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FilthyImp posted:Whether he realizes how incredibly fortunate that is, and how unlikely someone from this generation will ever experience that... well that's something else, aint it? That's actually the kicker. I don't begrudge him the money except that nobody from my generation has a chance of something like that. There's no route for us. My wife was a county worker and her plan was a pale shadow of the ones that my parent's generation got. For Gen X/Y it's: get kicked around from job to job, be forced to invest in the stock market whether you like it or not, and pray there's no stock market crash in the final decade of your career because otherwise your retirement is decimated. Oh and work until you're a sad-eyed burnout in your late 60s because you need that income and savings to supplement your Social Security. Good stuff. edit: Fixed stuff. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Oct 23, 2013 |
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Oct 23, 2013 23:00
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Ron Jeremy posted:I see where you're going but I'd like to add two points. To be completely honest, I'm a public employee, and I'll get my pension through CalPers, and I have to admit that it's going to be awesome in about 30 more years. After a lot of griping and complaining about these people raking in the dough with their morally questionable tactics, the state assembly (with support from the unions) passed an Anti-Spiking bill to keep these sorts of things from happening. For every 1 of these jerks who rig the system to their own benefit, there are tens of thousands of people who have paid into this system and are now reaping their modest pensions to live off of after they've put in their time. But this archetype of Fire Chiefs living high on the hog is detrimental to the public impression of public employees. It stirs up pension envy and riles up angry mobs against what in all actuality is a completely reasonable and fair system. Yes, people who are in huge positions of power (and liability) should be paid appropriately and that stands far and away from the average pension, and that's what makes up the majority of the state's commitments.
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Oct 23, 2013 23:08
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WampaLord posted:I remember hearing something about firefighter's pensions being based on their last 2-3 years of work, so oftentimes they'll work crazy amounts of overtime in those last couple years to ensure their pension is amazing. That's very common for public sector pensions. Both my parents make way more on their pensions (nowhere near 14k/month though) than they did over 40+ years each as state and county employees because of longevity pay ramping up the last few years they worked. Well-managed pension funds (always a big if) can easily handle being that generous, and really the vast majority of pensions are much lower than 14k/month.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:20
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, but granted that is an accounting method that obviously isn't used in public unless you want to smear them. Yeah, it is a large amount of money, but I don't see how he didn't earn it. Isn't the core of all this inter-generational pension warfare that pensions were underfunded for years? If it's gonna come down to raising taxes on the young to pay for the old, I can't begrudge the young to want to renege on pension obligations.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:30
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Slobjob Zizek posted:Isn't the core of all this inter-generational pension warfare that pensions were underfunded for years? If it's gonna come down to raising taxes on the young to pay for the old, I can't begrudge the young to want to renege on pension obligations. I really don't care if the tax payer is young or old, just as long as they have money.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:32
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Slobjob Zizek posted:Isn't the core of all this inter-generational pension warfare that pensions were underfunded for years? If it's gonna come down to raising taxes on the young to pay for the old, I can't begrudge the young to want to renege on pension obligations. Well it's a great way to get people to vote away their benefits since you know who would love to see more people forced into a 401k plan. It's also amusing how the mayor of San Jose seems to pursuing a course of action that has a good chance of getting shot down in court.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:37
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Ardennes posted:I really don't care if the tax payer is young or old, just as long as they have money. I don't follow. Are you suggesting that taxes be raised to pay for benefits that were never paid for over the years? That essentially means that Boomers get a free ride. That's bullshit. Edit: In fact, public defined-benefit pensions are generally bullshit. If the economy takes a poo poo on everyone else, why should they have to pick up the tab for public sector workers?
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Oct 24, 2013 00:38
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etalian posted:Well it's a great way to get people to vote away their benefits since you know who would love to see more people forced into a 401k plan. Oregon passed a "grand bargain" where some taxes were raises (and then the revenue was mostly given in tax cuts), and PERS's COLA was slashed. It looks like it very well may be overturned because its a breach of contract by the Oregon supreme court. Kitzhaber and Jerry Brown might as well be twins (and both of them were re-elected to being governor in non-consecutive terms).
