Product Guides

Tax Coordination for Betterment 401(k) Learn how 401(k) participants can benefit from Betterment's automated tax-coordinated strategy which can help employees reach their savings goal faster. For Betterment for Business 401(k) plan participants who also have a personal account with Betterment, using Tax Coordination for their Retirement goal can help increase their after-tax returns. At Betterment, we’re continually improving our investment advice, always with the goal of maximizing our customers’ take-home returns. Key to that pursuit is minimizing the amount lost to taxes. We’ve taken a huge step forward with a powerful service that could increase your employees’ after-tax returns, so they can have more money for retirement. Betterment’s Tax Coordination service is our very own, fully automated version of an investment strategy known as asset location. Automated asset location is the latest advancement in tax-smart investing. Introducing Betterment’s Tax Coordination feature for 401(k) plans Asset location is widely regarded as the closest thing there is to a “free lunch” in the wealth management industry. If your employees are saving in more than one type of account, it is a way to increase their after-tax returns without taking on additional risk. Millions of Americans wind up saving for retirement in some combination of three account types: 1. Taxable, 2. Tax-deferred (Traditional 401(k) or IRA), and 3. Tax-exempt (Roth 401(k) or IRA). Each type of account has different tax treatment, and these rules make certain investments a better fit for one account type over another. Choosing wisely can significantly improve the after-tax value of their savings when more than one account is in the mix. However, intelligently applying this strategy to a globally diversified portfolio is complex. A team of Betterment quantitative analysts, tax experts, software engineers, designers, and product managers worked for over a year building this powerful service. We are proud to offer Tax Coordination, the first automated asset location service, available to all investors. Next, let’s look at how asset location, the strategy behind TCP, adds value. How Does Tax Coordination Work? What is the idea behind asset location? To simplify somewhat: Some assets in a portfolio (bonds) grow by paying dividends. These are taxed annually, and at a high rate, which hurts the take-home return. Other assets (stocks) mostly grow by increasing in value. This growth is called capital gains and is taxed at a lower rate. Plus, it only gets taxed when you need to make a withdrawal—possibly decades later—and deferring tax is good for the return. Returns in 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) don’t get taxed annually, so they shelter growth from tax better than a taxable account. We would rather have the assets that lose more to tax in these retirement accounts. In the taxable account, we prefer to have the assets that don’t get taxed as much.2 When investing in more than one account, many people select the same portfolio in each one. This is easy to do, and when you add everything up, you get the same portfolio, only bigger. Here’s what an asset allocation with 70% stocks and 30% bonds looks like, held separately in three accounts. The circles represent various asset classes, and the bar represents the allocation for all the accounts combined. Portfolio Managed Separately in Each Account But as long as all the accounts add up to the portfolio we want, each individual account on its own does not have to have that portfolio. Asset location takes advantage of this. Each asset can go in the account where it makes the most sense, from a tax perspective. As long as we still have the same portfolio when we add up the accounts, we can increase after-tax return, without taking on more risk. The concept of asset location is not new. Advisors and sophisticated do-it-yourself investors have been implementing some version of this strategy for years. But squeezing it for maximum benefit is very mathematically complex. It means making necessary adjustments along the way, especially after making deposits to any of the accounts. For an optimal asset location strategy, an automated approach works best. Our software handles all of the complexity in a way that a manual approach just can’t match. We are the first automated investment service to offer this service to all of our customers. Who Can Benefit? To benefit from from Tax Coordination, the participant must have a balance in at least two of the following three types of Betterment accounts: Taxable account: If you can save more money for the long-term after making your 401(k) contributions, that money can be invested in a standard taxable account. Tax-deferred account: Betterment for Business traditional 401(k) or a traditional IRA. Investments grow with all taxes deferred until liquidation and then taxed at the ordinary income tax rate. Tax-exempt account: Betterment for Business Roth 401(k) or a Roth IRA. Investment income is never taxed—withdrawals are tax-free. Higher After-Tax Returns Betterment’s research and rigorous testing demonstrate that accounts managed by Tax Coordination are expected to yield meaningfully higher after-tax returns than uncoordinated accounts. Our white paper presents results for various account combinations. Here, we excerpt the additional “tax alpha” for one generalized case—an identical starting balance of $50,000 in each of three account types, a 30-year horizon, a federal tax rate of 28%, and a state tax rate of 9.3% (CA) both during the period and during liquidation. Equal Starting Balance in Three Accounts: Taxable, Traditional IRA, and Roth IRA Asset Allocation Additional Tax Alpha with TCP (Annualized) 50% Stocks 0.82% 70% Stocks 0.48% 90% Stocks 0.27% Source: TCP White Paper. Help Your Employees Get Started with Tax Coordination Ready to help your employees take advantage of the benefits of Tax Coordination? Direct them to this introductory article on Tax Coordination to get started. Learn more about how Betterment’s Tax Coordination feature can help your employees have more spending money in retirement. All return examples and return figures mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only. For much more on our TCP research, including additional considerations on the suitability of TCP to your circumstances, please see our white paper. For more information on our estimates and Tax Coordination generally, see full disclosure.

