Your 401(k) may be the largest account you own. Most advisors manage everything around it but never inside it. That's leaving serious money on the table.
Here is a situation that is more common than it should be. A client comes to us with $3M in investable assets. We ask about their full financial picture. They mention, almost as an afterthought, that they also have $1.8M in their 401(k) at work. Their previous advisor had never touched it.
This is the 401(k) blind spot. And it is endemic in the wealth management industry.
The reason is mostly structural. Traditional advisors charge a percentage of assets under management - and assets in a 401(k) are held at a corporate custodian that most advisors cannot access directly. So they manage the IRA, the brokerage account, the trust assets - everything they can bill on - and leave the 401(k) sitting in a default target-date fund, unoptimized and uncoordinated with the rest of the portfolio.
So the largest account in the household is often the least managed: holding the wrong assets, ignoring the location opportunities that exist across the full portfolio, accumulating in isolation from everything else.
The 401(k) should be integrated into your overall asset location strategy. The most tax-inefficient assets in your portfolio belong there - sheltered from annual taxation, compounding without friction.
At STQ, we manage 401(k) assets alongside every other account in your financial picture. We use platforms that give us access to employer-held retirement accounts directly, so we can optimize across the full portfolio - not just the accounts that happen to be easy to access. If your current advisor is not doing this, you are not getting the full picture.
At STQ, we manage 401(k) assets alongside every other account in your financial picture. If your advisor isn't doing the same, the Portfolio Diagnostic will show you what that's costing you.
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