Plan Participant

  

Categories: Investing, Retirement

The plan? Retire well. The plan here is your retirment plan, and if your company has, say, matching grants as part of your benefits package, then you are a plan participant. It's pretty typical for most professionals to take, say, $120k in salary and add a bonus, and then the employee can put away, say, $10k in a retirement plan, which the company will match.

So the company puts in another $10k in addition to the employees savings. For the employee, they're getting $20k a year in savings (usually with a few strings attached...like, they have to be an employee in good standing for that year in order to vest into that matching contribution benefit). And for the company, it's costing them at least $130k to pay that employee $120k with the matching $10k in plan contributions, with the employee playing the role of plan participant.

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Finance: What is a Pension?31 Views

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finance a la shmoop. what is a pension? well it rhymes with tension, and likely

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for good reason. if you're a teachers pension or a fireman's pension or [person wearing dark glasses writes something down]

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another state employees pension that's backed up by a state that's going

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bankrupt. Hi, California, Hi Illinois. well we're looking at you. all right people

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well a pension is another term for a retirement fund. but what's special about

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a pension is that the employer essentially forces you to put away money

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for your retirement and then they invested for you.

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how nice. or at least be sure you invest it well on a salary of 75 grand a state [gambling table shown]

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employed ditch-digger might get a contribution of say 10 grand a year into

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her pension, and that's each year 10 grand of forced savings for as long as

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she you know digs ditches for the state. and in some states where the unions are

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strong in the governing financial knowledge is weak the government

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guarantees a minimum financial return on the pension investment made on behalf of

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the employees. that is in California for example the state guarantees a 10% per

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year return on their invested pension savings. if the invested return like [equation]

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investing it in Wall Street and stocks and bonds and private equity funds and

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all that stuff well if that invested return is less than that number less

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than that 10%, then the state rights to the pinch and a check to cover the

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incremental difference. yeah it's a huge Delta and it's well pretty much why you

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a Californian Illinois you're going bankrupt remember. Jesus Saves

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