Fiduciary Is Fun!
(a.k.a. I heart taxes)
(a.k.a. I heart taxes)
The pendulum of life is always swinging. With respect to employees and employers the pendulum swang in the direction of paternalism in the middle 20th Century. Employees and their employers had informal contracts that implied that if employees worked there long enough, their employers would take care of them. That pendulum swung in the other direction for a good part of the last 50 years with employees assuming more and more responsibility for their own wellbeing and employers taking a more hands off approach. Is the pendulum swinging back again?
Some new research from PIMCO, a large asset management firm on the west coast, is suggesting that the pendulum is indeed swinging back at least a little bit. In the last couple of years, more and more research has come out that employees trust their employers more than they used to. They are looking to their employers for help and guidance in a number of areas from better health and wellbeing advice to retirement and financial planning tools. This new research from PIMCO is now showing a further iteration in employees and employers working together. It has long been known that most employees when they retire have almost no idea how to arrange their assets in such a way as to provide a lifetime of income. And why should they? After all, they have been spending a lifetime accumulating assets and saving, not figuring out how to make their assets last the rest of their lives. It appears that employers are starting to take notice and help out. The PIMCO Study shows that in the Small Plan Market (<$50mm in plan assets), the top client priorities in 2020 are Improving Participant Retirement Education, Evaluating Retirement Income for Participants, and Minimizing Fiduciary Liability, in that order. So what does this mean, or could this mean, to you as a Plan Sponsor? The first question to ask, of course, is do you have any interest in helping your employees prepare for retirement beyond just helping them save through the retirement or 401k plan? If yes, then it is probably a good idea to begin exploring what this assistance would look like. It should begin with education and helping employees understand how to use their assets in retirement. It could then move to helping employees work with an advisor to put together a plan for transitioning into retirement and living the life they want and can afford. But where does it truly begin? It begins with working with an advisor with experience in helping pre-retirees plan for retirement. Experience helping employees understand their asset mix and the tax implications of using those assets. Experience with Social Security and estate planning. If you are concerned with your current advisor’s level of experience, please give me a call. I would love to work with you and your employees as they prepare for a retirement they have earned. Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy
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I learned the above over 30 years ago. I can almost remember the exact time and location. The revelation hit me like a load of bricks as I had never thought about it before, and then when I did, was shocked to realize how correct it is in business. So simple, and yet so complicated.
We can only move business forward with one (or a combination) of 3 things – people, processes, and technology. Want to make more widgets to sell? Then hire more people to make them, improve your manufacturing processes, or develop new technology to make more of them. That’s it. There’s nothing else to consider. As we approach the end of the year and you look into 2020 with the hope of “doing more”, what one of the 3 levers are you going to pull? Technology is a game changer but often times take time to build and implement. Processes are often overlooked and can really move the needle, but process improvement initiatives are not always intuitive. For many companies, the go-to lever is “people.” So what are our people options? Well, can we work our existing employees harder? Maybe. Afterall, 40-hour work weeks are for sissies, right? But let’s assume that working existing employees harder isn’t option. Then what? We need to add employees and/or replace less productive ones. Again, pretty simple on paper. However, hiring new employees in 2020 may not be as easy as you would like. According to the new CNBC Global CFO Council Survey, 30% of global CFOs expect to be hiring more people in 2020. And Daniel Zhao, Senior Economist and Data Scientist at GlassDoor, while looking at the trends and available talent pool has said “hiring is going to be more difficult in 2020 than it is now.” Just what you need to hear as a business owner, right? So as we close out 2019 and you finalize your 2020 plans, what are you going to do? If part of the answer is to hire more employees you already know that this is going to be difficult as wages begin to rise and the competition for talent intensifies. I would suggest that one thing you can and should be doing is looking at your benefit programs and promoting them to the max. Are your benefit programs aligned to attract the talent you seek? Do you need to make changes to your 401k program to ensure competitiveness and desirability? Has your current advisor had this discussion with you yet? If you would like to explore ways to improve your company’s profile to new talent in 2020, give me a call. I would love to roll up my sleeves with you and explore what we can do together. Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy This fall I have conducted a number of Financial Education Meetings at employee worksites. Several of my clients have strong participation in their 401k plans, so traditional enrollment meetings have not been needed. Rather, we have pivoted to putting together financial education meetings that span many fronts.
