Guideline for Advisors is a free program for financial advisors. With Guideline, advisors can provide their clients with a seamless 401(k), plus get the tools to design, monitor and manage their clients’ plans while incorporating their own advisory fee.

Pursuant to separate agreement(s) between you and your clients, Guideline can process and pay advisory fees owed by your clients to you.. Guideline will pay the advisory fee out of the Plan participants’ accounts based on assets under management. The advisory fee will be prorated daily based on each active participant’s account balance and deducted directly from each active participant’s account quarterly and paid to the advisor in arrears. If you are interested in having Guideline process your advisory fee, you will have to provide the RIA W9 and ACH Bank Account for the RIA when you set up your Guideline Dashboard.

The monthly fee is paid by your client directly to Guideline.

Yes, you can. With your advisor dashboard, you can see all of your clients plans—completed and in progress. For new plans, you can help design the plan, track progress, and streamline the approval process to get it up quickly.

Yes, you will be introduced to your dedicated Relationship Manager after you join Guideline for Advisors and connect to your free advisors dashboard.

Once a plan is set up, we take care of nearly everything including recordkeeping, investment management, government filings, and more. We integrate with 18 different payroll providers and charge low monthly fees with no transaction fees.

All Guideline plans include the fundamental services and features needed for a great benefit. In addition, clients can add profit sharing, vesting schedules, matching options, and more. Every Guideline plan features automatic enrollment, and we do not currently support an hours-of-service (i.e. part-time employee) eligibility restriction.

Auto enrollment is a required feature for all Guideline 401(k) plans. Auto enrollment can help improve IRS nondiscrimination testing results, increase employees’ retirement readiness, and much more. Learn more about auto enrollment

With Guideline, participants can create a custom portfolio from our fund menu or choose one of 6 different managed investment portfolios. Each portfolio is diversified with funds from low-cost providers giving them an average expense ratio under 0.07%. When combined with a 0.08% account fee (alternative pricing is available for plans with 50 or more eligible employees at the time of signup), the estimated total cost of an active participant investing in one of Guideline’s managed portfolios can be under 0.15%.—That’s about 10x less than the industry average.

We do not at this time. Target date funds tend to have higher expense ratios for participants. We lower these fees by building the portfolios ourselves, and still give participants the flexibility to choose investments that serve a shorter or longer term investment strategy. Read more here