Welcome: Retirement Plan Administration Partners

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the UMPIP Plan Sponsor eNewsletter. This is your newsletter. It was developed to connect more closely with you, our plan sponsors. It supports our commitment, as your responsible choice, to provide all of the resources and support you need to administer the United Methodist Personal Investment Plan (UMPIP) for your participants.

This quarterly e-newsletter will keep your participant population interested, engaged and contributing to UMPIP. We aim to help you:

• Encourage your employees to save through UMPIP ("profit.ability.")
• Make your employees aware of valuable services that are available at no charge ("access.ability.")
• Enroll participants, remit contributions and assist with other day-to-day tasks ("manage.ability.")
• Avoid compliance issues that could cost you time and money ("account.ability.")
• Learn tips and tricks to simplify administration ("do.ability.")

The General Board is committed to its partnership with you in caring for the retirement needs of your lay employees. Together, we can help your employees make responsible retirement choices.

Help New Employees Focus on the Future

In the first days at a new job most people fill out a staggering number of forms—signing up for health plans, insurance, tax withholding, direct deposit of their paychecks and more. While making sure they get paid today is vital, making sure they receive benefit payments during retirement is also critically important. So how do you communicate the importance of contributing to UMPIP?

From the big picture to the practical, we will support your efforts to increase retirement plan enrollment and participation. Consider the following suggestions to increase the number of employees enrolling in and contributing to UMPIP:

• Provide the entire retirement plan enrollment kit. Don’t just give new employees the UMPIP enrollment forms. This enables prospective participants to review all of the benefits of UMPIP and learn why they should invest their retirement dollars with the General Board. We will send you complete enrollment kits upon request. Contact us online or call the General Board at 1-800-851-2201 to request as many kits as you need. Keep in mind that our forms and brochures are updated periodically, so make sure you have a current kit. If the kits you have are more than a few months old, you may need to request new ones.
• Explain the advantages—Sometimes the UMPIP enrollment kit is lost in the stack. Make a difference in the financial well-being of your new employee by highlighting the UMPIP materials and suggesting that he or she enroll in the plan and begin saving. The savings brochure illustrates the advantages of starting early through graphs and charts that show the value of investing over time. Don’t forget to tell your employees about the opportunity for matching contributions if you offer them. And be sure to let them know about the financial planning services available through Ernst & Young at no charge to participants.
• Follow up with new employees—One of the primary reasons employees wait until late in their careers to contribute to a retirement plan is that they simply never get around to enrolling. If new employees say they are considering UMPIP, follow up a week later to see what they’ve decided and to help them get started.
• Remind all employees—It’s a good idea to ask employees if they want to start or increase contributions to UMPIP at least once a year—for instance, during your formal performance review and salary increase process. Employees often find it easier to increase contributions when they receive a salary increase.
• Consider automatic enrollment—It’s been proven much more effective to automatically enroll all employees and give them the option to opt out. See if automatic enrollment is right for you.

Make Plan Administration Easier By Using Our Extranet

Has this ever happened to you? Your contribution remittance included an insert that provided important information about contribution remittance rules, but now you can’t seem to find it. No worries, that insert is available on the General Board extranet.

Our extranet has links to information on contributions, automatic enrollment and General Board contacts, plus the UMPIP summary plan description and plan document. You also can find useful plan administration information, including how to enroll participants, remit contributions and provide employee termination information to the General Board. Find all this and more in the UMPIP Administration Manual under “Plan Documents—Forms—Guides.”

Avoid Administrative Issues

The extranet enables plan sponsors to avoid some of the administrative headaches involved in overseeing UMPIP. For instance:

• Up-to-date forms and plan documents—Have you ever sent in a form for your participant, only to find out that an outdated version was used and that the form must be resubmitted? We encourage all plan sponsors to download forms directly from the extranet each time they are needed. This ensures that the correct version of the form is what you submit. (Note: Contact us to request full UMPIP enrollment kits, to be sent at no cost to you.)
• Legal and compliance notices—Are you unsure about the rules for remitting contributions? Avoid compliance issues and possible penalties by reading your Contribution Remittance Notice, which is available on the extranet under Retirement Plan Tools & Resources.
• Current General Board contact information—Have you mailed a form to the General Board that was returned as undeliverable? The General Board moved to its new Glenview headquarters in 2010. While phone numbers did not change, the new address—1901 Chestnut Avenue, Glenview, IL 60025—is available on the extranet and on each form. Make sure it is reflected on all correspondence. Fax numbers also are provided on most forms. (Note: Monthly contribution checks should still be mailed to the address on the remittance reminder and not the General Board.)

To access the extranet, go to https://extranet.gbophb.org and then enter the case-sensitive site username: extranet and generic password: gbop!123.

Keep Your Subscription Current

Are you moving out of your role and interested in sharing this newsletter with your replacement? Are there other individuals at your organization who you would like to receive this newsletter? Click here to sign up others who should receive this publication.

This newsletter, and everything we do, is dedicated to making it as easy as possible for employees to grow their assets while remaining true to our shared values and ethics. As your responsible choice, we will help your lay employees start saving for retirement with UMPIP and assist them throughout their careers.

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