Q3 2025 Newsletter
October 7, 2025
At Primark Benefits, we’re committed to helping employers and advisors navigate the complexities of retirement plans with clarity and confidence. This quarter, we’ve published a range of new articles designed to inform, debunk misconceptions, and highlight opportunities—especially those that can still make a difference for this year. Next quarter, we'll be continuing our new How to "Break" a Retirement Plan Series and discussing other timely and important topics.
Here's What You Need to Know
Retirement plans can often feel like an alphabet soup of acronyms, mandates, and evolving state and federal laws. This series seeks to dispel common myths so employers can make better informed decisions. In previous articles, we’ve covered multiple myths at once. However, in Part IV, we’ll focus our efforts on one big misconception. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the idea that cookie-cutter, state-run programs such as CalSavers are “just as good” as custom-designed retirement plans, and the misunderstandings that persist about what state-run retirement programs do (and don’t) offer.
Welcome to our new series, How to “Break” a Retirement Plan, where we discuss what leads to a retirement plan being categorized as “broken,” ways to fix broken plans, and compliance tips for how to avoid a broken plan in the first place.
Updated December 31, 2025 Retirement plan catch-up contributions allow “older” workers—typically those age 50 and over— to set aside additional funds in their retirement accounts beyond standard annual limits. These extra contributions are an important planning tool for those nearing retirement who want to make up for earlier gaps in saving. Up
Retirement plans can be confusing. Between complex rules, industry jargon, and competing providers, it’s easy for employers to fall into patterns based on assumptions or half-truths. That’s why we created this series: to cut through the noise and help employers make confident, informed decisions. In this third installment, we’re addressing two persistent myths that often lead employers down the wrong path: the idea that payroll providers are the best place to get your plan, and the belief that robo-firms offer a hassle-free alternative. Spoiler: neither is as simple (nor as beneficial) as they seem.
Many companies, especially in the professional services sector—law firms, staffing agencies, engineering and consulting companies, healthcare groups, etc.—are often made up of various employee tiers. For example, in a given company, you might find partners or executives in one segment, professional staff in another, and support staff or hourly workers in yet another. While this tiered structure works well operationally, it can pose challenges relating to retirement plan compliance. In one recent example, the Primark Benefits team helped a client with over 3,500 employees overcome a complicated compliance issue by strategically changing the plan design, first expanding eligibility and then implementing automatic enrollment. Let’s take a look.
The Mega Backdoor Roth strategy has become one of the most talked-about retirement planning techniques in recent years. Financial publications regularly highlight its potential to help participants contribute far more than the standard deferral limits allow. However, while the strategy can be extremely valuable, an important limitation is often overlooked: due to nondiscrimination testing requirements, some employer-sponsored retirement plans may prevent certain participants from taking full advantage of it. Before assuming a Mega Backdoor Roth will work in your plan, it is important to understand how the strategy operates—and where it can run into trouble.
For years, many California employers viewed CalSavers as something they would “deal with later.” As the state gradually rolled out mandatory retirement program deadlines based on employer size, it was easy for smaller businesses to push the issue down the road. Now, those deadlines have passed, the employee headcount threshold is now ONE— and enforcement is becoming very real.
In Part I of this series , we explored how differences in retirement plan service models can influence risks related to compliance, oversight, and fiduciary areas. In Part II, the focus shifts to a more concrete question: How do these differences ultimately affect the total cost of maintaining a retirement plan over time? While administrative fees are often the most visible expense, they represent only a portion of a plan’s true cost. The broader financial impact—what is often referred to as total cost of ownership—includes the downstream effects of operational efficiency, compliance accuracy, and the ability to fully utilize the plan’s design.