Downtown Little Rock, Arkansas

Downtown Little Rock, Arkansas

THE WEALTHPATH DIFFERENCE

Your retirement plan should be something you are excited to offer employees. We enjoy helping employers design a plan that encourages saving for the future while minimizing effort, compliance risks, and cost.

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CLIENTS CHOOSE US BECAUSE OF OUR:

  • Emphasis on education, including individualized employee consultations

  • Company focus on advising retirement plans

  • Experience with over a dozen recordkeeping and TPA vendors, to help you choose the right one for your plan

  • Ability to sign on as a plan fiduciary with the employer

  • Custom asset allocation portfolios and risk-based collective funds

  • Independent and objective investment monitoring reports that look beyond past performance to also consider cost, risk, and other factors

  • Experience advising a wide range of plan types: 401(k), 403(b), 457(b), non-qualified deferred compensation, cash balance, and other pension-type plans

WE HELP PLANS TO:

  • Choose a plan recordkeeper and fund lineup, based on your specific needs

  • Implement impactful plan design changes to drive more participation or savings

  • Regularly benchmark the plan to help ensure costs and services remain competitive

  • Educate employees on plan investments, plan features, and target savings rates

  • Monitor investments for expenses/risk/performance. We primarily recommend cost-effective index funds from companies such as Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackrock, and Charles Schwab.

  • Document plan meetings and the reasons fund/plan changes are made

  • Walk through a government-required corrections program if any plan management mistakes are made

  • Understand regulatory changes such as recent guidance for hardships, the CARES/SECURE Acts, fiduciary redefinition, etc.

  • Walk through the various ways to offload work or reduce personal fiduciary liability: Hire 3(38) investment management fiduciary, consult ERISA counsel, 3(16) outsourced plan administration, fiduciary liability insurance, automated payroll integration

  • Discuss adding a non-qualified deferred compensation plan or cash balance plan to retain key employees or help business owners save more

  • Draft and follow an Investment Policy Statement, when needed

  • Conduct annual, semi-annual, or quarterly plan reviews, but also conduct more in-depth compliance checklist reviews to help ensure plan terms and employer responsibilities are well-understood

OUR EXPERIENCE

We have a CFA® charterholder, individuals with finance & economics degrees, a former HR manager, several AIF designations, a practicing CPA in AR, a practicing attorney in AR, and individuals with a master’s degrees in business and computer science on staff, so we have a broad range of perspectives and experience at WealthPath. We also budget tens of thousands of dollars per year that we devote to plan-focused software tools, research and technology initiatives, and continuing education.

FOR EMPLOYEES

Employee education and our individualized consultations may be the most impactful service we provide to retirement plans.  Our experience is that individual meetings with employees are much more successful than webinars or phone calls in inspiring employees to save for their retirement and getting them into an asset allocation that is compatible with their risk tolerance, financial situation, and retirement goals.  Because of this belief, we prefer to do education onsite at each employer location.  Offering all employees the option to meet with one of our advisors at each enrollment is one common approach.  For example, if enrollments happen quarterly, we can offer both new and existing employees the opportunity to meet with one of our advisors quarterly.  For questions that come up between enrollment dates, we also make ourselves available to employees by phone or email.

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COMPLIANCE RESOURCES

With any decision about plan design or fund/vendor selection, it is important to consider how that decision can impact plan compliance.  We have experience advising on many common compliance issues, such as handling late contributions, vesting calculation errors, eligibility determination, QDROs, and compensation calculations.  We have walked plans through the voluntary corrections process and have also worked with several ERISA attorneys on more complex situations that required in-depth legal help.  Assisting you in locating a knowledgeable plan auditor is another service we can provide.

CUSTOM PORTFOLIOS

We manage 5 Smart Risk portfolios that we can offer inside retirement plans using either collective funds or custom plan-specific asset allocations.  We are very proud of our portfolio performance track record that starts over 15 years ago and is verified by an independent performance analysis firm.  Your plan would never have an extra WealthPath fee for those employees that choose to invest in our portfolios since we believe doing so can create an unnecessary conflict of interest when we are also helping employees choose investments.

PRICING AND TRANSPARENCY

We work for retirement plans as fee-only fiduciary advisors.  This means we do not accept any revenue sharing, kickbacks, commissions, or any other form of compensation from fund companies or plan vendors for recommending them to you and we commit to put the best interests of the plan first.  Our advisory fee will be clearly documented as a small percentage of plan assets or a specific dollar amount and can be billed to the employer or deducted from plan assets. Exact pricing is determined based on the services required, plan size, and complexity.

Note: Pensionmark does not provide 3(16) services.