Betterment’s 401(k) Investment Approach Helping employees make better decisions and providing choice to those who want it. Dan Egan, Betterment’s VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains why Betterment’s investment approach is effective for all 401(k) participants  Investment Approach Q&A Betterment’s 401(k) investment approach differs from that of traditional providers, but can you give us a little history about the 401(k) environment pre-Betterment? If I go back to the first job where I had a 401k, probably about 20 years ago, there was a lineup of funds, and it was up to me as a 401(k) participant  to figure out which funds to pick and in what ratios, how much to save and so on. The research coming from that period showed that people often ended up in an analysis paralysis state, where there was so much choice and so many things to consider. It was very difficult for people to know whether they were investing at the appropriate risk level, how much they were paying and so on. Many people were so overloaded that they decided to forego saving for retirement than risk making a “bad” decision. But as the industry matured, and everyone realized that more choice does not necessarily lead to better decision-making, the Pension Protection Act (PPA) was passed in 2006. The idea here was not to eliminate choice, but to encourage good defaults that would encourage 401k plan participation. How exactly did the PPA encourage more 401(k) participation? Well for one thing, it allowed for safe harbor investments in the form of QDIAs, or qualified default investment alternatives. The most popular QDIAs were target date funds, which are linked to an individual’s age so if you're 40, it’s assumed that you will be investing for the next 25 years and retiring at 65. Target dates have a glidepath so that the stock allocation becomes more conservative over time, so the employee doesn't have to do anything like managing a portfolio or rebalancing. After the PPA, it became much more common for employees to be auto-enrolled using a target date fund or something like it, and all of sudden, they no longer had to make choices. People were no longer worried about picking and choosing from a whole bunch of individual funds or even individual stocks. And the plan designs promoted by the PPA really worked: plan participation rates that had been languishing saw rates increase to 80 or 90% after implementing auto-enrollment. By the time Betterment started its 401(k) platform, the changes brought about by the PPA were already well established. So talk a little bit now about how Betterment's 401k investment approach differs from that of traditional 401(k) providers. Betterment takes and builds upon a lot of the ideas in a target date fund and goes further. Number one, we are not a fund manufacturer. We are independent from fund companies. So part of our job is to be a real investment advisor and financial advisor, and do the due diligence on all of the funds that are available out there. If you're picking from amongst eight large-cap US stock funds, there's not a lot of variation in what their returns are going to look like and you can generally predict performance versus a benchmark knowing the fund costs. So part of our job is to actually do the work on the behalf of participants, to narrow down the field of funds towards just the ones that stand out within a given asset class and that are cost-effective. We then ask more specific questions including not just how old someone is, but also more personalized questions like when someone plans on retiring. Some people want to retire as early as possible. That might be 55, 57, 62, which is when you can start taking social security. Other people want to keep working as late as possible, which is 70 or 72. Those are extremely different retirement plans that should have different portfolios based upon those hugely different time horizons. So unlike a target date fund, which says, this is your age and you're done, Betterment is going to ask about your age, but also things like, when do you want to retire? Putting together a holistic retirement plan, it might involve your spouse or significant others, retirement assets, and even doing tax optimization across the account types that you have available to you. And how does that help the employee? A lot of it is about making it easy for consumers to make better decisions, not imposing a bunch of choices on them. You have to remember, the vast majority of people are not commonly and frequently thinking about stocks and investing. They don't want to have to look up prospectuses and put together a risk managed portfolio. So Betterment does the work for them to make it very easy for them to understand how to get to where they want to be. I want to be clear that that's not necessarily about removing choice, it's about making it easy to get to a solution quickly. It’s also about minimizing the number of unnecessary choices for most people while maintaining choice for people who want it. At Betterment, 401(k) investors can still modify your risk level. You can say, "Yeah, maybe it makes sense for me to be at 90% stocks, but I'm not comfortable with it. I want to be at 30% stocks." Or they can modify their allocations using our flexible portfolio strategy, so that they can come in and say, "Actually I don't like international as much." So it's not about removing choice. And we let them see the consequences of that in terms of risk and return. So employees in Betterment 401(k)s have choice, but how do you respond to people who might already have a 401k or are already invested in funds outside of their 401k, and have a favorite fund that they feel is an absolute must have? I’m not necessarily against people who have put time and effort into researching something and wanting to invest in it. But I think it is focusing on the wrong thing. When you look at long-run research statistics on funds, the predictability of fund success within a category is very low. A fund that outperformed last quarter is very unlikely to continue to outperform this quarter. So I would say that the fund is very rarely the most important aspect of the 401(k) plan or decision. And I’d guess most participants don't have a favorite fund. Again, going back to research we've looked at across a wide array of companies, most people are looking to minimize how much burden is imposed upon them in making decisions about what they should do for their retirement. There is generally a very small minority who have very strong views about what the right investments are. And that trade-off shows up in that we will generally look at low-cost funds, well-diversified funds. We do offer a range of choice in terms of portfolio strategy: do you want a factor-tilted portfolio or a socially-responsible portfolio or an income portfolio? Without necessarily saying that you're responsible for doing the fund due diligence yourself. It is true that we offer a trade-off: we're not the wild west where you can go out and get anything you want. And that is