15th Anniversary of RPAY: Stace Hilbrant

The 2012 winner of the PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year award says more change has happened in the past eight years than occurred immediately after the passage of the landmark ERISA legislation.

Stace Hilbrant, managing director of 401k Advisors

From the point of view of Stace Hilbrant, managing director of 401k Advisors in the Chicago area and the 2012 PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year winner, the retirement plan advisory industry has seen “hugely important evolutionary changes” in the past eight years.

In some ways, Hilbrant says, there has been more change in the past eight years than occurred in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the groundbreaking Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) back in 1974.

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Most notably, Hilbrant says, many advisory practices have shifted their emphasis from a focus on helping sponsors address their fiduciary responsibilities to working more for the participant individually.

“People take [working for the participant] more seriously than they did eight or 10 years ago,” he says. “There has been a sea change in the services available to participants and how sophisticated they are.”

For instance, Hilbrant notes that as early as 2008, 401k Advisors began talking about retirement readiness with plan sponsor clients and participants.

“We started talking about how well prepared people were for retirement readiness early on—such as replacing 80% of their salary in retirement, including Social Security,” he says. “No one knew what you were talking about back then.”

With the recent passage of the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act, the Department of Labor (DOL) will soon require recordkeepers to project what participants’ balances would translate to in terms of lifetime retirement income, Hilbrant points out. He says advisers should work to make sure recordkeepers do a better job of explaining to participants how they arrive at those projections.

Over the past eight years, Hilbrant says, 401k Advisors has become more visible to plan participants, holding more group and individual meetings. The practice’s advisers make themselves available for any question participants may have—even giving them direct phone numbers.

In fact, since the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States earlier this year, 401k Advisors’ staff is on the phone nearly all day with sponsors and participants, Hilbrant says.

“Our phone calls have quadrupled,” he says, echoing comments shared with PLANADVISER by many other firms.

Another sign of the changing times is the fact that 401k Advisors now also provides advice on health care insurance as well as a financial wellness program. The practice also makes it a point to help workers understand the value of their retirement plan—particularly the company match.

“People are actually more productive when they value their plan,” Hilbrant suggests.

As far as the fee compression that has occurred in the past decade, Hilbrant says he firmly believes that practices which make a strong case for the value of their services can buck that trend.

One notable fact about the evolution of 401k Advisors itself is that the firm had $1.3 billion in assets under advisement (AUA) and 40 plans when Hilbrant won the “RPAY” award. Since then, the firm has grown to $1.6 billion in AUA but with fewer plans.

“The average client size is much greater,” Hilbrant explains. “Our clients now include some sports teams and high-profile publicly traded companies. We still primarily serve 401(k) and 403(b) plans, but our client base does include a few defined benefit [DB] and nonqualified plans.”

These days, 401k Advisors’ target market is plans with assets between $25 million and $300 million, Hilbrant adds.  

The broader industry’s evolution is further reflected in the fact that Hilbrant’s firm now partners with only half the number of recordkeepers compared with 2008. The years of additional experience have underscored the importance of “sticking with those recordkeepers that have the best service models and the highest quality deliverables,” he says.

Hilbrant says he is very optimistic about what lies ahead for the retirement plan industry, particularly how artificial intelligence (AI) and voice recognition may be used. While some industry insiders think the virtual meetings that companies have been holding during the pandemic lockdowns may continue into the future, Hilbrant says he is not so sure about that.  

“I happen to think that the value of having an individual with teams and committees meeting in person will continue to be appreciated,” he says. “Sponsors and participants appreciate the value of being able to call on someone face-to-face, who can be empathetic to their situation.”

Hilbrant makes it a point to volunteer. One of his clients, a professional sports team in Chicago, has a charitable foundation that helps families and children in lower-income neighborhoods, which he is involved in. He has also served as board chairman and continues to be involved in a school that helps blind and sight-challenged individuals learn skills so that they are able to work. Hilbrant says this organization helps 10,000 such people every year.

Asked what advisers could do to help participants be better prepared for retirement, Hilbrant points to a number of areas. First off, he says, advisers need to be “brutally honest” about what people need to save and how important it is “to follow the Dave Ramsey rule of thumb to live below one’s means and to come to grips with debt levels.”

“The fact is, the wage/wealth gap in this country is wider than we would like it to be,” Hilbrant concludes. “There needs to be a huge awakening in this country around taking retirement savings seriously and understanding how high health care costs can be in retirement.”

Advisers Giving Back: Bernadette Lanser and St. Ben’s Community Meal

It was originally supposed to be a one-time thing, but at this point, Lanser has spent more than 17 years volunteering at St. Ben’s Community Meal program.

Art by Sonia Pulido


Since launching in mid-2019, our Advisers Giving Back profile series has featured more than a dozen dedicated teams and individuals working in the advisory field who are dedicated to giving their time and resources back to the local and global community.

Some common themes have emerged in the series, including a focus on teaching financial literacy to young adults, assisting food banks and homeless outreach services, and providing international poverty relief and microeconomic development grants. Another theme to emerge has been the fact that some families are dedicated to giving back—with brothers inspiring brothers to give, or, in the case of Bernadette Lanser, a financial adviser and chartered retirement planning counselor with UBS in Milwaukee, mothers and daughters coming together to give.

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Lanser and her daughter, Erica, have been volunteering their time at the St. Ben’s Community Meal program for nearly 18 years. Their work has included preparing, transporting and personally serving meals to those in need in downtown Milwaukee. Their work at St. Ben’s also extends to raising money for the program through events such as the German Fest Run for the Hungry and working concessions at concerts and sporting events at the local Bradley Center.

“One of the reasons I got involved in the community meals program is that I knew I could serve and I felt it was a calling in my soul,” Lanser recalls. “Everybody out there matters—even those people who are at a time in their life where they cannot provide for themselves. You go in to serve these people and it is the most humbling experience you can have. At St. Ben’s, you work with people one-on-one, and it’s just such an amazing experience.”

The actual giving events for Lanser and her daughter usually fall on Friday evenings, which she says is “a challenging but rewarding way to end the week.”

“You are definitely tired out on Saturday morning, because you can maybe serve 100 or even 200 people in an evening after working all week,” Lanser says. “Still, it is not hard. When I do this work, I feel like myself. I cherish how everyone is treated with respect, and I get to carry this into my daily life, and into the workplace, too. In the retirement planning world, you just have to treat everyone with the utmost respect and compassion—and with their best interest front and center.”

Lanser says there is, in this sense, a very close connection between her charity work and her job serving 401(k) plan participants.

“You have to come at it with the same dedication and compassion,” she says. “Every person matters, no matter who they are or how much money they have saved.”

Recalling how her giving experience got started, Lanser says there was not much forethought involved.

“My daughter and I felt we should do something to give back, and so we picked St. Ben’s; our faith is very important to us,” she recalls. “We honestly thought it was going to be a one-time thing, but here we are all these years later.”

For the first dozen years, Lanser’s main role was to make food and go collect and deliver other families’ food from across the church community. Now, she is more involved in serving the food.

“We put the food out for the people as they came through, and we would work at a station and distribute the food and help people get their meal,” she explains. “You are speaking with these people and serving them however you can. Sometimes you have whole families come through with their little children, and they are just adorable to take care of. It’s usually about five hours of work all said and told.”

Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic has put a halt to the evenings of service for the foreseeable future.

“Fortunately, the people in need are still being fed through the program, but the community and companionship aspect is not possible right now,” she says. “It is sad, because the connection is missing. I can’t wait to see everyone again.”

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