Current Events
After all, I could postpone all my summer homework or reading assignments until late August (I apparently started my last-minute cramming habit early) and just enjoy life for those blissful months with no responsibilities.
Of course that logic doesn’t work anymore. Although summer might still contain a vacation or two, it is no longer the blissful few months it was years ago. Sadly, checking out is easier said than done. Technology seems to play both sides—while it makes it easier to get away and remain connected, said another way, it makes it easier to be contacted at your hideaway retreat—a blessing and a curse. In fact, taking time away seems to make more work later—at a minimum, cleaning up the bizarre amount of email that comes in while you’re out of the office.
This summer, we’ve heard from many plan sponsors, advisers and recordkeepers that are finding it hard to tune out work because of the implementation of fee disclosure—deadlines for 408(b)(2) and 404(a)(5) both coming during these summer months. In fact, I was amazed, and perhaps you will be, too, to see how many of our writers tackle fee disclosure in terms of how it will potentially affect their story’s topic—across all subsections in this year’s annual PLANADVISER Adviser Buyer’s Guide.
The theme of this year’s guide is “Keeping Your Practice Current in an Ever-Changing Industry.” More than a mere list of tool, service or product providers (if you are a reader of PLANADVISER or PLANADVISER.com, you already know the current offerings or where to find them), in this issue you will read a report of the current state of a wide variety of those investments, tools, services and partnerships that are essential to the success of a retirement plan adviser and the trends to watch out for in the future.
We have divided the issue into four sections: Relationships, Investments, Plan Tools and Practice Tools. Inside each, you will discover individual articles focusing on the relevant key practice elements. For example, in Relationships, we discuss current trends in and considerations for collaborating with back-office support (page 28); recordkeepers (page 36); and third-party advisers and attorneys (32).
The Investments section covers a range of potential plan investments, including target-date—and risk-based—funds (page 42); stable-value funds (page 46); the latest thoughts around retirement income investment solutions (page 54); and exchange-traded funds and collective trusts (page 50).
Depending on your individual practice, you might be less intimately involved with some of the topics covered in the Plan Tools section, but those are vital to your plan sponsor clients—and, sooner or later, to most retirement plan advisers, as well. These include plan benchmarking (page 64); rollover platforms (page 58); and managed accounts and advice (page 60).
Last, but certainly not least, in Practice Tools, we drill down on topics such as insuring your practice (page 68) and practice benchmarking tools (page 70).
As always, it is a very brief space in which to describe a very large marketplace, but we hope it offers some food for thought. If you are interested in more information about providers within any of these articles, PLANADVISER.com is a great resource. And, if there are any topics you would like to see included in future buyer’s guide issues, please let us know.
I hope you all have found some time, or are planning some, to disconnect and get a real vacation. Enjoy the last few weeks of summer, and I look forward to seeing many of you at the PLANADVISER National Conference next month, where we will be delving deeper into a number of the topics in this special issue.