401k Fund Transfers

SamanthaQ

We recently re-evaluated our 401k plan and decided to change fund providers from Oppenheimer to Transamerica. As part of the conversion process we are going to "map" over employees funds from Oppenheimer to the new funds in Transamerica. Basically we said anyone who has money in Oppenheimer Strategic Income Fund will have their funds mapped over to the Transamerica Bond Index Fund and so on for each of the 12 Oppenheimer funds we have. So instead of everything being dumped in a stable value type account they are mapped over to similar funds in the new plan. Does this sound reasonable to you? We are disclosing all this in our initial employee communications and in the blackout letter...also it will be discussed at the employee enrollment meetings that all participants will attend as well.

I've never done this before and wanted to get some other opinions on whether or not this sounded reasonable.

Dutch2

We have also taken this approach in the past. When we changed from Putnam to American Funds and also when we decide to drop a fund or two and add others. We simply transfer all the funds from one plan to the most similar fund in the other company. If the ee does not agree with the transfer they can change it to another fund as soon as the black out period is over. We have expreienced no difficulties so far.

lnelson

I concur with Dutch2. We did a similar switch. If the ee wants to make any changes they can after the blackout period.

lorrie

We have also done the same as Dutch2, and it worked very well.

gismo

We have also had to do this in the past, a couple of times in fact. We have our 401(k) retirement plan with Principal Financial Group, they sent out a sample letter for me to retype and send to all our participants, they had a date that the change was going to take place and also a certain amount of time that the participants could go in and make changes to their retirment account ahead of this change, because after a certain date, the participant cannot make any changes until after the switch, the funds will then be transfered by Principal. After the transfer was/is complete, the participant can then change move their funds around if they so choose. From what I see, very few did any prior changes to their accounts.

E Wart

We did this as well. However, we limited the number of funds we "mapped over to" to limit the confusion for employees. I think we only used 3 of our 15 funds. Obviously we did the most conservative.
Also, Profit Sharing investment had previously been controlled by a company committee. Due to employees never having controll over this investment, we did it all to the money market and then made them aware that they needed to go in and change or at least evaluate.
E Wart