More than just a retirement plan, a VIA plan includes our full compliment of financial planning resources. We emphasize employee education to be sure that their investment choices and contributions are in sync with their overall financial goals. We also offer workshops and seminars to provide crucial information to help participants make the most informed decisions.
Owners and key employees often benefit from comprehensive financial planning including asset management, tax planning, retirement planning, estate planning, college planning and any other unique services they might need.
We believe that there are 4 basic requirements to a successful retirement plan:
1. Adherence to fiduciary duties by the plan sponsor
2. Customized, comprehensive investment options
3. Low cost, transparent fee structure
4. Experienced, capable professional support
Adherence to Fiduciary Duties
To avoid any potential liability, a plan sponsor must be sure to fulfill their fiduciary duties such as:
ERISA);
- Paying only reasonable plan expenses
Our services include frequent meetings with plan sponsors to be sure that these duties are being carried out.
Custom Investment Options
Pplan Sponsors are required to provide diversified investment choices for participants to minimize risk and avoid large losses to their portfolio. However, iindustry research indicates that investors often make poor decisions that contribute to under performance.
By emphasizing employee education, VIA LLC helps plan participants to minimize investment mistakes, increase plan balances and reduce sponsor's fiduciary liability.
Our platform is an "open architecture" design, meaning that we can provide virtually any investment option without the restrictions of a typical mutual fund or insurance company product. This allows us the ability to completely customize the investment options to meet the needs of the employer.
Low Cost, Transparent Fees
One of the most vulnerable areas that plan sponsors are potentially liable for is excessive costs within their retirement plan. These fees are often found in the form of high mutual fund expense ratios, trading costs, custodial costs, and other administrative fees that are usually deducted directly from plan assets.
There is currently a significant effort by the federal government to expose all fees in qualified retirement plans. A plan with high fees that are deducted directly from plan assets usually results in poor investment performance and significantly reduced plan balances at retirement age. The government intends to prevent this from occurring in the future thus plan sponsors need to be aware of this issue.
VIA LLC eliminates excessive fees by utilizing low cost investment options such as exchange traded funds, index funds and no-load, low cost mutual funds. Our open architecture platform allows us to seek the most cost effective solutions for third party administrators, custodians and other administrative functions to further reduce overall plan costs.
In addition, our plans are completely transparent so that every fee that affects the plan is disclosed in our proposal. This transparency also ensures that plan sponsors are meeting their fiduciary responsibility of paying only reasonable plan fees.
Experienced, Capable Support
VIA LLC's open architecture platform allows us to select only the best-of-class firms for all functions within the plan. We are not associated with any particular company therefore have have complete objectivity when selecting service providers.
Plan sponsors can be assured that only the most capable and experienced companies will be utilized in the set up and on-going maintenance of their plan.
Contact Vista today for a complimentary analysis of your current plan. We will provide you with the actual cost of your plan (usually a percentage taken from plan assets) and a performance review of the investment choices. Other issues to address are plan design, investment policy statements, employee education and any specific concerns you might have.
