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November 21, 2005 at 07:00 PM
Everyone would love to have more money for their retirement years, but when it comes to actively managing a retirement account, or rebalancing 401(k) portfolios to take advantage of the highs and lows of financial markets –well, most people just do not take the initiative.
In fact, plan sponsors say that getting people to even enroll in company offered retirement programs is a real chore, and many despair over the future financial situation of their clients and employees.
Yet the lack of involvement in company-sponsored plans is not really due to inertia on the part of the population, according to John Ring, managing director of retirement plan services at Brinker Capital–one of the nation’s largest providers of managed account and mutual fund services, with over $5 billion under management. For many people, wading through and then deciphering the onerous amounts of paperwork and documentation that their 401(k) plans deluge them with can be overwhelming, if not entirely intimidating, he says. Surveys state that about 80% of plan participants in the U.S. never rebalance their retirement portfolios, but this is mainly because the do-it-yourself model of the traditional 401(k) plan is simply too much for most individuals to handle, Ring says.
“We are all concerned about saving for retirement, but it doesn’t happen so easily,” he says.
Enter, then, what Ring likes to call “the next generation solution” to saving adequately for retirement: Brinker’s Retirement Plan Services program. Offered only through financial advisors, the program offers individuals the choice of six managed mutual fund portfolios from Brinker’s acclaimed Destinations program, a managed mutual fund account program for high-net-worth individuals, which has a 10-year track history of exceptional performance. Many advisors, Ring notes, have been clamoring for the kind of service Brinker’s plan offers.
In a nutshell, the only decision any individual has to make is what kind of portfolio they want, based on whether their tolerance for risk is high or low. Each model portfolio is made up of 18 underlying mutual funds from A-list companies such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, Ring says, and they range from highly risky to totally tame, depending upon the composition of the underlying funds.
