You have saved your nickels and dimes over your career and have a good-sized nest egg to retire. Then you hand it over to a shady broker with tons of violations? I hope not but it definitely happens and more often than you think. Would you go to a firm where 30% of their brokers have FINRA violations? How about a firm where 70% have violations? Where there is smoke there is fire and personally I'd run from these institutions ASAP. It is hard to imagine that they are still in business.
Benchmark Your 401(k) Plan
Runnymede has increasingly been serving as a fiduciary advisor to companies' 401(k) plans so I will be writing a series of articles on how to tune up your retirement plan. The intended audience is the company and its trustees that sponsor the plan but participants are also advocating for better plans. It is our hope to help employers optimize and better manage their retirement plan. In doing so, we seek to help employees achieve their goal of successfully preparing themselves for retirement.
How the fiduciary standard protects you
You may have heard media reports about a new fiduciary rule for retirement accounts that the Trump administration is trying to rescind. Understandably, you have questions about how this might impact to your accounts. The rule was designed to ensure recommendations made by financial advisors to their clients regarding their retirement accounts are always made in the best interests of the client without any conflicts of interest. This rule was set to go into effect in April, but that is being delayed by 180 days and may be killed entirely.
How Much To Pay a Fee-Only Advisor? A Look At Average Annual Fees.
The subject of investment advisory fees can be confusing. While researching online, I observed that it is difficult to find average fees published anywhere so I hope that you find this blog post helpful.
Plan Sponsors: How to Review Plan Costs to Avoid Lawsuit
If you're a plan trustee, I hope you're paying attention. Employees have been increasingly active fighting against “excessive fees.” Just in the 4th quarter of last year alone, there were eleven major class-action lawsuits filed in federal courts against 401(k) sponsors or providers of retirement products. Most suits allege that participants’ retirement savings were compromised because employers, as plan fiduciaries, failed to act in participants’ best interests and breached their duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by allowing high fees, poor fund choices, and conflicts of interest.
If you are among those who thought only multibillion-dollar plans (Cigna, Edison International, ABB, International Paper, Boeing, Lockheed Martin) were at risk because small- and mid-sized plans won't get sued, think again. A new class-action lawsuit was filed in the Minnesota federal court targeting excessive 401(k) fees in a $9.2 million plan with 114 active participants. Damberg v. LaMettry’s Collision Inc., claims that plan fiduciaries breached their duties under ERISA for allowing excessive fees to be charged for plan investments, record keeping, and administration.