Hard working loyal employee for 25-30 years, looking forward to a beautiful retirement, only to find out that their promised company pension may have already been stolen. Farfetched? No.
In one year alone, 2005, about 120 corporations dropped their employee pension plans. On average, only one out of five corporate employees in America is covered by a traditional corporate pension plan today.
The problem is that of those corporations who still have pension plans, 80% are running out of money and will never be able to pay full benefits and may drop their plans completely.
Looked at another way, 8 out of 10 corporate benefit plans are under-funded. As a result, U.S. corporations are defaulting on their existing pension obligations at an alarming rate:
- Major airlines such as Northwest and Delta, recently persuaded a Federal bankruptcy court to delay or terminate their pension obligations to their retiring employees.
- Health care benefits for pensioners are particularly vulnerable and will gradually disappear. GM's outstanding unfunded healthcare obligations, at an unfathomable $64 Billion, are 25% more than its entire market capitalization!
- Inexplicitly, a company such as ExxonMobil, with the biggest quarterly corporate profit on record in history, recently announced that it has under-funded its pension plan by $11.2 billion. That was not an oversight. They gave departing CET Lee Raymond a $400 million dollar retirement package.
Can the government help?It should, they were the ones that allowed corporate raiders, such as Dick Cheney to siphon off retirement funds and consistently, though legally, under fund them. Don't count on the US government to keep your pension checks coming if your company runs out of money.
The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), has a whopping $23 billion deficit and it is the Federal body charged with insuring corporate pension plans that have defaulted. In the last 30 years, the PBGC has been forced to take over 3,400 pension plans.
With accounting practices now demanding that corporations "Book" their future retirement obligations on current financial statements, it is likely that the trend toward dropping pensions will become a landslide in the next decade.
As it is now, they have dramatically reduced pension payments to those retirees whose plans they have taken over to try to stretch out the remaining money.
A treacherous feature of the PBGC's pension payments is that you are not sure that you will not have to pay back a certain percentage of the money you are paid by them until your payment level is certified; a process that, somehow can take years.
The trend toward bankrupted and abandoned pension plans will also accelerate as the Baby Boomers queue up to get theirs only to find that their companies have been playing fast and footloose with the regulations that let them raid their employee pension plans and/or significantly under fund them.
It amounts to nothing less than malfeasance to the loyal hardworking men and women who made these companies successful.
The future does not look good, retirement wise, for those who expect to retire in the next 20 years or so. You should expect to have to augment or replace your pension with private resources or expect to have to work until you can no more. Forget about company supplied health care coverge for retirees.
This will become the accepted norm for later generations. Corporate pensions will have become quaint notions. Unless you have an IRA or a 401(K), you will be penniless when you retire.
In the mean time, what are you going to do, turn to family and friends or charities? If you are in your late 40's or 50's, you will have to go into emergency mode and start saving prodigious proportions of your salary for the balance of your working life and/or make investments that will be able to support you when you retire.
If you are already in your 60's, you will probably just squeek under the wire, but your payments and health benefits will probably gradually be reduced as the years go by.
By the way, I would not look to Social Security to pick up the slack any time soon!
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