because that level of discretion is just very, very rarely used by plan participants. There's a lot of potential to do the wrong thing when somebody has a completely open access plan. Not to mention, all plan fiduciaries have an obligation to act in the best interests of their plan participants as a whole. So they have to evaluate what makes the most sense for the majority of plan participants, not a small, vocal minority. Somewhat related, what is your response to people who argue that Betterment’s all-ETF fund line-up is too limited? A 401(k) plan made up exclusively of ETFs is no less limiting than a 401(k) plan made up exclusively of mutual funds. Because mutual funds have been around much longer, it’s true that their universe is larger, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that 8,000+ ETFs is not enough to choose from. ETFs represent an advancement over mutual funds because they are cost-effective, highly flexible, and technologically sophisticated. They are critical to Betterment’s investment approach and a better alternative for 401(k) plans, in large part because mutual funds have complex fee structures and are typically more expensive than ETFs which have transparent and low costs. So why do so many plans still use mutual funds? We believe it’s not despite these issues but because of them, since fees embedded in mutual fund expense ratios are often used to offset the costs of 401(k) vendors servicing the plan. In addition, many legacy recordkeeping systems do not have the technology to handle ETF intraday trading and must restrict their clients to using funds that are only valued at the end of the day. Betterment’s 401(k) plan comes with a 0.25% investment advisory fee. What do employers and employees get for that? I think there's actually two levels to this. The first is “does this actually cost me more?” It’s definitely more transparent in its cost, but most 401k plans charge more via higher fund fees. The fund fees may even include embedded fees that go to pay for other plan services. In these more traditional models, the fees are hidden from you, the consumer. But trust me: everybody is getting paid. It's just a matter of whether or not you're aware how much and who you're paying. That also sets up the very important second aspect which is: what is this investment manager responsible for and what are they incentivized to do well? What does Betterment do for 25 basis points? Well, number one, that's how we make sure that we're independent from the fund companies; we don’t get paid by them. Every quarter, we go out and we look at all of the funds that are available in the market. We sort through them, independent of who provides them, looking at cost, liquidity, tax burdens etc. And if we find a better fund, because we take no money from fund companies, we're going to move to that better fund. So one thing that you're paying for is, in effect, not only ongoing due diligence and checking, but you're paying for independence, which means that you get the best raw materials inside of your portfolio. The other thing you get is that we want to earn that 25 basis points by serving clients better. So we want to invest in things like personalized retirement portfolios (available to every 401(k) participant) where we are actually able to give better retirement advice that takes into account you, your partner, all the various kinds of retirement accounts you have: Roth, IRA, taxable, trust, maybe even pensions or other income sources. Or asset location, for example, which works across tax-advantaged retirement accounts so that employees can keep more of their money and enjoy higher levels of spending in retirement. So what you get from paying somebody to do a good job, is you get them really incentivized to take care of their customers. Betterment takes care of its customers. We are motivated to do a good job and to retain all of our customers.

Welcome to Betterment 401(k)! Find out how to make the most of your plan and get your employees to start saving for their future. We’re excited that you have chosen to help your employees prioritize your financial wellness with us, starting with your 401(k) plan. Betterment’s easy-to-use platform is designed to help you feel confident in administering your plan. Let’s get started. TABLE OF CONTENTS Overview Administration and compliance Investments Employee experience Overseeing your plan (including our 401(k) glossary) Betterment contact information Plan Sponsor dashboard overview Special note for first-time plans Adding new participants (individually and in bulk) Adding multiple employees at once Updating employee information Remitting contributions to Betterment Updating employee contribution (deferral) rate changes Distribution and loan requests Approving distributions Approving loans Reports Important documents Overview By sponsoring a 401(k) plan, you take on important fiduciary responsibilities for the plan, including acting in the best interests of plan participants at all times, following the plan document as written, paying only reasonable fees, depositing contributions in a timely manner and meeting all reporting and disclosure requirements. While you can never fully transfer or eliminate all fiduciary responsibility, Betterment will help with many of these duties. In fact, at no extra cost to you or your employees, Betterment assumes certain fiduciary functions to reduce your liability, serving as both a 3(16) administrative fiduciary and a 3(38) investment fiduciary. Let’s review key areas of your plan and the support that Betterment provides. As always, we provide support via phone and email to both you and your employees. Administration and compliance Our innovative technology and dedicated support make it easy for you to keep your plan running smoothly and remain fully compliant at all times. As your 3(16) fiduciary, we perform a wide range of administrative duties including preparing and filing your Form 5500 As your 3(38) investment manager with full discretion, we will select and monitor plan investments We provide on-going consultative support with respect to plan design, compliance testing and annual audits Investments Betterment uses low-cost ETFs to create globally diversified portfolios across 12 asset classes that are designed to help maximize returns for each level of risk. Employees will be defaulted into a portfolio that corresponds to their years to retirement, but they choose alternative investment strategies if they wish: Flexible Portfolio -- using funds in Betterment Core Portfolio Strategy, employees can customize their portfolio by adjusting fund weights Socially Responsible Portfolio -- for socially-conscious employees who want their investments to reflect their personal values Goldman Sachs Smart Beta Portfolio -- for employees who are willing to take on additional risks in the pursuit of higher returns BlackRock Target Income Portfolio -- for retirees (or employees with non-retirement goals), this approach seeks to provide a steady stream of cash income In addition, our