Name: jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Annual_401_k_Plan_07162025_4976907
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T05:53:18.983Z
Duration: 21 min 15 s
Description: jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Annual_401_k_Plan_07162025_4976907

Transcript for "jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Annual_401_k_Plan_07162025_4976907": Hello and welcome to today's presentation Annual four zero one ks Plan Reviews Have You Done Yours? My name is Stephanie Schifano and I'll be your host for today. Before we begin, just a few housekeeping notes. First, please note that the primary audio connection for today's session is streaming via your computer and there is no dial in option. Be sure to check your speaker volume to ensure your volume is at an audible level. To refresh or reload the webinar, for a PC you can press the F5 key or a Mac you can press Command R. Let's take a closer look at some of the important features. To download and print a copy of today's content for future reference and to access additional resources, refer to the files and resources window at the top right of your console available at any time during the event. If you have questions during today's webinar, you can send them via the ask us a question window. To submit a question, simply reply in your question and click Submit. We do have some people behind the scenes helping to respond to your questions, and we'll also address some common concerns in the Q and A segment towards the end of the presentation. Even if time doesn't permit for us to address your question individually, we do want you to know that all questions are received and help us create future resources to meet your business needs. Please note this presentation does not constitute legal advice and is for informational purposes only. And now I'd like to introduce you to today's presenter Marie Bradford. As a Regional Retirement Services Manager, Ann Marie has spent nearly a decade at Paychex helping businesses navigate the complexities of four zero one and retirement plans. After gaining expertise and compliance regulations in new plan sales, she led it excuse me, later transitioned to plan conversions, where she now leads a team of licensed professionals. Her team strives to deliver seamless conversion experience helping businesses streamline processes to create custom retirement programs tailored to their unique business needs. And now I'll turn it over to Anne Marie for today's agenda. All right happy to be here today. So we're going to cover what an annual four zero one ks plan review is, why it's important, the benefits of a plan review, what will be covered when you go through an annual four zero one ks plan review, and then some additional resources as well as a Q and A. Alright, so what is an annual four zero one ks plan review? So annual four zero one ks plan reviews help to ensure that you can be confident that you're acting in the best interests of your business and your employees. So it's the process of walking through a meeting with a specialist to learn about the various aspects of your plan today and then maybe some areas that may need to be reviewed or changes that may need to be made. Why do an annual plan review? Well, health and performance equal process efficiencies and employee participation. So annual four zero one ks plan reviews are not just the best practice, they're a critical part of fiduciary responsibility and overall plan health. The benefits to you and your company would be potential cost savings. You may find that your plan has an out of date or noncompetitive fee structure, peace of mind understanding if your business or plan are following the law, and if not, getting solutions to fix any issues. Lastly would be competitive advantage. Your plan can, you know, represent a best in class benefit that helps to attract and keep great employees, so it pays to ensure your plan is competitive in today's tight labor market. And now we have a quick poll. Of the three benefits of the annual plan review we just highlighted, which is most important to you and your business? So the first one is a competitive advantage, b peace of mind, and c potential cost savings. So at this time, if you could click one of those choices, what'll happen is it will pull our results for you, and we'll be able to let you know, what is the priority for the majority of those individuals on the call. So we have a few of you have this submitted so far. And Ann Marie, I just want to thank you for what you've taken us through so far. And I know that this information helps us because then you're able to help drill in on whether it's competitive advantage, peace of mind, or the potential cost savings. So with that, let's see where we are with regard to the results. And it looks like the one that's winning out right now is potential cost savings, Ann Marie. I will pass it back over to you for the next steps of the presentation. Alright, perfect. So what would be commonly covered within an annual four zero one ks plan review? There's a number of different areas that we would focus on. So looking at the design of your plan, are the eligibility match vesting schedule and profit sharing features? Are those still servicing your workforce or business strategies? A fast growing company might need to revisit eligibility periods or provide automatic enroll options. From a fee standpoint, that would look at both administrative and investment related costs. These are benchmarked to ensure that they're reasonable for your plan size and services and fee transparency is a really big fiduciary focus. There's a four zero one ks plan review checklist so that's going to touch on fiduciary responsibility, plan documents, contribution limits, testing results, and then audit readiness so that nothing falls through the cracks. Investment performance to look at how each fund is performing compared to its benchmarks and peers, flagging any underperforming options