Blue Pier™
Small and Medium-Sized Business Pension Plan

Costs matter. Some plans cost two percent – or more – of plan assets annually, which may include trailer fees. Employers may also have additional consulting fees, regulatory filing fees, and internal costs for staff to manage the plan, report to regulators and communicate it to employees. Employees may even have to take time off work to attend educational sessions on investments. All these hard and soft costs can add up quickly.

Blue Pier charges a modest startup fee and a low annual fee on assets under management. Best of all, fees can be tax-deductible and there are no trailer fees. Get in touch with us for more information.

The time required to establish a single-employer group plan and start contributions depends on the type of plan. If the plan must be registered individually with the CRA and a pension-standards regulator, it will likely take several months before a registration number is obtained.

With Blue Pier™, you can have a customized pension plan for your small to medium-sized business up and running in 6 to 10 weeks.

With traditional, single-employer group retirement plans, you are the plan administrator and it’s your responsibility to ensure all the annually-recurring plan management tasks get done. Some of these tasks include annual reporting, paying regulatory fees, issuing statements to members, monitoring the performance of investment options, monitoring members’ use of investment information and decision-making resources – the list goes on and on. If these tasks are not done correctly and on time, there can even be regulatory financial penalties. With little or no expertise with group retirement plans, most employers rely on consultants who are paid by the employer or from trailer fees charged to plan members’ accounts.

With Blue Pier, you’re not the plan administrator. Pension management is our responsibility. All you need to do is keep us informed about staff changes, make contributions, and report Pension Adjustments. We help with that. Get in touch with us to find out more.

The plan sponsor is your small or medium-sized business. As the sponsor, you determine who participates in the plan and the contribution rates, distribute enrolment forms, and inform the administrator (Blue Pier) about member events like termination of employment, retirement, etc.

The members are the employees of the small and medium-sized businesses which have joined Blue Pier as participating employers.

This question often arises with defined-benefit (DB) pension plans. In a DB plan, all the plan assets, liabilities and risks are pooled among all the active, inactive and retired members of the plan. If the DB plan is a MEPP, the risk of pooling extends to all employers and members. Practically, this means that cross-subsidization among unrelated employers and members will inevitably occur over time. What does “cross-subsidization” mean? It means that some of the contributions made by your small or medium-sized business or your employees may well end up paying for pensions of other members working for employers you don’t even know.

With Blue Pier, this doesn’t happen. Your pension money is always yours.

With DB plans, there’s a limit on the amount of pension money you can transfer to another registered plan like a DC plan, an RRSP or RRIF. Anything over the CRA-prescribed transfer limit will be taxed immediately as income.

With Blue Pier, you don’t have to worry about this. Transfers from Blue Pier to other registered plans are tax-free. Always.

In most provinces, pension legislation requires that pension funds arising from employer contributions and matched member contributions are to be used to provide pension income. In other words, they cannot be withdrawn in cash or transferred to regular RRSP. With a Defined-Benefit Pension Plan (DB), you must receive benefits in the form of a lifetime pension income.

With Blue Pier, you have some flexibility to decide how much of employees’ pension money is locked in.

This is a very important consideration when choosing a pension solution for your small or medium-sized business. Some plans require a minimum participation period – e.g. five years – when you sign up. Other plans may be difficult to terminate and wind up, especially if some members don’t make a choice as to what to do with their pension funds or cannot be located, which often happens when members terminate employment and don’t immediately transfer their funds from a plan.

Here at Blue Pier, we understand your need to be careful about long-term financial commitments. We’d like you and your employees to stay with us for life, but you don’t have to. To terminate participation, just give us 90 days’ advance notice.

It depends on the type of plan. With a DB plan, the only option is a pension payable for life. With a single-employer Group RRSP, DC plan, or DPSP, employees will have to transfer their funds to a personal plan or buy an annuity from an insurance company.

With Blue Pier, your employees have more choices. They can receive retirement income directly from Blue Pier, transfer their pension money to a personal plan, or buy an annuity from an insurance company.

Payroll taxes are an important consideration when choosing a plan for your small or medium-sized business. Payroll taxes are based on the amount of employment income paid to employees, individually or collectively. Examples of payroll taxes include contributions to the Canada Pension Plan or the Quebec Pension Plan, Employment Insurance premiums, workplace-safety insurance premiums, employer health taxes, post-secondary education taxes, etc. With some group plans, employer contributions increase the amount of income based on which payroll taxes are determined. This, in turn, can increase the total amount of payroll taxes for your small or medium-sized business and can also increase the payroll taxes that your employees have to pay.

With Blue Pier, this doesn’t happen. Contributions are tax-deductible and don’t increase payroll taxes for a small or medium-sized business or for its employees.

Business owners need the flexibility to design a workplace retirement program that is affordable for the business and its employees and achieves its objectives. Some of these objectives could be to improve employee morale, support staff recruitment and retention, or improve the tax effectiveness of total compensation.

Some plans have limited design flexibility. For example, they may require that both employees and the employer pay contributions in equal amounts, which can create a financial burden for lower-income employees. Ideally, a pension plan for small and medium-sized businesses should allow for a broad range of designs that can include mandatory contributions, matched contributions, voluntary contributions, service-based contributions, results-based contributions as well as different contribution structures for different employee classes.

With Blue Pier, it’s your plan, designed your way to fit your budget. Employees don’t have to contribute (unless you want them to). The minimum employer contribution is just one percent of the salary or wages for eligible employees. You can have different plans for different employee classes and even an “executive plan” for management and salaried employees.