investment approach incorporates sophisticated strategies such as automatic rebalancing, tax coordination, and automatic allocation adjustments as someone gets older. And with personalized advice and an integrated platform, employees can earn better returns at various levels of risk. Employee experience Betterment’s clean design and straightforward tools help your employees get more out of their retirement plan. Our goals-based approach helps employees see all of their financial goals in one place. We help employees establish a Personal Retirement Plan based on their unique situation and preferences. Every time they log in, they can easily see whether they are off-track and take immediate corrective action. We make it easy for employees to sync other accounts so that our advice will propose a total solution that takes everything into consideration. Employees have access to numerous educational resources including: Comprehensive guide to your Betterment 401(k)  Webinars and videos Website resources Articles FAQs Tools and calculators In addition, feel free to share the following to promote plan engagement and in response to specific employee questions: One-pagers Why save with a 401(k)? Small increases can make a big difference Employee guides 401(k) Rollovers  What to do with your 401(k) account when you leave the company Overseeing your plan In addition to the fiduciary responsibilities mentioned above, plan oversight includes making sure you and those responsible for the plan’s operations are familiar with the plan document. Depending on the size of your organization, it may be appropriate to establish a 401(k) committee that meets periodically to review the plan. Decisions should be fully vetted and documented. On an on-going basis, you and members of your team will also be responsible for: Adding newly eligible employees to the plan Ensuring that Betterment has current and accurate employee information Review and approval of distributions (and loans, if offered by the plan) Sending contributions and contribution rate changes to Betterment (non-integrated plans only Monitoring any vendors you hire You will find more details in the day-to-day operations section below, including the differences between integrated and non-integrated plans. 401(k) glossary of terms Betterment contact information: For employers For employees Monday - Friday 9:00am - 6:00pm EST 1-855-906-5280 plansupport@bettermentforbusiness.com Monday - Friday 9:00am - 6:00pm EST 1-855-906-5281 support@betterment.com Plan sponsor dashboard overview The plan sponsor dashboard is the home for your 401(k) plan, where you can perform all administrative functions and find all plan information. To get started, visit the plan sponsor login page, which is not to be confused with the login page to your personal Betterment account. (Although you may have the same login credentials for both pages, they are two different websites with different login specifications.) The plan sponsor dashboard allows for three levels of access: Administrator access provides full access to the dashboard and allows all actions to be performed. Staff access provides the same access as an administrator but does not allow plan managers to be added or deleted. View only access does not allow items on the dashboard to be edited. In order to gain access to the plan sponsor dashboard, you must either be invited by a member of your Betterment Plan Support Team or a current plan manager who has Administrator access (via Settings>Manage access). The plan sponsor dashboard contains several tabs that you should familiarize yourself with.  We will be referencing these tabs throughout this document. Home -- shows you high-level statistics and summary information about your plan, along with notifications that may require your attention and and recent plan activity Employees -- lists all active and inactive employees in your plan, along with information that requires your review Payroll -- location to upload payroll. Also includes notifications and past payroll activity Plan -- in addition to plan statistics, this is where you will go to approve loan and distribution requests. You will also be able to view recent activity as well as upcoming compliance deadlines Resources - source for reports, documents and education information to support you in your role as plan administrator. Under the Documents tab, you will find templates you may need for various uploads; and under the Support tab, you will find FAQs. Special note for first-time plans As a new plan, there are two small but important items to set up your 401(k) plan correctly and avoid complications down the road: Ensure payroll system and Betterment match Before your payroll launch date, make sure that your payroll system is set up to correctly withhold employee contributions. Your Betterment 401(k) offers Traditional and Roth contributions. Typically, these are two separate deduction codes within payroll systems. Make sure that your employee contribution elections from Betterment match your payroll system. You will receive notifications in your plan sponsor dashboard of changes and you can also run a custom report. Definition of compensation Our plan documents usually define compensation as all earned income (think Box 5 of the W2). That means all income reported on the W2 must be included in the calculation of deductions within the payroll system. You want to ensure that your payroll system includes commission and bonus checks as compensation for purposes of 401(k) deductions. Loan Code If your plan offers loans, you will need to set up a loan deduction code in your payroll system so that the loan repayment amount will be deducted from the participant’s paycheck on the first repayment date. Adding new participants (individually and in bulk) If your plan is integrated with one of our preferred payroll providers, new participants are added automatically when created in the payroll system, so this operation does not apply to you. When an employee becomes eligible for the plan, they must be added to the Betterment system. You can add each employee individually through the plan sponsor dashboard using these steps (our bulk upload process is outlined further down): To add a new participant, login to the plan sponsor dashboard. Once in the dashboard, click on the Employees tab, then click on the blue Add Employee button Follow the prompts on each page to successfully add a new employee. You will receive an error message if any data is incomplete or appears incorrect. Uploading multiple employees at once To make it easier and save time, you may want to take advantage of our bulk employee upload process which is detailed in this in-depth tutorial. We have built in a 15-minute buffer between the time you submit employee information to us and the time an employee sees a Betterment 401(k) welcome email. This allows you to correct any mistakes that you might realize right after you hit submit! Clients often ask: What are some common errors when adding a new employee? Answer: Two common errors we see