Elder Law Commons^™

Pension De-Risking, Paul Secunda, Brendan Maher

Paul M. Secunda

The United States is facing a retirement crisis, in significant part because defined benefit pension plans have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans that, whatever their theoretical merit, have left significant numbers of workers unprepared for retirement. A troubling example of the continuing movement away from defined benefit plans is a new phenomenon euphemistically called “pension de-risking.”

Recent years have been marked by high-profile companies engaging in various actions designed to reduce the company’s exposure to pension funding risk (hence the term “pension de-risking”). Some de-risking strategies convert a federally-guaranteed pension into a more risky private annuity. Other approaches …

Litigating For The Future Of Public Pensions, Paul Secunda

Paul M. Secunda

Public pensions are horribly unfunded, millions of public employees are being forced to make greater contributions to their pensions, retirees are being forced to take benefit cuts, retirement ages and service requirements are being increased, and the list goes on and on. These alarming developments involve all level of American government, from the recent move to require new federal employees to contribute more to their pensions, to the significant underfunding of state and local public pension funds across the country, to the sad spectacle of the Detroit municipal bankruptcy where the plight of public pensions plays a leading role in …

Protecting Our Aging Retirees: Converting 401(K) Accounts Into Federally Guaranteed Lifetime Annuities, Lawrence A. Frolik

Articles

America’s retirees are faced with a potential financial disaster. Economic security in retirement has long depended on Social Security, private savings and employer provided retirement plans. While much attention has been paid to the financial problems of Social Security and the lack of private saving for retirement, little attention has been paid to an alarming development in employer provided retirement plans: the likely inability of retirees during the long years of their retirement to successfully manage their retirement funds accumulated in 401(k) and similar accounts. We as a society have set up a funding system for retirement that assumes retirees …

The Pension Game: Age- And Gender-Based Inequities In The Retirement System, Camilla E. Watson

Scholarly Works

This Article begins by stressing the importance of retirement benefits in general and employer-provided benefits in particular. It then addresses specific current issues of age and gender discrimination under both the private retirement and Social Security systems. Gender-based discrimination is emphasized because of the overlap between gender-based discrimination and age discrimination. Finally, this Article suggests specific reforms for a fairer and more adequate systems in the twenty-first century.