in the first quarter of the year.
The S&P 500® Index returned 12.59% in Q1 2012, closing just above 1,408, which was the best Q1 performance for the broad-based index since 1998. The S&P 500® has now more than doubled since its lowest performance in March 2009, albeit still well off its all-time high of 1,561 in late 2007. The tech heavy NASDAQ faired even better returning 18.67% in Q1. Read full article »
The Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce has selected Pension Consultants as a finalist of the 2012 W. Curtis Strube Small Business of the Year Award, for the second year in a row. The Small Business of the Year Award is named in honor of W. Curtis Strube, the late director of Breech School of Business at Drury University. An avid supporter of small businesses, Dr. Strube founded the Chamber’s Small Business Council. The recipient is selected based on such factors as staying power, response to adversity, innovative products or services, business philosophy and contributions to the community. The winner will be honored May 2 at a luncheon at The Tower Club in Springfield, Missouri.
If you work with retirement plans, I assume you’ve read about the new fee disclosure regulations that become effective later this year. How many articles have you seen summarizing the regulation? There have been more than a handful, I’m sure. In fact, while writing this blog, I was emailed yet another article summarizing the regulation that encouraged me “to be aware of new fee disclosure rules.” Let me state what I think is somewhat obvious: We are aware there are new regulations. I have always been a strong advocate of fee disclosure, but let’s take the next step and assume your service provider, who is subject to disclosure regulations, has disclosed fee information to you. The service provider checks the disclosure task off of its list, but as the plan fiduciary, what are you going to do with the information?
The information must be used to evaluate the reasonableness of the retirement plan service provider’s arrangement. But how do we evaluate something that is not clearly defined? Obviously, fees need to be reasonable, but you have to know what you are evaluating before you can make that decision. Specifically you need to know what services are actually being provided. The tricky part is Read full article »
Leap Year – a predictable process that mandates regular adjustments. Sound familiar?
Leap years occur because the mathematics of our calendar don’t result in whole numbers. Our years are measured by how long it takes for the earth to rotate fully around the sun. Our days, however, are measured by how long the earth rotates fully around its axis. Since the time it takes to rotate around the earth’s axis one time doesn’t divide equally into how long it takes for the earth to rotate around the sun one time, our calendar has to make regular adjustments; hence, the leap year. Read full article »
What do you want to do when you retire? Some people want to travel the world. Others want to devote themselves to their favorite hobby. Still others plan to just sit on the front porch and watch the cars drive by. For some, the goal may simply be to reduce their employment to part-time when they retire. Trying to visualize what your retirement lifestyle will look like is the first step to preparing for it.
But there is much more to the process of planning for retirement than just dreaming about how you will fill your time. You must build a plan for how to get to your retirement goals. When you develop your retirement plan, it helps to work backwards, which is why we start with visualizing what your retirement lifestyle looks like to you. Read full article »
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Staying compliant with ERISA regulations is a serious undertaking. Regulations change constantly and a single mistake can be costly. Pension Consultants’ QP Review® process examines your plan to make sure you’re following the rules.
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