In most states, pensions are funded with contributions from employees and employers who participate in the pension plan.
"Many midcareer workers don't realize they haven't accumulated much in a pension plan until it shuts down, " Munnell laments.
What is the effect upon participants in a pension plan when the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation takes over the plan and replaces company pensions with PBGC pensions?
First, the above crisis was hardly unanticipated and could have been easily averted by simply not including company stock in the pension or 401k plan or at least not in significant amounts.
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The best bilingual debater on the government benches, Mr Martin has managed to portray a 70% increase in employee contributions to the government pension plan as investment in retirement rather than a disguised tax.
The idea is to enrol in these new accounts most employees who are not already members of a pension plan in which the employer contributes at least 3% of a worker's pay.
In Southern Europe, the general public is more likely to invest in property as a pension plan, she pointed out.
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The culprit is extremely low interest rates on high-quality corporate bonds, which play a critical role in assumptions for calculating pension plan obligations.
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The bulk of it comes from their parent firm, Standard Life Insurance, which is 96 percent invested in GARS for their pension plan since June 2005.
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Roll Over and Die Laughing IBM's momentous decision this month to wind down its traditional pension plan in favor of 401(k)s will no doubt accelerate the movement toward self-directed retirement savings.
We often focus on immediate benefits like salary, health insurance, employment perks, and working conditions when choosing an employer, but the first lesson may be to not underestimate the value of a traditional pension plan in choosing an employer.
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Small swings in the value of the pension plan can have massive effects on the value of the company.
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"This is particularly the case for older women who are thinking of starting a pension plan later in life, " said Mr McLean.
In relation to income drawdown plans, there is now a new arrangement known as flexible drawdown which will allow some people to draw all the money out in cash from a personal pension plan.
Imperial Germany in 1889 enacted the first pension plan, financed by equal contributions from employers and employees, largely because Chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw it as a method to wean the masses away from socialism.
For example, assets held in a qualified pension or profit sharing plan are exempt from state-law claims, such as malpractice claims.
What if you found out that your state pension plan was investing in a company that does business with a country that sponsors terrorism?
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Swooning stockmarkets are a particular headache for British fund managers, who have had too much invested in equities for too long, which is where many of their recent problems arise, and why almost every defined-benefit pension plan is now in trouble.
Packers game, the sticking point in negotiations had been the Game Officials Pension Plan.
And of those that are corporate, in about a third of those the pension plan exceeds the market value of the company.
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Moore's claim that North Carolina pays 29% less in fund management fees than the average public pension plan.
Assets in a bankruptcy typically get sold to rivals or financiers experienced in running or selling businesses, not pension-plan managers.
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Primary examples: gains from investments and asset sales, sharp declines in tax rates, overly optimistic assumptions on pension plan returns and heavy reliance on stock options as a form of compensation.
For example, if fund managers run a company's pension plan and have voting rights in the company's shares, they might be tempted to side with its management, against the interests of their investors, to keep the retirement account.
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The sponsors of the conference had pleaded with me to make the trek to deliver a stern warning to the government pension plan trustees who would be in attendance: the advice their funds were receiving from Wall Street stockbrokers posing as pension specialists was tainted by conflicts of interests that were profoundly undermining pension returns.
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Logging on to DealComposer, you can design a structure to suit the regulations imposed on the investors you plan to court: pension funds in Britain, for instance.
Example: When Verizon Communications (nyse: VZ - news - people ) partially froze its nonunion pension plan covering 50, 000 workers in July, it raised the maximum company match (assuming it hits profitability targets) to 9% of salary for a worker who saves 6%, up from 5% for one who saves 6%.
According to a report in the Detroit News today, while Snyder is insisting his plan is on track, enough Republicans oppose the pension provision to sink it in the state Senate, assuming all Democrats, as expected, vote against it.
Employees at Augsburg Fortress, a publisher in Minneapolis that sells books published for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, lost 30% to 60% of their pensions when the publisher, which claimed the pension was a church plan, terminated it in 2010.
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On Sunday night, 60 Minutes called the attention of its millions of American viewers to a dirty little secret: Just about everyone with a 401(k) pension plan or mutual fund has money invested in companies that are doing business in so-called rogue states.
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