Plan Operations

Each year, we evaluate the plan demographics and the plan's employee communication and education strategy. Based on this review, we can determine where there are opportunities to improve the plan's success in meeting its objectives and whether plan design solutions (automatic enrollment, automatic escalation, etc.) or communication and education strategies can have the greatest impact. We can also review the demographics of the plan relative to the new financial wellness services to determine whether they would be a good fit for your participants.

In the past 24 months, we have worked with clients on several plan design initiatives. Those include: Completed a plan design change that included employer contribution changes and re-enrollment for a client looking to reduce the employer non-elective and employee mandatory contributions. This was motivated by their goal to incentive more employee participation. We worked with a client to cut the employer's non-elective contribution and added a 100% match on the first 5%. We also implemented an auto-enroll at 5%. This client was looking to reduce their employer non-elective and employee mandatory contributions while also incentivizing more employee participation. Our client wanted to replace their complex 403(b) and 401(a) plans with a more simple 401(k) structure that encouraged higher participant savings rates. To assist them with this goal, we helped the client understand the regulatory complexity of the plan types and modeled the different match and auto-enroll structures for their consideration. We also reviewed the viability of a gradual sunset of current retirement programs. We helped a client implement dual eligibility, with an immediate entry for deferrals and a safe harbor match after six months. This client's goal was to have their employees enroll in the plan on the first day of employment but also offer a match after they had been contributing for a while. For a client who expressed a goal of having more plan participation, we helped them implement auto-enroll at 3% and auto-escalation up to 10% (one percent per year until the 10). Our client had three entities within a shared ownership group. Each had its own retirement plan, and the ownership group wanted to simplify their retirement benefit by having one plan for all three entities. We implemented one single plan under the main entity, with multiple participating employers (being the other two entities). This reduced the overall admin costs by 2/3.