Retirement plan advisory

Your retirement plan has two jobs. Is it doing both?

A well-built plan should do two things at once: help the owner save meaningfully on a tax-advantaged basis, and help the business attract and keep good people. Many plans are built to clear compliance - and quietly underperform on both.

Find out if yours is Take the plan scorecard
3(21) plan fiduciary Fee-based
Who we work with

Two roles, two sets of stakes - one plan that has to serve both.

Whether you sponsor the plan as the owner or administer it as a CFO or HR lead, the pressures are different. The need for an advisor who shares the work is the same.

For the business owner

Your plan should work for you, not just your team.

Most plans are designed to satisfy requirements. Fewer are designed around what the owner can personally set aside - which can be well beyond the standard deferral most owners assume is the limit.

Increase owner contributions, within IRS limits
Reduce personal fiduciary exposure as sponsor
Use the plan as a real retention tool
Coordinate it with your personal wealth strategy
For plan sponsors
For CFOs & HR leaders

You carry real liability here. Let's make the plan defensible.

As administrator, you're personally responsible for compliance, the investment menu, fee reasonableness, and documentation. Most administrators don't fully see that exposure until something tests it.

Fiduciary liability review and documentation
Investment menu evaluation and benchmarking
Fee reasonableness analysis
Enrollment support and participation
For plan administrators
What we do

Sponsoring a plan carries real risk - our job is to help you mitigate it.

We serve as a 3(21) investment fiduciary. You keep final authority over the plan - we're not named on the document - but every recommendation we make is held to a fiduciary standard, and the process behind it is documented, repeatable, and built to hold up if anyone ever asks.

01 / Governance
Plan governance
A defined process for how plan decisions get made, who makes them, and when they get revisited - so oversight runs on a schedule instead of on memory.
02 / Investments
Investment menu review
We evaluate the lineup for quality, cost, and fit, and replace what isn't working - on a documented schedule, not on a whim.
03 / Cost
Fee benchmarking
Plan fees have to be reasonable under ERISA. We benchmark total plan cost against comparable plans and show you where it stands.
04 / Owner
Owner contribution design
Many plans leave the owner's own opportunity untouched. We design the structure around what you can set aside tax-advantaged each year.
05 / People
Enrollment & education
Low participation undercuts the whole benefit. We run enrollment and education that helps the plan reach the people it's meant to.
06 / Audit
Documentation & review
Documented reviews, investment policy, vendor due diligence - the paper trail that supports the process if it's ever examined.
What we typically see

In our experience, most plans aren't broken. They're just unattended.

The average plan does the minimum well enough. The gap between that and a well-run plan rarely shows up as a crisis - it shows up quietly, in the same few places, year after year.

A
Fees that were never benchmarked
Reasonable is a standard you have to demonstrate. "We've always used them" isn't documentation.
B
A menu no one formally monitors
Default funds, set once, reviewed rarely - and no written record of the decisions in between.
C
An owner saving less than the plan allows
The design was built for compliance, not for the person who signs for it.
“
Whether you're an owner trying to save more or an administrator trying to stay protected, a short conversation is usually enough to tell whether the plan is doing its job.
- Nate Walters, Walters Wealth Management
Start here

Find out what your plan is - and isn't - doing.

A 30-minute review is enough to see where a plan stands and what a better-built one could do for you and your employees.

Book a 30-minute plan review

No commitment. A straightforward look at whether your plan is working as hard as it should.