during the “add a new employee” process include: Mismatched information to existing Betterment customer record If someone has previously had a Betterment account before joining your organization, all of the personal information must match the information we have on file. Differences may occur if, for example, the employee may have had a different last name when they signed up for Betterment years ago or their current profile includes a typo. The error “Last name matches existing user” indicates that the employee’s Betterment profile has a different last name. Failed ID check As part of SEC regulations and the US Patriot Act, Betterment must attempt to verify the identity of all our clients. Our system automatically checks new employee information you enter against a database of publicly-available information. Participants who fail the ID check will be alerted via email and should follow the prompts in the email to resolve the issue. It is not uncommon for newly married, recently-relocated or younger participants to fail the ID checks, which is not a cause for concern. Updating employee information It is important that all employee information be kept current on the Betterment system. If your plan is integrated with one of our preferred payroll providers, please make sure all demographic data is correct in your payroll system, as that is the main source of truth and all demographic data on the Betterment system will be overwritten when the next sync with your plan occurs. For plans that do not have payroll integration: Participants can update every piece of personal information themselves within their profile under Settings. Plan administrators can update most employee information, with the exception of the email address linked to a participant account which serves as a login ID. If an email address was changed without an employee’s knowledge, they will be locked out of their account. Please contact the Betterment Plan Support Team for help in changing an email address or direct the employee to make the change themselves. Remitting contributions to Betterment If your plan is integrated with one of our preferred payroll partners, the process to remit contributions to your 401(k) plan couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is ensure the contribution data is accurate and run your payroll as you normally would! Once you run your payroll in your system: the contribution data will be automatically sent to Betterment for processing Betterment will send an ACH request to your bank account on file Upon receipt, Betterment will allocate the funds to the proper accounts and execute any necessary trades. For plans without integrated payroll, data must be uploaded via the Payroll Upload template accessible via the Payroll Upload page of the Plan Sponsor Dashboard. The pre-formatted template includes all of your employees who have an account in your 401(k) plan and can be populated with a report available on most payroll systems. Information required: compensation for the pay period hours worked for the pay period contribution amounts any applicable employer match amounts any applicable loan repayment amounts Once you have the file ready for upload: Login to the Plan Sponsor Dashboard and navigate to the Payroll Upload Page Click Upload Payroll NOTE: You will always get an email confirmation for the payroll upload. If you do not receive that email, your payroll submission was not completed. Upon receipt, Betterment will check for any issues and will send you an email with a summary of the contribution file, along with the amount to be withdrawn from your organization’s bank account. Once you approve the submission, we will send an ACH request to your bank account on file and upon receipt, allocate the funds to the proper accounts and execute any necessary trades. Updating employee contribution (deferral) rate changes If your plan is integrated with one of our preferred payroll providers, Betterment pushes all contribution rate changes directly to your payroll provider, meaning there is nothing for you to do! For plans that do not have payroll integration, some work is needed to make sure contribution rates are correctly passed to Betterment as recordkeeper and to ensure a clean audit trail. There are three ways for you to see contribution rate changes made by employees: View all recent changes by logging into the plan sponsor dashboard and clicking on Payroll>Notifications. View the Weekly Deferral Rate Change email sent by Betterment, which links directly to the reports found on the dashboard. Run a Current Deferral Rate report by logging into the plan sponsor dashboard and  navigating to Documents>Reports>Run a Report>Current Deferral Rates. Regardless of which method you use, if any employees have made contribution rate changes, you will need to reflect those changes in your payroll system before you run your next payroll. Clients often ask: Are there regulatory requirements around how quickly I need to make contribution rate changes once I am alerted? Answer: The requirement is “as soon as administratively feasible,” which usually means within 1 to 2 pay periods. It’s very possible for you to miss a contribution rate change that an employee makes shortly before you run payroll. As long as you update your payroll system next time, you are fine. Distribution and loan requests As plan administrator, you are responsible for approving all loans and distributions since assets are leaving the plan. Approving distributions When a participant seeks a distribution online, our system will dynamically present them with available options at that moment in time (based on plan rules and the individual eligibility), with brief explanations regarding the pros and cons of taking a distribution. Once the participant submits a request, you will be alerted via email that a distribution request is pending. You can view any pending distribution request in the dashboard under Plan>Distribution Requests. We suggest you check the distribution request for: Common or obvious spelling mistakes Accuracy of vesting Accuracy of matching contribution amounts if your plan provides a match Please note: Mistakes are easier to fix before the request is approved. Approving loans For the participant, the online loan request flow works similarly as for distributions. Once you receive an email that a loan request is pending, you will need to do the following: Approve the loan Add the loan repayment to your payroll system (regardless of whether your payroll is integrated). Reports You can find a variety of reports within the Plan Sponsor Dashboard to help you analyze, manage, monitor, and evaluate your plan. To run a report, simply go to Resources>Reports> Run a Report. Important documents Many of the important documents related to your plan can be found within Resources>Documents, including participant notices and disclosures (participants may also find this information within their account via disclosures. These disclosures can be found in the plan sponsor dashboard via Documents>401(k) Documents.

