Customer Reviews

Smart Choices: Selecting and Administering a Safe (k) Plan

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"Smart Choices: Selecting and Administering a Safe 401(K) Plan" is one of the best books on the market today about 401(K) plans. It focuses extensively on the viewpoint of the company that wants to establish a 401(K) plan. How do you establish the plan? What are the fiduciary responsibilities of the plan administrator? What are the consequences of various choices? How should you compare plans to determine the one that best fits your needs? I've read other books on 401(K) plans and they generally seem to focus on just a few of the subjects treated in this book. Many focus on selecting a good plan, but often don't provide the information on how to determine an appropriate ratio of growth, income, risk and other factors. Others focus on the design and implementation of the plan without providing any guidance on how to benchmark a good plan. This book, on the other hand, is very comprehensive and yet is written in a manner that the average reader can understand and apply the concepts. If you are responsible for selecting a company plan, selecting the funds to be in the plan, design of the plan, or any other aspect of a 401(K) plan then you owe it to yourself to read this book. "Smart Choices" is a complete reference to understanding a 401(K) plan from overall concepts to the details of whether it is performing as it should be.

I have worked on retirement plans for over 8 years and I am currently a retirement plan consultant.

This is by far the best book that I have read in regards to
401(k)s. It is written extremely well and really teaches one a lot about retirement plans. I use this book as a refresher for myself. The author is very intelligent and has extensive insight on 401(k) plans. It is also written in a very easy to understand manner.

If you are a plan sponsor, retirement broker/consultant or somehow involved in retirement plans, I strongly encourage you to read this book. In fact, I have sent this book to all my clients.

Being the administrator of a company's retirement plan is a task very few people are intially equipped to handle. The administrators of most plans come either from the world of finance or human resources, which in either case provides only a portion of the skills necessary to administer a plan. This book provides an excellent summary of the responisibilites and liabilites of a plan administrator. It makes you fully aware of the extremely high standard imposed by federal law. Most importantly, it walks a person through each of the moving parts of a plan and explains in detail the administrative processes involved in each component.

I work as a consultant for several plan sponsors. I can not think of a better basic reference for those new to the responsibilites of retirement plan administration.

This is a very good book. It provides insights into the 401(k) world I had never thought of. This book is highly recommended.

As a 401(k) trustee, I found this book to be extremely useful, easy to read, full of exactly what I needed and was looking for. Even many of the participants in our plan have read it - and gained answers to the questions they always ask me. My advice to all retirement plan trustees...buy your participants this book and ask them to read it! My compliments to Mr. Gnabasik!

It was a good book with a lot of common sense information. Also, according to this author the 401k participant needs to do quite a bit of research of his investment options on the regular basis. However, all this approaches are already automated and believe it or not there are independent companies out there that will do all this research for you on the regular basis. For example there is a company called StockRing.com that monitors your 401(k) account and tells you if you need to add some new fund there or sell some of you lagging funds. They do a lot of research for you so you can just focus your attention on 1 or 2 "bad" apples in your 401k portfolio and replace them with better choices offered by your 401k administrator.