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Oct 24, 2013 00:41
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Ardennes posted:Oregon passed a "grand bargain" where some taxes were raises (and then the revenue was mostly given in tax cuts), and PERS's COLA was slashed. It looks like it very well may be overturned because its a breach of contract by the Oregon supreme court. It's pretty much why every sort of political office has legal consultants to look over new bills since it's pretty embarrassing to burn political capital just for a law to get booted out in court.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:43
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etalian posted:It's pretty much why every sort of political office has legal consultants to look over new bills since it's pretty embarrassing to burn political capital just for a law to get booted out in court. I don't know if it was intentional or not, Oregon democrats are now making sounds that the entire issue is off the table even if it gets struck down. The state technically got marginal higher revenues out of the deal, so if that was the actual plan, I guess it worked? That or just Oregon politicians have no idea what they were doing and didn't expect the court to come down on them. I mean I guess we will see but it does look like a honest breach, the higher cola was clearly part of their contracts.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:47
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I'm not a lawyer so this is an honest question, but in situations like this where the state reneges on paying pension benefits, why aren't they able to get out of breach-of-contract judgements under sovereign immunity?
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Oct 24, 2013 00:54
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I don't follow. Are you suggesting that taxes be raised to pay for benefits that were never paid for over the years? That essentially means that Boomers get a free ride. That's bullshit. Because that was what we agreed to when we hired those public sector workers. If we hadn't agreed to a defined-benefit plan for them, presumably we'd have had to agree to some other system to support their retirement savings; employer-matched 401(k), perhaps, or perhaps just much higher salaries. The taxpayer, via our proxy (the government), got (in theory) the best deal we could, in negotiation with the unions that represent those public workers. If we didn't get the best deal we could, that's on the negotiators we hired, or our representatives, or simply the voters who preferred to give a decent deal to our public employees rather than squeezing them as hard as possible. Of particular note, of course, is that a defined-benefit pension plan tends to backload rather than frontload costs. So we have been content, as a society, to push onto our children and grandchildren, costs which we could have borne ourselves. Conveniently, they couldn't vote about it at the time. Even more conveniently, those same kids, who are now gen-x and gen-yers, still fail to vote on these issues, preferring apparently to leave the bulk of voting power to the baby boomers. Nonetheless, it's not really fair to the public employees to try to bail out of a contract you (we (the country)) signed with them when we hired them. There's no taksies-backsies, it's hosed up to make someone work for their entire career under false pretenses and then renege on the agreement when it's far too late for them to do anything about it. OK, having said all that: a big reason why a lot of defined benefit plans are hosed now, has to do with their managers being loving stupid about how they managed them, and/or companies (and governments) raiding them by underfunding them or even borrowing money from them. You might not have noticed, but the stock market has more than recovered from the recession, as have bonds, so any pension or defined benefit plan that is right now underfunded, is so because of gross mismanagement of the fund's... uh, funds... and not because of "the recession". Again, that's really not the workers' fault, there are people that had fiduciary and/or contractual responsibility to adequately fund the pension plan in order for it to meet its obligations, and they've failed, massively and across a huge swathe of public and private instututions. CalPERS is one of the few that's in reasonably good shape (and is seen as a model worldwide), as is the California state teacher's retirement fund (CalSTRS), so we Californians can be somewhat smug about that one.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:57
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Leperflesh posted:Of particular note, of course, is that a defined-benefit pension plan tends to backload rather than frontload costs. So we have been content, as a society, to push onto our children and grandchildren, costs which we could have borne ourselves. Conveniently, they couldn't vote about it at the time. Even more conveniently, those same kids, who are now gen-x and gen-yers, still fail to vote on these issues, preferring apparently to leave the bulk of voting power to the baby boomers. Yeah, it's good that CalPERS/CalSTRS are in good shape (most of the issue here is municipal retirement funds, I think), but I can't agree with you assessment of equity in this situation. Yeah, it's unfair to older workers to renege on benefits, but it's also unfair to younger workers to raise taxes and decrease their ability to save to bail out older workers. Ultimately, I think we are as a society are better off investing in the young rather than the old if we ever have to make such a choice. Anything else is a weird death-culture.
