People who exercise control and authority over the management of a retirement plan's assets are fiduciaries. So are professionals who provide investment advice with respect to those assets. As a company owner or executive, in most cases you also play an investment fiduciary role unless you partially...

IRS rules provide for participant loans and hardship withdrawals from 401(k) and other plans. They're not required, but rather left to the discretion of you, the plan sponsor. Today, there's a good bit of debate about how participant loans affect long-term retirement outcomes. On one hand, it's not ...

When we talk about 401(k) retirement plans, we sometimes focus on the contributions made by employees that are always immediately vested. In other words, it's their money and they can always withdraw it without forfeiting any - subject to certain IRS rules about early withdrawals.

It's a common story - business owners put everything into their businesses for years before being in a financial position to put real money away for retirement. Once you're ready to really get going, we can suggest a number of retirement plan designs and individual plan features that can help you re...

While we hope you have never had to experience it, you're no doubt familiar with the idea of an audit of your personal or corporate tax return. But you may not be familiar with an audit of your qualified retirement plan. There are two broad categories of retirement plan audits. Today, we'll focus qu...

There are some things we're happy to buy right off the rack. After all, mass production usually means consistency and cost-savings. On the other hand, when we do buy off the shelf, we compromise on individual choice and sometimes flexibility in getting the exact qualities and features we want. In re...

Most of us live in homes that were not custom-designed for us. We adapt to them rather than expect them to be optimized to how we like to live. Most retirement plans are sold the same way. Companies buy something off the shelf that was intended for a generic audience, but not necessarily ideally sui...