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The Ask: To win business, every financial advisor, should do their best to analyze nearby 401(k) plans. The key point here is benchmarking and choosing the right target plans. Our clients frequently ask us to help them find the best plans for prospecting, however, requires taking specific steps. The Problem: While you can find a lot of publicly available information on 401(k) plans, you need to show a plan sponsor that their plan is benchmarked correctly and that it has room for improvement. There needs to be a way to put their plan in context, because knowing the plan data is not enough. You also need to show it in...

German Lee

25 Jun 2019

Smoothly Changing your TPA

A TPA (Third Party Administrator) can help manage all the logistics of general retirement plan and health services, so employers can concentrate on what they do best. Changing a TPA gives an opportune time for company executives to improve their vendor service road map and solicit extra worker compensation claims which were not addressed and satisfied by their legacy third party administrator. In general, TPA’s will meet your new customer requests on everything that lies within their scope of service. Upon changing your TPA you’ll be forming a close, legally bound relationship with an associate who will have access to your assets. The success of the relationship will depend to...

German Lee

25 Jun 2019

Managing non-standard securities in 401kFiduciaryOptimizer

The Ask: As you know, the 401kFiduciaryOptimizer, is quite a flexible tool where you can work with both audited and non-audited retirement plans. You can even run a full scale optimization even on a plan that doesn’t have any audited schedule of investments (Read up on how to do this on our separate case study here: Working with Non-Audited Plans in 401kFiduciaryOptimizer). When uploading a plan in our system, you can specify all the specific funds and other securities available in the plan. However, in this process, you may discover some securities outside of normal mutual funds (for example CITs, separate accounts or other annuity products. Luckily, we have the...

RiXtrema Team

24 Jun 2019

Week of June 24, 2019

1. THE HOME STRETCH – The S&P 500 has closed at its calendar year high in the second half of the year (i.e., during the 6 months of July-December) 74% of the time since 1950. In 17 of the last 30 years, the index’s calendar year high has occurred during the month of December. The S&P 500 consists of 500 stocks chosen for market size, liquidity and industry group representation. It is a market value weighted index with each stock’s weight in the index proportionate to its market value (source: BTN Research).2. WELL ABOVE AVERAGE – With 1 trading week remaining in the first half of 2019, the S&P 500...

RiXtrema Team

19 Jun 2019

What kind of risks do you need to take when it comes to planning retirement income?

Recent research from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services focused on retirement preparedness, showing a number of practical barriers that were either preventing or discouraging people from saving for long-term needs. Such barriers often included conflicts of financial priorities, lack of trust to financial service providers, and poor understanding of the products serving the market. The following research by DCFS was focused mostly on suggestions to overcome these barriers. It explained additional, psychological factors that should be considered, in order to create an approach to solve this problem. A great number of studies proved that people are not rational all the time, and often fail to do what should be...