Establishing your plan

Initial design

Our actuary will collect basic initial information from you or your advisors to get a sense of your goals and the type of retirement plans that best suit your needs. This information includes:

- Type of business entity (sole proprietor, LLC, partnership, S-Corp, etc.) and how its taxed (disregarded entity, partnership or corporation).

- Owner's age and expected compensation

- Desired contribution levels and flexibility

This will allow the actuary to prepare a complementary illustration of the expected contributions for the current year. In addition, you will be provided a long-term projection of the contribution and assets over the expected lifetime of your retirement program. We can then alter the design based on feedback and prepare alternatives until we've reached the optimal retirement program.

What is the deadline to start a plan? A retirement plan can be established for a tax year up until the tax filing deadline, with extension.

Service agreement

After finalizing the design, we will provide a Service Agreement (SA) that outlines the scope of the work Solo Pensions will perform and the associated fees. In general, our fees are standard for most owner-only plans, as shown here. There will be an initial set-up fee and a fixed ongoing annual administrative fee (billed in semi-annual installments).

After the SA is executed, we will prepare the official plan documents that govern your retirement plan(s).

Plan documents

Each qualified retirement plan must have official documents that contain specific plan provisions that govern the operation of the plan. Separate plan documents are required for each plan you maintain. We use plan documents that are pre-approved by the IRS, but can generally be modified to match the design of your plans. Since these documents are lengthy and contain technical language that is not always easily understood, the plans are also required to have a Summary Plan Descriptions (SPD). The SPD is an abbreviated version of the plan document that highlights the most important provisions.

Once the plan document is signed by the plan sponsor, the retirement plan is officially established.

Plan documents should be kept in your business records, but they are not required to be filed with any government agency unless they are specifically requested (for example, during an audit). We will also keep a copy of your executed document in our files. Plan documents must be restated every few years to take into account any legislative changes that have been made since the document was created or last restated.