Plan Design

Where Art and Science Meet

Creating a successful, competitive retirement plan isn’t just about the numbers. You need a high-impact program that encourages employee participation and readies them for retirement. Using Courageous Plan Design™, we strive to create a cost-effective solution that can help improve plan health through:

• Automatic enrollment
• Higher minimum deferral rates
• Automatic deferral escalation
• Employer matching programs
• Elimination of loans and hardship provisions

Help Employees Help Themselves

Employers spend a lot of time, money and energy creating retirement plans and encouraging participation. But many employees still contribute too little to their plans or even nothing at all. Why?

Under traditional defined contribution plans, employees have to sign up to start saving. With Courageous Plan Design and our proprietary PLANavigator™ technology, the paradigm is flipped — you automatically enroll employees and they have to opt out of the plan instead of into it. The default contribution rate is also higher than the standard, and contribution rates automatically go up each year. Add to that other forward-thinking plan elements, including stringent savings leak prevention and simplified investing options, and the results can be phenomenal.

The Power of Automation

It might seem like automation is forcing your employees to do something. The reality, though, is that no matter how a plan is designed, the default action is steering them in some direction. Automation simply steers them toward saving for their retirement — they still have the freedom to make their own choices. Our retirement professionals can help you design a system that makes saving as easy as doing nothing.

Automatic enrollment empowers you to help your employees to help themselves. By setting them up to build retirement assets with pretax employee contributions, you can help them start saving even if they don’t do a thing. And that’s just the beginning. We’ll help you select an automatic deferral rate and the right automatic increases that can really up the savings potential.