that may need to be replaced. Your investment lineup is it diverse and aligned with your participant needs? And then finally, to evaluate the services you receive, like employee education, advisor support, and plan reporting tools. So when reviewing your four zero one plan design, we dive into the structural features of your plan to ensure it still aligns with your business goals and your workforce needs. The end goal of your plan may change over time, so reviewing all plan design features is an important aspect of ensuring the plan is optimized, competitive, and aligned with your business needs, whether that's attracting top talent, maximizing owner contributions, or improving retirement readiness. So what fees will be reviewed? So we will look at fees associated with managing your four zero one ks plan, which would be related to the administrative components, as well as transaction fees, which would be associated with the various plan features and services. There is a four zero one plan checklist published on the IRS website, which is used to help keep your plan in compliance with many of the important rules. So if you didn't check all the boxes when you look at this resource, you may have a mistake in the operation of your plan. The list is really only a guide though to a more compliant plan, so checking all boxes may not mean that your plan is 100% compliant. When we look at the investment performance review aspect, this part of the review really ensures that your employees have access to quality, well performing investment choices that support their long term retirement goals and helps you fulfill your fiduciary duty to monitor investments regularly. For those of you who are unfamiliar with target date funds, here's what the d o DOL says about them. Target date retirement funds or TDFs can be attractive investment options for employees who do not want to actively manage their retirement savings. TDFs automatically rebalance to become more conservative as an employee gets closer to retirement. The target date refers to a target retirement date and is often a part of the name of the fund. For example, you might see TDS with names like Portfolio 2030, Retirement Fund 2030, or Target 2030. They're designed for individuals who intend to retire during or near the year 2030. So what are some common metrics to review? A couple of those would be plan participation, and then deferral rates would be another common area to review for general four zero one ks plan health I seem to have a little bit of a lag while catching up. Stephanie, is it showing up on your end? Yep, I am seeing the presentation. So right now I'm on the general four zero one plan health deferrals page. So I have advanced it to the next slide but it seems to be frozen. Okay, let's see. Your four zero one plan provider can make all the difference? I should be on participation. Let's see. Thank you everybody for bearing with us as we're going through this. So I am in participation Annemarie and I can help guide you through it if you want to keep going if you're not seeing the slide advance. Correct. I'll just let you advance the slide here. I've got my numbers. All right. Perfect. So participation. So when evaluating the overall health of your four zero one ks plan, employee participation is one of the most telling indicators. If you have high participation, this typically means that your employees understand the value of the benefit. Low participation, on the other hand, could signal maybe a communication gap, a lack of awareness, or some plan design issues. So ultimately, strong participation means that your plan is doing its job helping employees prepare for retirement while also helping them avoid plan helping you avoid plan issues or compliance testing issues. And we've gone to the next. Love It technology makes us roll with the flow and be really creative. Exactly. Exactly. Deferrals, right? When we look at deferrals, what is the average deferral rate for your plan? That's something we would help you look at. How does this compare to national averages? Is this in the low single digits or do you have strong participation in your plan? So salary reduction and or elective deferral contributions are pretax employee contributions that are generally a percentage of the employee's compensation. So while some plans may permit an employee to contribute either a specific dollar amount or a percentage, this is also something that we would help you evaluate in that annual plan review. So ultimately, strong deferral rates are a sign that your plan is working and not just available to your employees. And I've advanced to your four zero one ks plan provider can make all the difference. Perfect. So at the end of the day, that's exactly the point, right? Your four zero one ks plan provider can be a source of confidence or a source of frustration. That's why it's important to not only review your plan annually, but also assess whether your current provider is still And it looks like those technology issues may have taken Anne Marie away from us, but it's actually kind of perfect timing for what we had planned. So we'll see if she comes back to us. I believe what she was going to share is that it's really important to not only review your plan annually, but then also assess whether your current provider is delivering the level of support and results that you need. At this time, we were going to move over to some of the additional resources. So appreciate everything Anne Marie has provided to us. And what I'd like to do is highlight some additional helpful resources on the topic that you should be seeing on screen. What you can see is we have a get started on the path to plan health, how to switch four zero one ks providers and choose a new one, and then four zero one ks and retirement planning services. From there, paychecks can help you with all of these. So I walked you through Anne Marie's background, talked about how great her team is. We have those individuals here to