I’ve been told that I’m not a good candidate for a cash balance plan because I’m young and have some older employees. Why is this?

The economics of cash balance plans and other defined benefit plans don’t work great for everyone. These plans are primarily driven by compensation and age. So the higher your W2 wage (or business profit) and the older you are, the more you can contribute and the more these plans make sense.

In addition, when you have employees it makes it more challenging. The ideal situation is older, high income owners combined with younger and low compensated employees. When employees have high income it can make it difficult because as a general rule you may have to give the employee 10% or so.

Our goal is to get 85% to 90% to the owners. But when you have younger owners and higher paid staff the economics can shift. When it gets to, for example, 70% owner and 30% staff, it just usually doesn’t make sense.

In addition, when the owner is young they often can’t get an allocation that is high enough when you consider the plan administration costs. These plans are more expensive because of the actuary cost to sign off. So when you assume that these plans will run $2k or so annually that can also hurt the overall economics.

So at the end of the day, it may not make sense and you are left with looking at a safe harbor 401k. I wish this was better news. But this type of plan won’t work well for your situation, and you will have to consider other options.