OUR RETIREMENT PLAN SERVICE FEES...OUR FEES

Normally, you will only see one fee billing per year from us, the Annual Service Fee.

Annual Service Fee: Towards the end of each year, we charge a flat fee which reflects the work we expect to have to do for your plan for the current year, including work done from the beginning of the year to work to be done for the end of the year filings. Services provided include normal advance planning, discussions on contributions and allocations, actuarial valuations, 5500 forms, minor plan amendments, individual statements for participants, EFAST filing, distribution calculations and support (including RQMD), loan documents, testing, and beneficiary designation forms. This fee tends to rise slowly from year to year with inflation, and may increase if you roll in additional amounts from other plans or IRA plans, or if your employee group grows.

Plan Document Fees: Once in a while, the government requires that your plan and trust documents be restated. This process takes about six years. We have to restate the entire plan and trust documents. We charge a separate fee for the plan and trust documents, and for the Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs). Our plans are all Volume Submitter types, and are “word-for-word” adopters (which means there are no significant deviations from the pre-approved wording for which we already have an Opinion Letter from the IRS). If the documents are submitted to the IRS to get a Favorable Determination Letter, you will have to pay the IRS a processing fee.

Termination of Plan: If you want to terminate your plan, we need to prepare termination amendments, do final allocation work, prepare distribution forms, help you resolve issues, and also prepare our files in case the plan is audited (this often involves us looking back at several prior years’ work). We may also have to prepare other amendments to the plan and trust that correct any deficiencies.

IRS/DOL Plan Audits/VCRP Filings: We normally handle all IRS or DOL plan audits. At this time, many of these audits are performed by mailing in the information required, and have a limited scope. In prior years, and possibly in the future, these audits are full scope and involve an IRS agent coming to our office for a day to perform the audit. We charge a separate fee for these audits. We rarely have any issues arise during audits; this happens because we carefully review your information each year, and ask questions if we do not understand what you have sent us. You can help yourself by making sure we know all about any employees you have in this or any other company, get periodic valuations on real estate, keep us aware of any problem assets you have in the retirement plan, etc. When you help us, we can help you take care of the problem. Audits are fairly infrequent, and we have a fairly good reputation to help you keep it this way.

Other Fees: Sometimes your plan may require further work than what we regard as the usual level of work for a typical plan. If this is the case, we will charge an additional fee. This is a fairly rare occurrence for our clients.

OUR RETIREMENT PLAN SERVICE FEES...INVESTMENT PLANNING

Our Investment Planning services, and the IP PLANNING TOOL, are separate from our retirement plan work shown above. These services are meant only for clients who choose, in writing, to have them. We normally charge a first year Full Workup Fee, which reflects extensive work in the first few months, and then an Annual Investment Planning Fee, which involves updating the IP PLANNING TOOL with your updated information, and a discussion of the results and direction. If there are major changes in your situation, we will charge a Full Workup Fee, which involves the same level of work as the initial work over a few months. Please refer to the Investment Planning section. Our services in this area are to help you identify your personal risk aversion in the major asset categories, and to project your future asset accumulation, with a view to helping you explore and decide on asset categories appropriate to your actual situation; these asset categories include: stocks, bonds, ETFs, index funds, income producing real estate, precious metals, art and collectibles, etc. The process involves all of your assets, not just your retirement plan. We do not select or help you select specific investments. We work closely with you and your spouse, and if appropriate with your heirs, in the Investment Planning process.

We provide a discount to our Annual Investment Planning Fee to clients who also use our Retirement Plan Services.