The retirement planning process begins with an in-depth, face-to-face “discovery” meeting between our retirement planning professionals, you and your business partners. We strive to clarify your current circumstances, identify and prioritize short and long-term objectives, uncover hurdles that could hinder your progress, and pinpoint the issues of greatest concern.

The result of these one-on-one conversations is the development of a realistic framework for all subsequent planning, to help you make wise choices. This ensures that the state of affairs of your business, as well as your ultimate goals, are considered when making decisions and implementing recommended strategies.

Whether you have two employees or 200, Preferred Pensions LLC can develop and implement a custom-designed retirement plan that meets your personal financial objectives.

Working in tandem with our executive, actuarial and investment support teams we can help you choose from the wide variety of pension plans, including defined benefit, cash balance, profit sharing and 401(k).

Upfront, we identify and define what is most important to your company’s key individuals and their families, and what is critical to the future of the business itself.

Accumulating enough assets for retirement takes years! We recommend that you begin planning and contributing right now—well before you are ready to launch a new lifestyle or a well-deserved retirement. We can also help you with additional planning techniques that protect against unforeseen circumstances.

Whether your plan is newly established or a transfer to Preferred Pensions to administer, our investment advisory team can help you choose the appropriate investment vehicles for your plan. We begin our independent, unbiased request-for-proposal process to identify the providers of investment products, fund choices and fee structures that best suit your company’s needs and demographics.

Our robust fund scoring system, updated quarterly, will help you provide “best of class” offerings to your participants, supporting them in reaching their retirement goals as well as providing the necessary criteria for compliance with Department of Labor mandates.

We take a different approach when assets are being managed in a pooled account on behalf of plan participants. We make distinctions between the structure of defined benefit / cash balance plans and pooled profit sharing plans when determining risk management. We believe that understanding these distinctions is critical in implementing an appropriate asset allocation.

Preferred Pensions is a full-service, third party retirement plan administration firm. We provide a broad range of administrative services to facilitate legislative compliance with IRS and Department of Labor requirements, including document preparation and tax filings. We also keep abreast of any legislation changes that may affect your plan.

Preferred Pensions works closely with our clients’ human resource departments so that participants understand the benefits of their retirement plan. This includes preparing and presenting a comprehensive on-site meeting to educate and enroll eligible employees and offering guidance to participants in making choices consistent with their goals and risk tolerance. Plan participants have access to educational support material, retirement planning tools and calculators.

Fiduciary responsibilities are an inherent and mandatory part of the retirement planning process. Our advisory and fiduciary support team provides documented compliance with ERISA 404(a) and 404(c), assisting plan sponsors in identifying and minimizing their fiduciary liability.

Our team drafts customized investment policy statements to establish firm guidelines for decision-making, clearly defining investment objectives, selection criteria, procedures and the underlying philosophy. And through our robust 401(k) fund scoring system, we also help in selecting, monitoring and evaluating the plan’s investment options.

Relative to specified guidelines, our disciplined process of monitoring investment performance is consistently applied. It includes regularly scheduled and documented investment policy committee meetings, and a reliable system for replacing poorly performing funds. Funds are evaluated on ten criteria, including investment performance in a variety of market conditions, risk-adjusted returns, reasonable and competitive fees, and qualitative characteristics, such as acceptable manager tenure.