How Betterment’s investment approach helps 401(k) investors Dan Egan, Betterment’s VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, answers the most common investment questions asked from 401(k) plan sponsors. Questions and answers with Dan How should plan sponsors think about the investment funds within a 401(k)? People may be surprised to hear this, but aside from avoiding high-cost funds, the specific funds in a 401(k) are probably the least important part of a 401(k) plan. If you’re not saving, using the right account types, or looking at things holistically (for instance how you’re going to claim social security), then the returns won’t be very powerful.  The savings base those returns are built on needs to be adequately established. So how do you respond when someone asks “how do your funds compare to the market?” Betterment tries to match, not under- or out-perform the market. Generally, when we’re talking about the market for a given asset class we’re talking about an index, which is not something you can invest in directly. So we invest in funds that seek to track the market index, and we do it for as little cost as possible. Betterment likely won't be the worst or best performer because we don’t make concentrated gambles. We don’t take bets on specific companies, sectors or strategies. However, we do know that how much you pay for a fund - its expense ratio - is the best predictor of its future success. The less you pay, the better your outcome compared to peers. People may be surprised to hear that Betterment isn’t trying to beat the market. Can you explain why that is? First, the most important job of a financial advisor is helping people make the most of their money, especially in crafting a successful retirement plan. For 401(k) plans, it’s all about helping individuals achieve their retirement saving goals. Are they saving the right amount? Are they using the right accounts? Do they have a plan that aligns with how they’re actually going to spend money in retirement? We guide investors toward those levers over which they have control and that have a high degree of certainty. Second, the odds of anyone consistently beating the market is quite low. When you try to pick funds to beat the market, in any given period your fund may be very much above or below the market. Consider that even Warren Buffet has underperformed the market by up to 67% over a two-year period.  There’s very little predictability about which fund is going to be above market in the future. On the other hand, there’s actually very good predictability about who’s going to be below average—because of costs. Costs are just a deadweight headwind that you pay for no matter how well or poorly the fund does. So given the low expected benefit of trying to pick winning funds, and the higher downside of high-cost funds, Betterment focuses on keeping costs low. How does this “independence” manifest itself? We’re different from many advisors in that we don’t run our own funds, we don’t take a cut of anything, and we don’t take kick-backs. So we make decisions that are based purely on doing what’s best for our clients. There’s no undue influence on what is a very rigorous, systematic process. Every quarter we consider new funds that might be a better fit. There might be changes to the existing fund line-up, or we might switch funds between primary and secondary positions based on forward-looking fund performance. The fact that we don’t have our own funds means we are free to pick whichever ones are right for clients, regardless of who manages them. Our sole mission is to deliver the best performance in a highly predictable way. And we do that by focusing on low costs, high liquidity and tax efficiency. How does your approach protect investors in down markets? We diversify portfolios across stocks and bonds, both domestically and internationally, which offers some amount of downside protection. But there’s no short-term reallocation involved that would cause us, for example, to move to 0% cash one month and 100% stocks the next month. Our approach is to reduce risk through diversification. So when the global markets go down, our portfolios will go down with them. No one has a crystal ball to know what the markets are going to do (and if we did have one, we would keep it to ourselves!). What we do instead is help clients align their level of risk in their portfolio to their goals and time horizon. That’s where the idea of a glidepath comes in. If someone is getting close to retirement, they don’t have a lot of time to recoup losses from a market downturn, so they should be taking less risk (ie., have a lower percentage of stocks to bonds). On the other hand, someone who is 20 or 30 years from retirement should tolerate being in a portfolio with a high percentage of stocks because even when there’s a market downturn, they’ll probably still be ok at the end of their investment horizon. Can you tell us more about the advice and guidance Betterment provides? We provide advice and guidance within the application to every individual, encouraging them to use the right account type, aggregate external accounts, and have a holistic plan that considers other assets. We also give access to investors to techniques like tax coordination that high net worth advisors have been using for years. By using knowledge and information about the tax code and tax rates, we can help investors keep more of their after-tax spending money in retirement. Taking advantage of that strategy also means participants may not have to save as much (or alternatively can have a higher target retirement spending amount). What are some other tools that Betterment 401(k) participants have access to? Most people stick with the default portfolios. But our Flexible Portfolio Strategy was built primarily for 401(k) participants who wanted to have more control over how their portfolio was allocated. What’s interesting is that even when people change the weights of individual funds within a portfolio, we provide guardrails of sorts that tell them when they’ve become too concentrated or taken on a risk level that is quite different than what we would recommend. And we see that people who use these tools really pay attention to those guardrails. They have the comfort of having some control but also respect the guidance that we provide them. We know that the Betterment platform allows 401(k) to save for other goals besides retirement. How does that work? Our platform allows for multiple goals so that investors can think about different pots of money differently. If there’s only one pool of money, then the investor has to figure out a way to quantify the average risk or asset mix that would be appropriate across all goals. By allowing people to assign different pools of money to individual goals, all with different time horizons, investors actually behave better because they have a purpose in mind. For instance, having a safety net that is fully funded allows people to “check the box” on the conservative side of things, making them more comfortable to take more risk with their retirement savings. Why doesn’t Betterment use the risk tolerance questionnaires to determine how to allocate someone’s investments? Rather than classifying people into categories, we want to interact with them and engage them in a conversation. When setting an allocation, for instance, we display the expected returns over both the long-term and the short-term. Sure, the 500% cumulative return over 30 years looks great, but are you comfortable knowing that you might lose 30% in any given year? If not, you may need to dial back your risk level. We want to have clients wrestle with that a bit, take it in and make a better decision off the bat. We think it’s better to have an ongoing conversation so that investors are thinking ahead about, for instance, the impact of a market downturn. So when the inevitable happens, people realize it’s a normal part of the process and don’t get so rattled. That ongoing conversation is important, too, because people’s attitudes toward risk often change over time. What about plan sponsors who are putting off starting a plan or moving to Betterment because they are nervous about the market volatility? If they’re waiting for the market to stabilize, well, that’s just market timing of a different sort. Sure, in a perfect world it would be great never to have to be out of a market (as with conversion plans) but over a short period of time, the market can do any crazy thing. So I worry about people putting off a good long-term decision for something that is outside of their control and only relevant in the short-run. There’s very low predictability about what’s going to happen in the market, but there’s a high predictability that moving to Betterment would give your employees access to advice and tools that could help them have more money in retirement. I would caution plan sponsors to avoid putting off a good decision waiting for something that they can’t plan for and encourage them to make decisions for things they can control.

