Parties with Prescriptive Plan Designs
“We’re not normal!”
It’s a tagline screamed from 401k Advisors Intermountain, albeit one that’s tongue-in-cheek.
“We are much more than that; we’re extraordinary, innovative and passionate with a mission to help as many people as possible retire with dignity.”
Clever, and reflective of the firm, its employees and its philosophy.
“We’ve really had success in starting from the top down,” Corby Dall, president and managing partner, says when asked about strategies to help ensure positive participant outcomes. “We originally went through the human resources departments when focusing on financial wellness before it was such a buzzword, but HR always had specific bandwidth and were a little bit overworked and a little bit understaffed.”
To get better buy-in, they convinced HR staff to immediately involve the CEO.
“We try to get them to come up with some sort of internal branding,” adds Intermountain advisor Brady Dall. “Whether it’s wealth and health, retire ready or a thousand others, it helps to all use the same vernacular when pushing towards similar goals. We’ll get the CEO to make an announcement to kick off the program that will keep the HR team accountable and to let employees know that it’s important enough that they’re hearing it directly from the top. So, starting there, we try to then be more prescriptive.”
A major partner with Dave Ramsey’s SmartDollar financial wellness program, Dall claims the ability to measure outcomes “has been fantastic. The name recognition makes financial wellness an easy sell, not only at the employer level but at the employee level. So that’s been a lot of fun.”
By fun, he means pizza parties for program participants when $1 million of personal debt is paid off across the company.
“Some of our sponsors have live-streamed it across their organization and that’s generated a lot of awareness and excitement.”
But Ramsey isn’t always right, or at least the right fit, so they developed their own financial wellness program that makes more use of the “human element.”
“We have mentors that reach out to every employee to help push them along and provide resources no matter where they are on their journey, whether it’s debt consolidation or student loan issues or maybe a college savings program.”
Corby points to one particular client as emblematic of successful outcomes.
It’s a company with 1,500 employees and is extremely diverse, which he claims is a good barometer for the things Intermountain is doing. It has a good mix of employees from a language and income perspective, and all-around multicultural background.
“They’ve got a little bit of everything,” Brady notes. “We’ve had a full financial wellness program in place with them for two years and pretty progressive plan design. It’s culminated in a nearly 100 percent participation rate with an average account balance of $128,000.”
A key is segmentation by age bracket.
“We might have done really well with the millennial bracket through plan design and by focusing on keeping them invested, avoiding 401k loans and staying out of debt, but that might skew the results because they’ve got enough time to save.”
Older populations require something different; again, a more prescriptive approach.
“For the 35 to 50-year-old age bracket, we focus on (among other things) getting them to enter outside accounts. That might be a big quarterly push for us, because obviously someone that age is more likely to have outside assets, and we can therefore better measure retirement readiness. If we can’t measure that, it really skews the outcome numbers, so it’s incredibly important.”
Corby Dall is president and managing partner of Utah-based 401k Advisors Intermountain.
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.