I was a fit at my old law firm sort of like how my son’s toddler clothes fit him at age 7. I wasn’t a good fit because I didn’t take myself too seriously, I tried to push for flat fee billing, and I tried to break down difficult retirement plan concepts into Basic English for my clients and for the financial advisors that I was working with. The way I empathized fiduciary responsibility for plan sponsors then and now is that it isn’t brain surgery and clearly that’s a threat when you have to charge $300 an hour for that legal advice because when you charge a premium, you can’t make the advice that much basic.
The fact is that like keeping a healthy mouth, keeping a healthy retirement plan doesn’t take that much work. It takes dedication and time, but ultimately, a successful retirement plan always requires one constant: a plan sponsor that takes their fiduciary role seriously. So a plan can have the best providers out there and the best fund lineup out there, it’s still probe to problems if the plan sponsor is negligent in their duties. A plan sponsor committed to fiduciary responsibility is the one constant for having a great retirement plan.