Betterment 401(k) – Bulk Upload Tutorial for Plan Sponsors Betterment’s bulk upload tool allows you to add multiple employees to your plan quickly. This tutorial outlines best practices and shares helpful tips for using our bulk upload tool effectively. Step-by-step Tutorial Log in to the employee Dashboard   Navigate to: employees → add employees → add multiple employees   Download the CSV template   Open the CSV template using a program like Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or Google Sheets   Fill out one row for each employee you want to upload.   Use the table below to understand the columns in the template: Column Description First Name The employee’s legal first name No special characters accepted Last Name The employee’s legal last name No special characters accepted Middle Initial Leave blank if the employee doesn’t have a legal middle name Social Security Number The employee’s government-issued Social Security Number If the employee is not a US Citizen, a Social Security Number still needs to be provided Social Security Numbers should be formatted as 123-45-6789 Email Betterment uses email to complete the employee sign-up process and to send employees important plan notifications and updates Date of Birth Date should be formatted as MM/DD/YYYY Employment Status This field accepts the following inputs: active   (currently employed) terminated   (formerly employed) deceased   (deceased) disabled   (on disability leave) unpaid_leave   (unpaid leave) retired   (retired former employee) Date of Hire Date of hire can be up to one year in the future Date should be formatted as MM/DD/YYYY Date of Termination This field is required if Employment Status is terminated, deceased, disabled or retired This field can be left blank for employees who are active or who are on unpaid leave Date of termination can be up to one year in the future Date should be formatted as MM/DD/YYYY Date of Rehire This field is required if Employment Status is active and Date of Termination is set Address Line 1 This field is required for all employees The employee’s residential address cannot be a PO Box If the employee’s address includes a comma, you must put that address within quotation marks Address Line 2 This field can be left blank if the employee’s residential address is only one line City Part of the employee’s residential address State Part of the employee’s residential address State should be written using the official two-letter postal abbreviation Examples: NY, FL, CA, TX 5 Digit ZIP Code Part of the employee’s residential address Eligible This field accepts an input of Y or N If an employee will be hired in the future, you must enter N for Eligible, and enter a date in the Entry on column. This indicates that the employee will become eligible for the plan on the future date you’ve specified. Entry on This field defines the date on which an employee will become eligible for the 401(k) plan This date can be in the past or the future Date should be formatted as MM/DD/YYYY Electronic Access This field accepts an input of Y or N Can this employee receive emails and access Betterment’s website at a computer they use regularly as part of their job? Union Member This field accepts an input of Y or N Is this employee a member of a union? Date Joined Union Required if the employee is a member of a union Date should be formatted as MM/DD/YYYY Can be left blank for non-union employees Participant Type This field accepts the following inputs: primary   (all participants who are currently in the plan, whether active, terminated, deceased, disabled, retired, or on leave) beneficiary   (beneficiary of a deceased participant) alternate_payee   (a person who will be the payee of a divorce or other legal settlement) Deferral Rate If an employee was participating in a 401(k) plan you had with a previous provider, please indicate their contribution rate from that provider. This will be used as their new default rate at Betterment. The employee will be able to log into their account to change this prior to their first contribution with Betterment. Traditional deferral amount and percent cannot both be present. Roth deferral amount and percent cannot both be present. If you’re not switching to Betterment from a previous provider, you can leave this field blank.   After you’re done filling out the document, export the file as a CSV.   Upload your CSV file to Betterment.   If you receive any errors after uploading your file, review the errors and make changes to your CSV file. Re-upload the file to Betterment after making changes.   Once your file is accepted without any errors, you’ll be asked to review the names of the newly created employees. This helps ensure that you’re uploading the correct file to your plan. When you’re done reviewing, click the ‘add employees’ button.   Next, the upload process will begin. Once your employees have been uploaded, they’ll receive an email inviting them to complete the sign-up process.   Finally, check the employees page to make sure there are no outstanding errors that occurred during the employee creation process. Address any errors that may have occurred.   You’re all set! All new participant profiles will be visible on the employees page. You can return to the employees page to make changes to an employee’s profile at any time.   Frequently Asked Questions Do I have to do anything else? Nope! You’re all set. Betterment will email all required disclosures to your new plan participants. Do I have to send any notices to my employees? No, Betterment will send all notices to your employees automatically via email. When will my employees be alerted? Employees will be notified by email as soon as their account is created. How can my employees join the plan after I upload their information to Betterment? Employees can check their email for an invite from Betterment to complete the sign-up process. My employee has a P.O. Box as their address. Can I use that address with Betterment? No– to comply with regulations for opening accounts, we require a physical address to verify an employee's identity. Betterment will not send physical mail to an employee’s address (unless they opt into paper statements, which is rare); we will only use the address for account verification. Questions? Contact us.

