Plan Participant

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.