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Oct 24, 2013 01:14
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Yeah and I agreed on having a certain amount of money be paid to me, but when the economy took a poo poo, I had to deal with making less money for a while. Why exactly should those of us in the private sector be liable for 100% of some guys's pension that was promised decades before every job that supported it was shipped to China even as our 401ks eat poo poo sandwiches and the city/county/state collapses around us because there's no money left for anything else? You want to hold on to your pension? Convince the politicians to jack taxes on the rich into the moon. Otherwise, the public sector, ESPECIALLY in this state, deserves nothing more than the same poo poo sandwich all of us have to eat.
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Oct 24, 2013 01:55
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My father in law was an associate chief for a county, retired at 63, makes close to 90% of his salary for his pension. That's not including health care.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:01
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redscare posted:Yeah and I agreed on having a certain amount of money be paid to me, but when the economy took a poo poo, I had to deal with making less money for a while. Why exactly should those of us in the private sector be liable for 100% of some guys's pension that was promised decades before every job that supported it was shipped to China even as our 401ks eat poo poo sandwiches and the city/county/state collapses around us because there's no money left for anything else? Crab bucket mentality at it's finest, folks. This is why we can't have nice things.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:03
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WampaLord posted:Crab bucket mentality at it's finest, folks. This is why we can't have nice things. In this case, it's looking out for my own self-interest. The public employees and their unions have had and I would stay still have plenty of time to find solutions other than "lol gently caress you pay up" but I'm not seeing any. And as was just demonstrated, when one side takes a "no gently caress you" position, negotiations break down.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:22
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WampaLord posted:Crab bucket mentality at it's finest, folks. This is why we can't have nice things. The solution for 401k collapsing due to a stock market crash is to make sure even more people are put in the same bad situation.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:22
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etalian posted:The solution for 401k collapsing due to a stock market crash is to make sure even more people are put in the same bad situation. Well we COULD have state-ran pension plans you could buy into (for example), but much like the old people on Medicare that don't want to expand it to everyone, the public employee unions don't seem to be terribly interested in anything beyond "get your hands off our pensions" because like the private unions that were broken before them, they're choosing to be obstinate. And then there's the CCPOA. A pension-less pox upon them as a matter of principle.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:26
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redscare posted:Yeah and I agreed on having a certain amount of money be paid to me, but when the economy took a poo poo, I had to deal with making less money for a while. Why exactly should those of us in the private sector be liable for 100% of some guys's pension that was promised decades before every job that supported it was shipped to China even as our 401ks eat poo poo sandwiches and the city/county/state collapses around us because there's no money left for anything else? CalPERS, like most public pension systems is primarily funded through investment income and interest.