You might be thinking at this point that the point of this blog post is to stress how important it is to reinforce budgeting, debt management, education planning, emergency funds, comprehensive insurance reviews, etc. And the list goes on. And while all those items are important, critically important, I am not going to discuss them here. Rather, what has been interesting to me and what I do want to cover is how I have worked with the HR departments at my clients to get a better understanding of their overall benefits programs as I prep for my financial planning meetings. The benefit offerings at an employer can often be a seamless web and to discuss one offering in isolation of the others is to not fully convey the value of all the programs and how they work together. For example, when I cover the need to review insurance, I like to know what the employer already provides. Is their term life insurance in place? How about some short and/or long term disability coverage? Knowing the answers to these questions allows me to piece together multiple components of the protection story and help the employees understand that their employer has already taken steps to help them out. Another place I spend time is understanding the Employee Assistance Program. When I discuss the need for employees to have wills, health care directives, and power of attorneys, I often point out that the EAP offered by their employer is available at no cost (generally) to help employees get started on getting these documents in place. These are only a couple of examples. There are many more to be considered. I generally find that taking a comprehensive approach to the benefit programs leaves the employees feeling more empowered and confident as well as more appreciative of their employer. It is a shame when an employer and their benefits broker put together comprehensive programs that are underappreciated and/or underutilized. Everyone leaves shortchanged in these situations. If you are an employer looking for an adviser that takes a comprehensive approach to all your benefit programs beyond just the retirement plan, please give me a call. I would love to discuss how we might work together. Pete Welsh a/k/a 401KGuy I was meeting with a prospect last week and we were discussing his business and the current challenges of finding good talent. The business requires a number of technology savvy folks, although the actual business is not a “tech business” per se. Indianapolis has in recent years become a bit of tech hub as SalesForce has expanded here and is now one of the larger employers in the area. Suffice to say that if you are a young technology person, the idea of working for SalesForce or any one of the many start-up tech companies has a slightly greater appeal than working with my prospect.
We discussed ways in which we could address my prospect’s challenges, and one of the options that he has used in the past, and continues to use now, includes signing bonuses for the right talent. These bonuses are not six figure bonuses, of course, but they are generally several thousand dollars. He feels he needs to continue to strategically use these bonuses to compete against the more tech centric competition in town. However, one of the problems with these bonuses has been that employees that do come on board often don’t stay very long. Many move on after a year or two, which is obviously frustrating. Is there a better way, he asked? Well of course there is! I mentioned to him that he could continue to keep signing bonuses part of his offering for key employees but instead of paying them out in cash, he could put them into the retirement plan and make them subject to a 5 or 6 year vesting schedule. He was surprised to hear that he could do that as he thought this might be discriminatory when in fact it is perfectly legit. Moreover, by putting these bonuses into the plan and making them subject to a vesting schedule, he and the employee avoid paying taxes on these contributions. He can even make the bonuses more generous because if the employees leave before fully vested, he can repurpose those forfeited dollars for other employees. Was my prospect happy about this idea? Naturally he was. Is he a client yet? Not quite, but things are looking positive. If you are an employer looking to partner with an advisor who can think outside the box to help you with a business problem, give me a call. I would love to have a discussion! Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy Here is what would seem like a simple question – What kind of college graduates do CPA firms hire? When I came out of college the answer was pretty simple – accounting graduates. Duh. Well, according to a new report (“Trends”) from the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts (“AICPA”), 31% of the new graduates in 2018 that public accounting firms hired were non-accounting majors. Almost 1 out of every 3 new hires was not an “accountant.” Does this surprise you?
These numbers are actually causing many in the CPA profession to reevaluate things, including the actual CPA exam itself – what it should look like, who can take it, etc. As a CPA, I have found these changes to our profession interesting. CPAs have always been on the leading edge of business changes as consultants and advisors to clients. However, as Barry Melancon, CPA President of the AICPA said of the Trends Report, “Increased demand for technology skills is shifting the accounting firm hiring model.” With more and more of the accounting profession becoming automated and technology focused, the old fashioned debit and credit skills are becoming less valuable on their own. I suppose all of this makes sense when you think about it, but what has this shift required of accounting firms and their hiring practices? It’s caused them to think differently in many areas. The traditional career paths are changing. Incentive structures are changing. Work habits of these new non-accounting graduates are different. How is your business model changing and have you considered what these changes mean to your recruitment and staffing model? All business models change. In fact, if the CPA profession can change as fast as it is doing, I am quite sure that almost every other business is changing as I type this. Are you a leader in your organization, and are you thinking about how your next new hire could be different from your last? Do you post positions simply to fill the same role of the prior person? Or are you thinking strategically about how your business is changing and adjusting accordingly? I would suggest that a growing business needs to constantly be considering what it will look like and need 2 to 3 steps out. Part of that analysis should include your benefits program including your retirement plan(s). This could be both your qualified plan – 401k – and non-qualified plans. Just because you haven’t done something in the past is no reason not to consider it in the future. If you want to have a discussion around the next generation of retirement plan and planning for your organization, please give me a call. I would love to talk to you about the unexpected. Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy |
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