Employer Sponsored Retirement Plans by HBKS Wealth Advisors
Going beyond compliance to help you develop financial and investment plans to grow your business and personal wealth.
As an employer you are responsible for the effective management of company-sponsored qualified retirement plans, including 401(k)s, profit-sharing plans, and defined benefit pension plans
Along with this responsibility comes liability under ERISA, the rules that govern how qualified retirement plans are to be administered.
HBK’s affiliated wealth management firm, HBKS Wealth Advisors, maintains a Retirement Plan Unit to work with employers to develop and maintain qualified retirement plans that accommodate today’s complex and challenging regulatory environment. Some of the ways HBKS Wealth Advisors can help you:
Conflict-free, Open Architecture
Your retirement plan investment portfolio should be free of bias or incentive driven investments. HBKS Wealth Advisors offers most publicly traded mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (EFTs), and is not limited to company-sponsored or incentivized investment products.
HBKS Wealth Advisors uses conflict-free, open architecture platforms with access to more than 15,000 investment options, leaving them free to focus solely on best-in-class funds.
The flexibility of an open architecture solution allows HBKS Wealth Advisors to build an extraordinarily competitive investment lineup for retirement plan sponsors.
They are not subject to the limitations and pressures of the typical marketplace based on the performance of limited investment alternatives.
Fiduciary Monitoring of Investment Options
As a retirement plan sponsor and fiduciary, you must select careful and supportable investment options to offer your plan participants. The HBKS Wealth Advisors Retirement Plan Unit works with clients through an Investment Policy Statement that details the roles and responsibilities of the various parties serving the retirement plan while defining the criteria for selection and replacement of investment options.
The Retirement Plan Unit will monitor the plan’s investment options on a systematic and ongoing basis.
They help with the documentation supporting the investment fiduciary’s decisions.
On a regular basis, The Retirement Plan Unit review investment option benchmarks, including:
Performance relative to peer groups
Expense ratios
Measures of risk-adjusted return, such as the Sharpe ratio
Tenure of the money managers
Investment style consistency
In the event that an investment option is to be replaced, the open architecture platform allows you to choose a competitive replacement fund.
Monitoring and Benchmarking Retirement Plan Fees and Expenses
Your retirement plan fiduciary responsibilities include keeping watch over plan fees and expenses. HBKS Wealth Advisors offers benchmarking reports that compare your plan’s investment manager and mutual fund expenses, recordkeeping and administrative expenses, and investment advice fees to hundreds of similarly sized plans.
HBKS Wealth Advisors services are characterized by thoroughness and in-depth knowledge:
Plan sponsors can see how their plan compares to others: the most expensive, the least expensive, the median and the mean.
Powerful information allows you as plan sponsor to document the process used to determine the reasonableness of your plan’s fees and can support you in renegotiating contracts or searching for new service providers.
As a retirement plan sponsor working with HBKS Wealth Advisors, you can feel confident you are working with a skilled specialist guiding you on a systematic and ongoing basis through a sound plan management process.
Fee-based, Revenue-Neutral Pricing
Key to an investment portfolio that is designed in the best interests of your business and your retirement plan participants is unbiased investment advice, free from conflicts of interest and incentives to recommend any particular investment products or solutions.
HBKS Wealth Advisors:
Is a fee-based advisory; they do not accept commissions on the investment products used to build your retirement plan investment portfolio.
Is a revenue-neutral service provider whose only incentive is to identify and recommend the best investment options for each retirement plan and its participants.
Even when an investment option pays revenue sharing fees, HBKS Wealth Advisors capture those revenue sharing dollars and use them to offset other fees in the plan.
Helping Plan Sponsors Manage Fiduciary Responsibility
As an employer and retirement plan sponsor, you are your retirement plan’s fiduciary and face personal responsibility and liability under ERISA. As such it is critical to select a retirement plan investment advisor that understands, develops strategies that comply with, and can even share that responsibility.
HBKS Wealth Advisors can serve as either a co-fiduciary under ERISA Section 3(21) on matters related to investment advice, or a discretionary investment manager under ERISA Section 3(38).
HBKS Wealth Advisors:
Offers a specialized business unit to service our clients sponsoring qualified retirement plans such as 401(k)s, 403(b)s, defined benefit pension plans and others.
Acknowledges and accepts responsibility to work exclusively in the best interests of the plan and its beneficiaries.
Participant Education and Counseling
As your retirement plan fiduciary, part of your responsibility is to educate participants on their plan. The HBKS Wealth Advisors Retirement Plan Unit delivers high-quality education to plan participants in a group setting or one-on-one. The training is designed to provide participants with the tools and knowledge to make thoughtful and educated decisions about their retirement plan contributions.
The HBKS Wealth Advisors Retirement Plan program of participant education is thorough and flexible:
Training can be delivered on-site, off-site or via webinar.
HBKS Wealth Advisors professionals have extensive experience educating participants in a group setting through a variety of financial and retirement planning workshops.
The one-on-one counseling option is available to participants with a HBKS Wealth Advisors financial advisor who works with families to plan long-term goals, including retirement.
Please visit HBKS Wealth Advisors for more information on Retirement Plan Services
