June 2017

14Jun

US. Pennsylvania Pension Reform Bill Becomes Law

Pennsylvania’s Senate Bill 1, which moves employees with non-high-risk jobs into hybrid retirement plans, has graduated to a law. Gov. Tom Wolf gave the state pension reform bill the green light Monday. It was passed by the Senate on June 5 and the House of Representatives on June 8. “Today is yet another demonstration that by working across party lines and branches of government, we can address important issues,” Wolf said in a press release. “The common thread that runs through...

June 14, 2017
News
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09Jun

US. NYC’s Pension Fund Becomes First In Country To Divest From Private Prisons

New York City's pension fund is the first in the nation to fully divest from private prisons, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer. Trustees of the city's pension fund voted unanimously to divest in mid-May, and have since pulled $48 million of stocks and bonds from three companies: GEO Group, CoreCivic, and G4S. "With Donald Trump in the White House, we're seeing more and more industries try to profit from backwards policies at the expense of immigrants and communities of color,"...

June 9, 2017
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06Jun

US. High Court Expands Religious Exemption for Retirement Plans

The exemption in federal pension law for church retirement plans should apply even to plans not initially established by a church, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday. This morning’s reversal stems from class actions against Advocate Health Care Network by current and former employees. Advocate runs 12 hospitals and 250 other health care facilities in Illinois. Though it is not a church, it has contractual relationships with the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Illinois...

June 6, 2017
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May 2017

29May

US. Who killed retirement security? If you look closely, it wasn’t the 401(k)

“America’s retirement savings system has failed,” famed financial planning author Jane Bryant Quinn has said — and she isn’t short of company. Media articles regularly recount the ways in which Americans, burdened with the responsibility of saving for retirement through 401(k)s, fail to put enough aside for old age. In response, 84 percent of House Democrats have co-sponsored legislation to expand Social Security benefits, while states are hoping to establish their own retirement plans for private sector workers. But here’s the...

May 29, 2017
News, OP Ed
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26May

US. A Step Backward in Financial Regulation

The scarring experience of the financial crisis of 2008, and the federal government’s actions to avert widespread chaos in the financial system, remain poorly understood events across the political landscape. Although Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 to prevent such crises from recurring, some of its provisions reflect that poor understanding. Rather than surgical precision, Dodd-Frank took an inefficient broad-brush approach to making the financial system safer. And despite being overly burdensome, it failed to address a range of...

May 26, 2017
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25May

US. Why tax reform could take away some of the benefits of retirement saving

Retirement saving in typical employer plans – both defined benefit pension and 401(k) plans – is tax advantaged because the government taxes neither the original contribution nor the investment returns until they are withdrawn as benefits at retirement. If the saving were done outside a plan, the individual would first be required to pay tax on their earnings and then on the returns from the portion of those earnings invested. Deferring taxes on the original contribution and on the investment...

May 25, 2017
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25May

A Third of Older Latinos Have Tapped Into Retirement Savings

Suddenly jobless and with small children to support, Jose Victor Camargo without hesitation cashed out a retirement account he had with his former employer. That was more than a decade ago, and the father of three used the money to pay for rent and stay afloat until he found another job. "We are always in need, so I used the money," he said in Spanish. "We were struggling. We tried to make the money stretch." An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public...

May 25, 2017
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24May

US. Trump’s proposed retirement changes would have major impacts on current feds and retirees

It’s happened before; lawmakers and think tanks have offered their own proposals to change the federal retirement system. Despite a few initial worries, current federal employees and retirees have remained relatively unscathed. Yet that could change next year. Federal financial experts are sounding the alarm bells on the major changes to the federal retirement system included in President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget — proposals that they say would leave a significant impact on both current retirees and employees and...

May 24, 2017
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24May

US. Obama, Buffett or Trump: who’s right about the cost of retirement investing advice?

In a stunning reversal, the Trump administration will not seek to further delay an Obama-era investment rule designed to put an end to costly, conflict-filled retirement advice. The so-called fiduciary rule will require anyone selling retirement investment advice to put their clients' interests first and to plainly disclose fees. It was set to take partial effect on April 10, but the incoming Trump administration had forced a delay until June 9. In an Op-Ed, Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta gamely...

May 24, 2017
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23May

US. Trump Budget to Cut Federal Pensions

The Trump administration’s 2018 budget to be released tomorrow will include a range of proposed spending cuts. The budget will call for cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs. These reforms come on top of proposed cuts to discretionary programs released in March. There is more good news. The budget will propose cuts to the fat benefit packages received by federal workers. An April CBO report found that benefits for the government’s civilian workers were 47 percent higher,...

May 23, 2017
News
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