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It's an average Tuesday for your practice when you receive a call from a client. They've just finished lunch with a friend who owns a small business. The friend mentioned hearing a lot about Cash Balance plans, so the client contacted you to learn more about the pros and cons of a Cash Balance plan compared to a 401(k) for their own business.
You’re familiar with the plan, though not its exact details, so you turn to ChatGPT after the call to provide a timely response. But after your first few prompts, you begin to notice inconsistent and inaccurate answers. Opening another tab on your browser, you turn to Google as an alternative, but searching for articles on Cash Balance also delivers conflicting information, leaving you with more questions than answers.
Whether you’ve experienced this story or something similar, the challenge remains the same. We’re able to produce answers faster than ever, but complex topics often require context-specific answers that general resources (the assets AI and LLMs tools draw from) don’t provide.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just pick up the phone and receive an answer? With October Three’s Retirement Learning Center, this is our exact approach. With a quick call, you gain access to highly experienced consultants who can offer sales support, technical ERISA help, and retirement plan guidance over the phone.
You get the insights you need, applied to your situation. Below are a few of the common roadblocks that we solve for which advisors expanding services or answering client inquiries might experience.
Opinion pieces and inaccurate resources can create additional confusion and elongate the time it takes to get an accurate answer. Like financial advice, it is best to contact an expert who can help clear the path and deliver a reliable answer to your question.
Solution: With our Retirement Learning Center, you receive on-demand access to dedicated support instantly through the retirement consulting Resource Desk, where a seasoned consultant can provide comprehensive answers to all your inquiries.
In some cases, you may locate an answer to your initial question, but it's challenging to apply to a specific client or scenario.
Solution: For situations like these, we’ve developed Plan Snapshots, which provide crucial insights into contributions, distributions, and the vesting of your clients’ retirement plans from official documents. Our ERISA experts then provide personalized consultation to deepen your understanding of the plan and make informed decisions to support your clients.
Advisors already have access to information on the topics we cover, whether through AI or other resources. These tools can tell you what the rule is, but contextualizing the rule requires more than a definition. It requires an understanding of how the rule applies to your specific scenario.
Solution: Our ERISA consultants regularly receive calls from financial advisors on a broad array of technical topics related to IRAs, qualified retirement plans, and other types of retirement savings and income plans. We then take the most relevant topics from these conversations and highlight them in our “Case of the week” to provide real-life examples of how to navigate specific scenarios that advisor businesses are often involved in.
Of course, far more is needed beyond accurate information to achieve your AUM goals. True strategic practice growth requires much more, which is why the Retirement Learning Center also includes tools and resources to:
Optimize Your Practice: Our consultants help financial professionals pinpoint inefficiencies and untapped opportunities within your practice, paving the way for more effective business models.
Locate New Prospects: Get access to O3 Edge, a powerful and intuitive retirement plan prospecting tool designed to amplify your practice’s competitive advantage.
Expand Service Offerings: As a nationally recognized leader in the Cash Balance plan space, we design solutions that prioritize participants’ and employers’ goals. We’ll work with you to develop a custom program to achieve your AUM goals.
Click here to learn more about how partnering with October Three can help you incorporate Cash Balance plans into your services.