I'm John Bette with my good friend Gene Marks, who writes for The Guardian, writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer, writes for the Hill, writes for Forbes, he writes in general about small businesses.

And we come to a recommendation from Gene's inquire column about planning for the future with pooled employer plans. Gene, this is a good idea. Is it happening?

Yeah, the use of pooled employer plans or PEPs have been increasing a lot over the past couple of

years. And they really should be. This was a new rule, a new part of the 2022 secure legislation, secure 2.0 legislation.

And if you're a person running a business right now, it's something you should really consider doing.

A pool's employer plan for your 401k, for your retirement plan.

What it does is right now, your 401K plan, most businesses, it's standalone, the money's

invested, the business owner is like the trustee and the fiduciary with responsibilities and

legal requirements for doing the filing and signing off on the tax returns. And if God forbid

there weren't the right investment choices or if it was set up incorrectly, the business owner could be responsible for that.

Well, with a pooled employer plan, you move your 401k into a pulled situation where you're

pulling your assets with hundreds or thousands of other employers.

And because of that, you still offer the investment options to your employees, but then the

administrator who runs the pool employer plan, they're responsible for all of the filings

and the requirements and the discrimination testing.

They're the ones that are liable, if anything, is wrong, not the employer anymore.

And because the administrator is doing this across the board for all of the companies in the plan,

the cost of the administration is shared by all of the companies. And the plan, and the bottom line is,

the costs are lower. So, you know, my advice to you is that if you've got a traditional 401k plan, if you want to

reduce your liabilities around it, if you want to give more flexibility to your employees,

and if you want to lower your costs, talk to your plan administrator, your benefits person,

and say, tell me more about pooled employer plans so I can move these assets into there

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