Larry M

Well, let's see. I, too, am a solo practitioner - strictly fee for service - and I bill AFTER the work has been done...not in advance...for my regular clients. For new clients and those where it may be a one time job, I get a retainer agreement with a modest fee in advance. Most of the clients come by referral and I can use the referral source to pry money out of late payers. My experience has been the opposite of yours - clients pay promptly - most of the time - the exceptions are occasional, and, after hitting the wall a few times, I try to forget about them and go on with the good clients and the fun part of the job. In your situation, it would appear as if those clients who balk at the full fee in advance are the troublesome ones. You may have to decide if it is worth keeping them, at the reduced fee, or if you should start charging late fees for their work or if you should just resign, or raise the "advance retainer" for them. By the way, in my practice, and mainly because I don't have the stomach for going to court, we have not filed small claims court suits against them. [My time and energy are too important - and I'm chicken!] Other firms in this area (So. Cal.) do go to small claims court on a regular basis and collect. ... and sometimes keep the client.

Seymour is editor emeritus or some such at spencer's. and say "hello" to him from me.

1.make sure any document the new wife signs with respect to the plan is after they are married - a pre-nuptial agreement will not be binding 2.if the plan allows in service distributions, then let him make a trust to trust distribution of the current account to his own ira. Later, when the new wife signs the appropriate agreement, he can transfer teh money back into the 401(k) as a rollover account.

Spencers EBR (Chicago) has a lot of employee benefit information concerning larger companies. Check with Seymour La Rock (who is not quite as long in tooth as I )

does document accept rollovers from non-participants? if so, on what basis? [This message has been edited by Larry M (edited 09-03-98).]

unfortunately, it is dos-based and soomewhat inflexible in certain areas. ... but it does work in most cases

one of the ways we have encouraged matching among reluctant plan sponsors (and to get them to promote employee productivity) is to make it flexible by gearing the rate of match to certain company profit goals. If, for example, profits are less than $x, no match, if profits exceed $X, the match is 20%, >$z, match is 40%, and so on.

yes, we have been successful in this field for a long time - strictly fee for service - and, except for the miserable #@!&$(&* regulations, enjoying most of it. and there are a number of even more successful (financially) fee for service competitors in this area. referral sources - attys, accts, other clients - seem to prefer the lack of the potential conflict associated with those who sell products.

'tis my understanding these persons are currently participants and are now 100% vested.

[i am an actuary, not an attorney.] I can not comment on the legaality of the request as it may concern otherwise confidential information, BUT, my guess is Trigon is doing this (as do many other carriers) to most small groups in order to determine whether the group is covering only those persons who are entitled to be covered and is covering the correct percentage of those employees. You may be able to satisfy both the carrier's needs and your employees' confidentiality by deleting certain aspects of the payroll tax form.

One of the traps many small business firms fall into is looking at the initial charge for setting up a plan. The qualified retirement plan is intended to be in existence for a long time and should accumulate a large amount of assets. A prudent owner should spend some money up front, analyzing her/his options, including the manner in which benefits can be distributed at a later date, BEFORE making any decision based solely on the initial administrative costs. I say this in spite of the fact that a lot of our firm's income comes from helping small business owners clean up the messes in which they became enmeshed when they went to prototype or canned plans.