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Anbody think that there should be a bailout for people whose lost their 401k and now have to suffer and must work until they drop dead loke the people getting a mortgage bailout. Banks Auto, stock market, state government and my mother uncle is getting bailouts. WE DESERVE A BAILOUT RIGHT NOW OR OUR RETIREMENT FUNDS.
Anybody still puting money into their 401k and if you are are you putting any into stocks. since the tanking of the stock market how many more years do you have to work until retirement.
this is certainly the time to keep putting money in,,,, remember its buy low sell high and forget about catching the bottom or top ,you will never do it....
10 years from now you will wish you put every penny in..(i hope)
we got 3 years left but its irrelevant... the only money in equities should be the money thats going to be used to eat at least 15 years after you retire..
its still long term money i have in equities even if i retired today
i find it interesting about all the comments about how the downturn destroyed alot of retirement plans and it seems to me most were destroyed by not the down turn but a lack of having a fully functional plan..
by that i mean down cycles are always part of the business cycle and yet we forget that good planning allows for these downturns and having a plan dosnt mean just throwing all kinds of money into a mix of funds in our 401k and keeping our fingers crossed.
as we get closer to retirement the rules of the game are changing. no longer is it about getting richer but its now about not getting poorer. not by inflation,not by over-withdrawing more money then we can afford to in retirement or by selling stock to live on in down markets
i use a nifty little system based on ray lucias buckets,... although im 56 and my wife is 58 we started our planning 2 years ago for the final decent into retirement land hoping to retire early in 2 to 3 years.
we pretend we are retired , we set up a 3 bucket system that protects our plans for a good 15 years out. why 15 years? because the odds of being down in any 15 year period are about 3% or less
bucket 1 gets 7 years worth of withdrawls in safe money, banks,cd,money markets
bucket 2 gets 7 years worth of withdrawls in relatively safe money .
bonds,bond funds,un-traded reits
bucket 3 is still invested like we are 30... equity funds,stocks,reits,commodities etc...this is our growing bucket..
we can go 15 years before selling or worrying what the markets are doing..15 years ago we crossed 4,000 ...today we all are freaking at 7-9,000.
of course you dont have to wait to refill your buckets, anytime the markets are up refill 1 &2.. its not timing the markets that make money, its time in the markets ... the buckets are rebalanced not on what the markets are doing but rather on how you are doing and whether buckets 1 and 2 need money when the markets are up.
thanks to some careful planning although we are down 6 figures we can still sleep at night and all our plans remain unscathed....
please, everyone , review your plans early and dont try to rule out bad markets, plan and allow for them... it takes alot more creativity then just throwing money into funds to have your plans stay on track. you should put as much thought into your planning as you do buying a refrigerator or a car.
and no im not in the business, i sell nothing, i just enjoy writing articles for various financial publications about good careful planning..
There is no reasonable way for anyone to bailout our savings and looking at what we should have done in the past is not a productive exercise.
Many of us already retired are under heavy pressure because of the downturn as the equity portion of our portfolio is down 50%, part-time and contract income has dried up, and work is very difficult to find. We are spending down the cash portion of our retirement at an alarming rate because investments are not paying much, the fixed income portion has been damaged, and the long term portion has been hit harder than any downside projection every projected.
The real issue is finding work as few are willing to even interview for a professional position when the applicant is obviously over 60 that has been out of industry over five years. And interviews for modest income positions are not much easier as there are an abundance of applicants.
The answer for most of us is to restructure budgets as tight as possible, keep a job if you have one, and look for work if you don’t.
f the last 100 years are an example then funding when we are so down is very important.... its very hard to pull out any 15 years from the last 60 and not come within the same average long term return no matter what happened in the world.. crashes, wars, the 70's gas lines, the mega inflation of the 80's... its all not a blip on the radar
Anbody think that there should be a bailout for people whose lost their 401k and now have to suffer and must work until they drop dead loke the people getting a mortgage bailout. Banks Auto, stock market, state government and my mother uncle is getting bailouts. WE DESERVE A BAILOUT RIGHT NOW OR OUR RETIREMENT FUNDS.
Anybody still puting money into their 401k and if you are are you putting any into stocks. since the tanking of the stock market how many more years do you have to work until retirement.
I like your suggestion, but nope~we don't deserve a bailout anymore then the person who sits down to play cards and loses his life savings. The stock market is a gamble and we all know that going into it. Some win and some lose. People like me who can't afford to lose a lot are better off going with safer investments even if the return is much less.
And to your second question~I have never invested heavily into a 401K/403B and never will. Theoretically, there is a 10% return, but I've never seen it and I'm sure many others haven't either. BUT I'll bet someone out there is sitting with a 20% return~thus the averages.
First remember that those and the auto baiouts are loans . What you want is like the stimulus money; that is given. Sorry no one has that amount of money and the US isn't good for that type of loan even.Beside it was all justestimates on paper really. Hopefully you were smart enough that your investment itself is still there;at least on paper.Might want to switch to something like bonds or tresuries if you don't want the risk./
WASHINGTON - The recession spells trouble for a government corporation that insures the pensions of 44 million workers and retirees.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. already has an $11 billion deficit that seems sure to grow larger.
With companies reporting shortfalls in their pension funds, it's all but certain that the PBGC will be forced to take over the pension plans of a rising number of bankrupt businesses.
The future financial health of the agency is hard to forecast. It is hinged on interest rates, the length of the recession and the PBGC's own luck in playing the market, where it has billions invested.
The agency has $63 billion in assets. But it is obligated to spend $74 billion on pension benefits in the coming years. The PBGC might have time to rebound, but over the long term it might require a bailout.
"Someday - probably more than 20 years from now - there's a significant chance that somebody is going to have to pay the piper," said former PBGC Director Charles E.F. Millard.
The PBGC's fate is important to the workers covered by the more than 29,000 employer-sponsored benefit pension plans it insures, and to all taxpayers who could be asked to foot the bill if its financial picture worsens.
Congress created the PBGC in 1974 to guarantee the retirement security of workers covered by defined-benefit pension plans. These traditional plans, which pay a specified monthly benefit at retirement, are being phased out as companies turn to 401(k)-style programs. The PBGC, which receives no tax dollars, gets its money from premiums paid by companies that sponsor the pension plans, along with revenue from its investments.
The corporation's balance sheet has taken heavy hits in recent years. Nine of the 10 largest pension plan terminations in PBGC's history, including United Airlines and Bethlehem Steel, have occurred since 2001.
When a plan is terminated, the PGBC takes over. But retirees might not get the full amount that their employer promised. The maximum guaranteed amount is $54,000 a year for a person retiring at age 65.
Some experts shrug their shoulders at the PBGC's $11 billion deficit, noting that the 35-year-old corporation has been operating at a deficit for most of its existence.
"Every time the economy bounces around, everybody acts like everything is going to collapse and that they should worry about the PBGC, and then things come back," says Dallas Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington.
Old news. The same story was printed when teh air;ines declared bankrupsy. I thnik like many stories its politcally motivated mostly.
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