Significant expertise and independence
At RIS, we manage over a billion dollars of TIAA money for hundreds of clients and their families across dozens of universities. We count three former TIAA employees, with over 41 years of collective TIAA employee experience as part of our team.
Top-down coordination
Retirement Income Solutions is independent of TIAA and the area universities, but we enjoy a close working relationship with them that allows us to actively manage university retirement accounts without transferring assets. In many cases, we can also deduct our wealth management fees directly from those accounts, allowing clients to pay our fees with pre-tax dollars.
We work with employees of the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Eastern Michigan, Wayne, Oakland, and many other non-profit and governmental organizations. We also work with Fidelity accounts and 401k and 403b assets and can coordinate among all of them.
For example, if you only have a TIAA account, we’ll choose what we believe to be the best offerings from their fund lineup. If you have TIAA and Fidelity, and a spouse with a 401k at an employer like Ford, GM, or Pfizer, among others, we’ll analyze and choose from the options available in those three separate retirement plans, and manage your whole portfolio in line with your risk tolerance and goals. And since we are a fee-only advisor, we’ll never earn a commission for picking certain products.
Unlike other advisors, we don’t deploy a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Instead, we periodically re-evaluate the choices in your plan and choose which to avoid and which to employ. In certain environments, bonds may be more attractive than TIAA Traditional; in others, TIAA Traditional may be more attractive than TIAA Real Estate.
Regular transparency
We provide quarterly reports that list and summarize all of the balances of your investments, dollars gained, and our fees, as well as the investment performance net of our fee versus a blended benchmark for YTD, and as applicable for 1 year, 3 years, 5 years and 10 years.
We do that for all of your accounts, no matter who their custodian is. Many of our clients had never coordinated their TIAA, Fidelity, 401k, 403b, IRA and taxable accounts with a family advisor in this way before coming to RIS. Through coordinating all of their investments and providing transparency on performance as well as market insights, we can help our clients feel much more comfortable with their investing and confident that their retirement dreams may be attainable.