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I cannot count the number of local government meetings I have attended in the last 40 years. But, every time employees want a raise or benefit increase everyone of these governmental boards brings in their advisers.
Who always tell the school board, city pension funds including firefighters and cops, county commissioners, yada yada to go ahead on and increase it to whatever is being asked for.
They always say 4-7 growth. In my dreams I wants those advisors to be held accountable for their rosy projections.
I’m in both of the large public pension funds in my state — educational and public employee. Neither is particularly well funded. There were tweaks to one of them in 2013 to do some shoring up. Now there is talk of tweaking the other. It seems most likely that the changes will include stopping the existing standard 2% retiree COLAs and tying them to actual performance of the fund, as well as increases in contributions from current employees and the state. My contribution from my salary — 10.7% — isn’t inconsequential. Increasing that will be a tough sell, but something must be done. I can envision future decreases to the pension factors — at 2.5% and 2.35% they’re pretty generous. But I would imagine this would be a tougher sell, and I haven’t seen it in many of the proposals.
So, in essence, I believe my pension will be there. I don’t believe it will be exactly the same as I currently envision in ten years when I finally start drawing it.
Meant to add that the fund that was shored up in 2013 is now funded at 75%, which still isn't stellar. The one that desperately needs shoring (and is where the bulk of my pension will come from) is funded at 52%(!). There were some tweaks in the 2019 Session, but more sacrifices need to be made all around on that one: retirees, current employees, future employees, and employers/state.
I am relying to some extent on the pension, but I also have retirement savings from the first 2/3 of my working life spent in the private sector. I'm also still contributing 10-13% toward defined-contribution plans on top of the almost 17% going toward the pension and Social Security.
Our pensions are all federal, so not too worried about pension funding but somewhat worried that they may do some sort of means testing for SS that could impact retirement income as they start to run out of funds.
In a sense that when you do your tax, they will claw back base on your income. Take my husband’s SS, he gives back almost 75% of it through tax already. If he has no other income, he gets 100% of SS. So if that’s not means testing, what is?
10 years of great stock market returns but America still has a terrible pension problem. This is due to a number of issues including: more pensions money going out than people putting money in, poor choices of investments by pension managers, and underfunding of pensions by governments.
The experts are saying that future stock market returns will likely be 0-2% real during the next ten years but pensions are being funded with an expectation of 4-5% real returns. (The people who estimate future stock market returns and pension officials who set return estimates have not met in years!)
I suspect many pensions will go broke in the next 10-20 years. Could this be your pension and are you worried?
I agree with 2 (poor investment choices) and 3 (underfunding).
Steps have already been taken to address #1, at least in my company:
- Defined benefit pension is off-limits to new hires since 2012
- Union employees grandfathered will continue to accrue pension credit
- Management employees will retain what's accrued, future credit will be frozen, and they will receive a compensatory "extra match" in their 401k. Other employees receive a 1:1 match up to 6%, affected management will receive the match up to 8%
The new hires who never had the defined benefit will have accessed to the 6% match in their 401k -AND- receive an automatic 3% contributed into a cash balance pension. This 3% does not come out of the employee's pay.
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