Income Portfolios from BlackRock Learn about BlackRock’s income portfolio strategy, which provides retired employees with the opportunity to generate cash income while preserving capital. BlackRock’s income portfolio strategy provides retired employees the opportunity to generate cash income while preserving capital. The BlackRock income portfolio strategy is a diversified 100% bond basket that seeks to provide a steady stream of cash income while minimizing potential loss of capital and stock market volatility. Participants can choose from four risk levels, each with different targeted levels of income yield. The tradeoff for higher expected income is greater risk. Why the Income Portfolio Might be a Good Fit for Your Participants Often, participants value stable income and principal preservation during the later stages of their lives. The income portfolio strategy can help plan participants preserve their nest egg after they retire or if they’re nervous about investing in stocks while they’re still working. Generating Income The chart below shows the expected income yields for each of the four risk levels in the income portfolio strategy and how those levels compare to the Betterment portfolio strategy with similar levels of risk. Disclosure: This chart compares the four BlackRock income portfolios available to Betterment against four allocations of Betterment’s core portfolio strategy with similar relative risk levels. All four of the comparison allocations include both stocks and bonds, while BlackRock’s income portfolios are comprised completely of bonds. The Betterment Portfolio’s income yield is comprised of dividends from equities and coupon income from the underlying bonds in the fixed income ETF. The BlackRock Target Income Portfolios’ income yield is comprised solely of coupon income from the underlying bonds in the fixed income ETF. The expected income yields are expressed in annual terms and are based on the historical dividend yields over the past 1-year period ending August 30, 2017 for the individual funds in each of the portfolios, as reported by Yahoo Finance. These expected yields correspond to the time period referenced above for the funds in the relevant portfolios and will change over time as economic and market conditions change. When an economy is expanding (contracting), for example, interest rates will tend to rise (fall) and credit markets will tend to strengthen (weaken) as companies become less (more) vulnerable to defaulting on their debt. These figures do not include the Betterment fee or fund level expenses. The Betterment stock allocations shown here correspond to the Betterment portfolios that have expected volatilities that are closest to the expected volatilities of the four BlackRock income portfolios. The stock-to-bond allocations used for Betterment are: 9% stock to 91% bond, 22% stock to 78% bond, 37% stock to 63% bond and 40% stock to 60% bond. Expected volatilities are estimated based on the historical total returns data for the relevant funds over the past 10 years using the methods of Ledoit and Wolf (2003). This chart is hypothetical and used to illustrate the points discussed in this article. Past performance is not indicative of future results and does not guarantee that any particular result will be achieved. As you can see, BlackRock’s income portfolios have a higher expected income yield than allocations in Betterment’s core portfolio strategy with comparable risk levels. For example, if a participant in your plan had $1,000,000 in savings in their 401(k) account, she could invest it in the 40% stock Betterment portfolio, and the income portion of their return would be about $24,000 per year in gross investment income. (Note that the income portion composes only part of the total potential return generated by a Betterment portfolio allocation.) But remember, investments generate returns in two ways; income and principal growth. We refer to these two forms of growth as the total return of an investment. Bonds can provide steady income but historically have provided lower principal growth than have stocks. For this reason, putting some money in both the income strategy and the Betterment portfolio strategy may be a preferable alternative for some investors. Retirees who are interested in the income portfolio strategy can pair it with Betterment’s automatic withdrawal feature to set their retirement income on autopilot. Less Historical Risk For participants who are nervous about investing their retirement fund in stocks, the income portfolio strategy can be a good approach because the underlying bonds have a lower historical risk than stocks. According to Gallup, 48% of Americans have no money invested in the stock market. And with the best savings accounts paying only slightly above 1% in interest, keeping too much money in cash means your money loses value to inflation every day. Choosing bonds over cash can be a nice middle ground that better balances risk and return. The chart below shows the risk (as measured by standard deviation) for various types of bonds over the past 15 years, compared to stocks in large US companies. Comparing Risk The chart shows the risk (as measured by standard deviation) for various types of bonds over the past 15 years, compared to stocks in large U.S. companies. Click respective categories for data on short-term bonds, intermediate-term bonds, long-term bonds, high-yield bonds and large cap stocks. Short-term bonds were almost six times less risky than US large company stocks. Even high-yield bonds, the most risky type of bonds, were almost two times less risky than stocks. It’s worth noting that investing in bonds is generally more costly than investing in stocks, so plan participants will pay a higher expense ratio on income portfolio funds compared to funds invested in the core Betterment portfolio. The Betterment portfolio strategy, which contains a mix of stocks and bonds, has annual ETF fees of only 0.07% – 0.16%, depending on the portfolio’s allocation. Our income portfolio strategy, while still far lower cost than the industry average, has slightly higher ETF fees of 0.21% – 0.38%, depending on the portfolio’s target income level. Different Income Targets to Meet Participants’ Needs The strength of Betterment for Business’ approach is that all of our portfolio strategies can adjust to your participants’ risk tolerance. The income portfolio strategy is no different. We selected BlackRock’s iShares™ ETFs to invest in different types of US and international bonds including US Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, corporate, high-yield, and emerging market bonds. We had no incentive to partner with BlackRock other than the strength of their fixed income expertise and the robust construction of the iShares™ ETFs. To align with each participant’s risk preferences, we offer four different risk levels to choose from, each with different targeted levels of income. The income portfolio strategy is actively managed, so the exact allocations of the underlying bonds are subject to change approximately once per quarter (and up to six times per year depending on market volatility). With each rebalance, we allocate to the asset classes that are designed to help investors maximize the income return while limiting overall volatility. Risk and return are connected, so lower-risk bonds pay less income than higher-risk bonds. The income portfolio increases projected income by taking on more risk in two main ways: Investing in longer-term bonds: Long-term bonds are more sensitive to changes in interest rates, and thus carry more risk. To compensate for this risk, long-term bonds pay more interest. Investing in lower-quality bonds: When you lend money to less-established companies, the chances of the company defaulting and not paying you back are higher. To compensate for this risk, low-quality bonds pay more interest. We are proud to offer an income portfolio strategy for Betterment for Business because, with more strategies like this one, 401(k) plan participants can personalize their investments to match their specific retirement timeline, risk tolerances, and viewpoints. To get started, participants can open a new goal account and select the BlackRock income portfolio strategy.