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Unequal Access to Retirement Benefits
Tweet Share on Facebook October 18, 2011 Comment (5)The opportunity to participate in a 401(k) or pension plan is only available for about half of the workforce. Just 49.2 percent of all workers had access to a retirement plan at work in 2010, according to a recent Employee Benefit Research Institute analysis of Census Bureau data, and just 39.8 percent of employees participated in the plan. This is virtually unchanged from the 39.6 percent of workers who utilized retirement benefits in 2009.
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Traditional Pensions are Casualties of a Retirement Heist
Tweet Share on Facebook September 15, 2011 Comment (4)Companies often say they are freezing their traditional pension plans and eliminating retiree medical benefits to remain competitive with pension-less employers overseas and cope with an aging workforce and stock market losses. But in a shocking new book, Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers, Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz explains that pension cuts are actually an accounting maneuver that is being used to boost corporate earnings. The massive retirement liabilities that many companies report are actually caused by unfunded executive pensions and deferred compensation plans, not the pension obligations to ordinary employees, she found. U.S. News asked Schultz to explain why traditional pension plans are really being frozen. Excerpts:
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9 Workplace Benefits That Need Improvement
Tweet Share on Facebook September 9, 2011 Comment (2)Many workers feel fortunate to have a job at a time when the unemployment rate is over 9 percent. But a growing proportion of employed workers say that their current job doesn’t provide adequate pay or benefits. Employee job satisfaction has dropped to 83 percent, compared to 90 percent before the recession, according to a recent Gallup poll of 489 employed adults age 18 and older. Considerably more workers are now unhappy with their health insurance, retirement plan, and the amount of money they earn than three years ago. Here are the workplace benefits that workers are growing increasingly dissatisfied with.
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Industries with the Best 401(k) Matches
Tweet Share on Facebook September 6, 2011 Comment (1)Workers in the private sector were offered a median 401(k) match of 3 percent of pay in 2010. But the maximum possible employer contribution is considerably higher for specific groups of workers. Here’s a look at which employees are getting the biggest company contributions to their 401(k) plan.
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Retirees Fastest-Growing Users of Social Networks
Tweet Share on Facebook August 30, 2011 Comment (2)Retirees age 65 and older are the fastest-growing group of social networking site users like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And for the first time this year, more than half of baby boomers use social networking sites.
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SF Fed: Baby Boomer Retirement May Sink Stock Market
Tweet Share on Facebook August 24, 2011 Comment (3)The oldest members of the baby boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, began to turn 65 this year. Those who don’t have traditional pension plans will need to sell their assets to finance retirement. “A looming concern is that this massive sell-off might depress equity values,” according to a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report released this week.
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401(k) Savers Who Stuck With Stocks Saw Gains
Tweet Share on Facebook August 19, 2011 Comment (1)401(k) account owners who maintained their equity allocation and continued to save during the market decline of 2008 and 2009 now have much larger account balances than investors who stopped saving or pulled their money out of the stock market, according to a new Fidelity Investments study.
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Average Retirement Age Grows
Tweet Share on Facebook August 17, 2011 Comment (2)Workers are now retiring at older ages because the incentives to retire have changed. Since the mid-1990s, the average retirement age has risen from 62 to 64 for men and from 60 to 62 for women, according to a new Center for Retirement Research at Boston College analysis of Census Bureau data. The trend toward later retirement has been driven by declines in traditional pensions and retiree health benefits offered by employers, changes in the way Social Security benefits are calculated, better education and health, and less strenuous jobs that people are able to perform at older ages.
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Traditional Pensions Hit Record Low
Tweet Share on Facebook August 12, 2011 CommentThe number of large companies offering traditional pension plans hit a record low this year. Only 13 Fortune 100 companies sponsor a traditional pension plan open to newly hired workers, down from 17 in 2010 and 89 in 1985, according to a study by Towers Watson.
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Automatic Enrollment Hurts Retirement Saving
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2011 Comment (2)Automatically enrolling new employees in the 401(k) plan generally gets more people to participate in the retirement plan. But it also leads to low contribution rates because the default saving rate is usually 3 percent or lower, according to several recent studies.
