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401(k) Plans

Overview

Patton Funds expanded into the retirement plan business more than a decade ago to deliver the same investment expertise and outcomes to retirement plan participants as we do for our high net worth individual clients.

We are a Registered Investment Advisor, providing complete investment advice and comprehensive consulting services. As such, we are able to partner with any of the industry-leading recordkeepers and administrators to provide you with a Total Plan Solution.

A retirement plan is one of the few things at your company 100% about your employees. The law requires us to hold all retirement plan decisions to one standard—“is this in the best interest of our employees?” Every bit of our advice and services are designed to meet this standard.

Reducing Costs

Cutting total plan cost is key to providing participants with more money during retirement. We are passionate in the use of index funds, those designed to track a particular investment index, as opposed to actively managed funds where a manager is trying to buy and sell various securities at the right time in an attempt to out-guess the rest of Wall Street to beat an index.

Every bit of evidence clearly illustrates index funds produce substantially better returns than the average actively managed fund and do so with SUBSTANTIALLY less cost.

The mutual funds available in many plans today have annual expense ratios of 1% - 2%. This is resulting in significant drag on performance. These high costs are not necessary in today’s environment. Typically, we can cut a plan’s total costs by 50% or more resulting in your participants accumulating significantly more money for their retirement.

Value Added

We bring tremendous value to your company’s 401(k) plan in several areas.


Added Diversification

Added Diversification allows us to provide participants with a full range of asset classes which typically is not offered in retirement plans. Even if plans offer a full range of asset classes, most participants do not know how to properly use these asset classes to build the best portfolio. Patton Funds recommends a wide array of index funds. Each individual index fund provides access to all types of assets including stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. This allows participants to build portfolios based on their risk tolerance.

Retirement Plan focused

Unlike many advisors, we are Retirement Plan focused. This is not a side business for us and we’ve built an entire business around providing great solutions for companies and their participants when it comes to their retirement plan. We start with a smooth and seamless transition process where employees are happy with the impending change and feel their employer is looking out for their needs. We then follow up with our proactive customer service and ongoing employee education.

Investment Advice

Investment Advice is often lacking in retirement plans and participants are thirsting for investment advice they can easily understand and implement. We have extensive experience providing investment advice and can clearly demonstrate how our advice results in substantially higher expected returns for participants without increasing their expected amount of risk. Helping participants make better investment decisions to improve their expected returns can mean up to twice as much money for employees during their retirement.

Fiduciary Responsibility

If the DOL came knocking at your door, are you confident in your fiduciary compliance? In 2011 alone, the agency investigated over 3400 plans and found violations in roughly 75% of them, with an average fine per plan of approximately $450,000. The majority of these fines were for basic errors, oversights and omissions.

As a Registered Investment Advisor, Patton Funds serve as a fiduciary to your plan with the same responsibility to the plan and its participants as you and anyone else with decision making authority. Insurance agents and stock brokers are not required to serve as fiduciaries.

The Department of Labor defines fiduciary responsibility as the following:

  • Acting solely in the interest of the plan participants and their beneficiaries and with the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to them.
  • Carrying out their duties prudently.
  • Following the plan documents.
  • Diversifying plan investments.
  • Paying only reasonable plan expenses.

Customer Service

Patton Funds wants to serve as a partner and not just a vendor. The person in your company handling the 401k plan will have a single point of contact who will handle all your customer service needs. We provide a clear, step-by-step road map for the year so there is never any question of what needs to be done, when or how.

We have more than 30+ proactive steps designed to alleviate the burden from your employee, before, during and after the transition with ongoing support throughout the year. Below is a sample of some of the items we will take care of for you:

You will be able to login to our website and see a list of Best Practices with an up to date list of what has been completed and what will be completed and when.

  • Census Data Review performed semi-annually.
  • Education for participants without investments performed annually.
  • Email participant notices annually. We will send you an email with the completed plan notices attached as well as the letter/email needing to be sent to participants.
  • Fiduciary training performed semi-annually.
  • Plan review performed annually to catch any potential testing issues and ensure passage.
  • Terminated employee balances reviewed annually to distribute small balances.
  • Pre-enrollment meeting before transition.