help you. So as you're seeing on the blue card at the lower corner of the console, I am tongue tied today, we're offering a no cost annual review as a complimentary service to any business. So whether or not you hold a retirement plan with us, you can get that complimentary review. Our retirement specialists can help walk you through the review process, as Ann Marie shared, to help catch any concerns and outline potential adjustments so it's working at peak performance for you and your team members. And that's going to bring me to our next poll question. I'm going to have you stick with us because I think Ann Marie is back and we actually have some questions that have come in also. So at this point, if you're interested in talking with a paycheck retirement specialist, please click yes and we can have somebody reach out to you for that no cost annual review. So thank you for that. And then from oh, sorry. I might have just given you the full question. See if I can have it in front of you now. Feel free to click yes or no. And then from there, Ann Marie, are you back? I am. You gotta love weather, and we got hit with some crazy storms, and so my power flickered. I apologize. No worries. You came back at the perfect time because we did have questions coming in. So what I'd like to do is ask you a couple as time permits, if that works for you. Yeah, perfect. Great. So the first one I'm seeing says my four zero one ks plans participation rate is low. What are some things I can do to increase the participation rate? So there's a lot of different proven strategies that we know work to increase participation. That might be automatic enroll and adding that as an option to the plan, Reviewing maybe your plan's eligibility waiting periods. Maybe the employer match is something that should be looked at to make it a bit more competitive. And then lastly, would say some targeted employee education. Perfect. Thank you. Just kind of scrolling through some questions. As I shared, what I'm trying to do is kind of say, Okay, here's a theme here. And it looks like the one I'm choosing next is part of that theme. I have part time employees. Are they able to participate in my plan? Really good question. So there are some regulatory changes specifically with the Secure Act and Secure Act two point zero where long term part time employees who work at least five hundred hours within three consecutive years or two years if your plan year started in 2025 may become eligible to participate in the plan. That would be a really good area to discuss when you complete your annual plan review if you think it might impact your company. Awesome, thank you. Next question. You mentioned the end goal or goals of the four zero one ks. What are common goals you see with your clients? Another really good question. I mean a lot of our clients that we meet with every day, they're focused on reducing administration, manual administration specifically. They want to maybe improve their employee or participant engagement. Maybe they're having some issues with compliance testing and they want to review if there should be some updates made to their plan document from that regard. And then lastly, I would say just ultimately making sure that they've checked the box that they're offering a competitive benefit. Awesome. Thank you. And then next question. Goodness, I'm trying to get through all of them. There's so many great ones coming in. What happens at the end of the plan review if I discover my plan is not optimized to suit my business needs? So if we uncover that your plan isn't maybe set up or aligned with your goals the way that you'd like it to whether that's the plan design, that's fees, maybe it's provider support that's that's what the whole point of the review is for right so we'll walk through what changes could be made and then from there we can create a clear action plan. There might be some changes that you can make mid year versus changes that you have to wait until the beginning of a calendar year to make. So ultimately the sooner you have those plan reviews specifically now, We're in the middle of a calendar year, so it's great time to complete those reviews so that if there were changes that maybe couldn't be made until the beginning of a new calendar year, have plenty of time to prepare for those as well. Great. Anne Marie, there are still questions coming in. We're at about the twenty minute mark and I know one of our goals was to keep this short, concise and to the point. And I'm hearing some weather happening in your background. So what I'd like to do is I'm going to move forward from the Q and A. For everybody here with us, please know that we have experts behind the scenes answering some of your questions. I've seen some specific ones coming in with regard to your specific plan. So we'll be able to refer you to some resources that may be able to help you or offer some additional information. And again, if you're interested in that annual plan review, please just call it out and let us know and we'll be able to answer more specifically for you. So with that, Ann Marie, thank you so much for your time today. As I was sharing, if you still have questions or need help, we have our phone number (844) 846-7822 or you can go to payx.meretire and submit a question there. And still we'll have people behind the scenes for a little bit answering questions here. We want to thank you all for joining today for a closer look at the all important annual four zero one ks plan reviews and a big thank you to our speaker Ann Marie for sharing her expertise and insights. As a reminder, you can access a printable copy of today's presentation in the files and resources window on your console, along with a bunch of other helpful articles and links. If you can spare a few moments as we close, we welcome your feedback on a brief survey that will pop up, and your response will help us improve future resources to support your business. Thank you again and have a great day!