Wharton Professors Olivia S. Mitchell and Marshall Meyer put GE’s pension freeze/buyout in context and discuss potential fallouts: @WhartonKnows journal & podcast here. Image courtesy of Jeff Turner.
GE’s Pension Freeze: Will It Help — or Hurt?
retirement security
More Troubles For GE As 20,000 Pensions Are Frozen
Only 16% of the Fortune 500 still offer defined benefit plans, vs 60% 30 years ago, says Wharton’s Olivia S. Mitchell, discussing the announcement that GE will freeze pension accruals for 20K employees & offering lump sums to 100K more. Read here.http://bit.ly/2MlBmbk Image courtesy of Chuck Miller.
GE Will Freeze 20,000 Worker Pensions In Effort To Cut Deficit By $8 Billion
GE is freezing defined benefit plans for 20K workers and offering 100K former workers lump-sum buyouts, as it seeks to cut debt and risk. This is part of a decades-long trend away from defined benefit pension and toward defined contribution plans in the US, states Wharton’s Olivia S. Mitchell in…Read More
SECURE Act Update
Professor Olivia S. Mitchell contends that deferred lifetime annuities encouraged by the SECURE Act will protect retirees from longevity risk: see here at the Philadelphia Inquirer and our paper here.
Making Retirement a Gig for Life
How prepared are gig workers for retirement, and how can older Singaporeans steer clear of financial mistakes? CREA researchers considered these questions at a roundtable on ageing and financial preparedness.…Read More
Improving Women’s Retirement Security
Older women confront many retirement security challenges. For one thing, women live longer than do men, so their money must stretch farther. For another, many average fewer years in the paid workforce and, when they do work, their average pay is often lower. Additionally, they are more likely to work part-time, for a lower salary. These factors all translate into lower retirement accumulations, smaller retirement payouts, and higher poverty rates in old age, as reported in a recent Society of Actuaries 2014 study “Impact of Retirement Risk on Women.”…Read More
Fixing The Weakest Link: Strengthening Retirement Security By Default
One drawback of defined contribution (DC) retirement plans is that they place the burden of making financial decisions on participants who are often ill equipped for the task. This has contributed to widespread concerns about retirement security. Will people have enough savings when they leave the workforce to afford a comfortable retirement? Will they then draw on their nest eggs efficiently while in retirement, enabling them to avoid financial ruin over an uncertain lifetime?…Read More
Seven Retirement Gaps And What To Do About Them
What do we expect to happen as we age, and how do our ideas about retirement planning change? New research on post-retirement risks by the Society of Actuaries identifies where the knowledge gaps are and how we can do better.…Read More