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Products January 11, 2018
Financial Soundings Solution Supports In-Plan Retirement
The firm’s retiree program is designed to provide plan participants the essential guidance needed to manage assets through retirement from within the qualified plan.
Reported by John Manganaro
The enhanced retiree offering from Financial Soundings seeks to help retired participants take advantage of the group pricing and the fiduciary oversight delivered by qualified retirement plans—by helping participants craft a strategy to spend down assets without leaving the plan.
As the firm explains, the program begins with a baseline retiree analysis “proactively delivered to each plan participant flagged as retired,” and includes a personalized investment strategy recommendation in tandem with a monthly spending guide for their qualified plan assets.
The analysis encourages the retirees to visit the Financial Soundings Retiree Portal to help complete and tailor the analysis for their specific situation. To complete the picture, retirees are encouraged to add any additional assets and retirement income sources, including Social Security, pensions, individual retirement accounts, non-qualified assets and spousal assets.
Retirees can also customize the spend-down calculation by adjusting the assumed life expectancy or setting a legacy percentage to leave behind to their estate.
“If education on any type if income product is desired, that can be included in the report and the program,” the firm says. “If desired for employees with assets over a certain level we can point them to more in depth services from our partner. Any changes made to the assets or assumptions will trigger an updated set of calculations and the retirees will be presented with a personalized dashboard, depicting the spend-down matrix broken down by income source, along with a new investment strategy recommendation.”
For key recordkeeper partners, which have real-time integration between platforms, the Financial Soundings retiree workflow is supported for single sign-on and re-allocation transaction requests. If the decision is made for the retiree participants to fund the cost for the program, the recordkeeper will be responsible for all fee deductions from the plan accounts.
More information is available here.