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Oct 24, 2013 03:18
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Yeah, again, the economy "took a poo poo" in the form of a loss of jobs. There was a market downturn in 2008 corresponding to the credit crisis and the mortgage crisis, but the market has more than fully recovered since then. If pension plans are short, it's because the people managing them - namely, the employers - failed to meet their obligation to pay into them, and/or mismanaged the funds. How is it remotely fair to the workers to tell them "welp, we promised you a good retirement, but the people we voted for robbed you and we're not going to make it right by paying what you are owed. Sucks to be you!" The fact that the powers-that-be have hosed the non-union private sector, should not in any way make it reasonable or OK to turn around and gently caress the public sector retirees. On the contrary, those of us without a union-negotiated retirement package should be heavily pushing to organize and negotiate just-as-good packages for ourselves. The evidence strongly suggests that this isn't a zero-sum game. When union membership rises, wages rise, benefits rise, economic activity rises, and the economy rises. It is utterly self-destructive and self-defeating to try to tear down the small segment of the working class that actually managed - through longstanding loyalty to union jobs - to negotiate decent retirement benefits for themselves so they can live in comfort after putting in a solid 30 or 40 years of work serving the public. If you feel jealous that your situation sucks compared to theirs, the right reaction is to fight for a better situation for yourself, not to attack them. And yes, if we as taxpayers and voters failed to meet our obligations to our employees, we have a duty to do whatever we have to to remedy that, up to and including paying more money now to make up for previous mistakes. That's an ethical argument, not an economic one, but it's ultimately in our self-interest to ensure that our government can't get away with reneging on contractual promises to its employees; if it does, it will find itself (more) unable to hire quality people. And we'll get more incompetence and waste from our new workforce consisting only of people who literally cannot find any better job with an employer whose employment contracts aren't just a pack of lies. e. Just to make this clear: Nasdaq composite index, Oct. 2007 peak: 2804. March 2009 low: 1293.85. Today's close: 3907.07 DJIA, Oct. 2007 peak: 14066.01. March 2009 low: 6626.94. Today's close: 15,413.33 Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index (NYSEARCA:AGG), march 20, 2008 peak: 103.42. Oct. 10, 2008 low: 88.4. Today's close: 108.01. Both stocks and bonds are above the pre-crisis highs. Given that defined-benefit pensions invest today's contributions in order to pay out tomorrow's benefits, the fact that the markets are at or above their pre-crash highs ought to mean that they're well-funded and doing fine (yes, they'd have had to sell assets at depressed prices in order to pay out benefits during the brief but steep drop in 2008, but they'd also be buying assets at discounted prices at the same time). Well-managed defined-benefit plans are doing fine, and this includes CalPERS. Those that aren't doing fine? It's not because there's not enough young people to pay for all the old people, because the demographics of that shift have been obvious and well-known for half a century now, and therefore ought to have been planned for. It's because management made promises and then failed to plan how to deliver on those promises, and now we as taxpayers have to cover for our elected representatives' fuckups. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Oct 24, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 03:37
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Google Bruce Malkenhorst, and you will understand why the average citizen wants to gently caress over public employee pensions.
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Oct 24, 2013 03:48
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predicto posted:Google Bruce Malkenhorst, and you will understand why the average citizen wants to gently caress over public employee pensions. Well, yes, that's a good example actually. Per this LA Times article (quoted in part): quote:Regardless of the legal merits of Malkenhorst's claim, the lawsuit feeds into the caricature of greedy public employees who view the public treasury as a personal trough. It doesn't help matters that Malkenhorst was convicted in 2011 of taking $60,000 from said treasury to spend on golf, meals and other personal uses. Emphasis mine. We should hold elected officials responsible for negotiating reasonable - even reasonably generous - compensation for public employees, without creating Malkenhorsts with ridiculous compensation packages. But more importantly, we should hold elected officials responsible for alternately raiding, or underfunding, the pension funds for our public servants. It's foolish and shortsighted at best, and potentially catastrophically expensive at worst.
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Oct 24, 2013 03:59
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comes along bort posted:CalPERS, like most public pension systems is primarily funded through investment income and interest. It's also a hell of a lot better at investing than Joe Sixpack and with much better options available and can rely on the state to dump money into it if it comes up short, so it's totally the same thing.
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Oct 24, 2013 04:00
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redscare posted:It's also a hell of a lot better at investing than Joe Sixpack and with much better options available and can rely on the state to dump money into it if it comes up short, so it's totally the same thing. You're missing the point. The point is that CalPERS doesn't rely on the state to dump money in. Also, once again why are we arguing down retirement security? Why must the argument be "some non-wealthy person has a better retirement than others, get rid of it!" instead of realizing that a 401k is a joke used to earn money for your fund managers. The "I got hosed so everyone should get hosed too!" argument leaves everyone sore.
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Oct 24, 2013 04:12
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 04:14
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etalian posted:It's also amusing how the mayor of San Jose seems to pursuing a course of action that has a good chance of getting shot down in court. Because, y'know, the Supreme Court takes such a positive view the validity of direct democracy through ballot propositions. Leperflesh posted:Because that was what we agreed to when we hired those public sector workers. If we hadn't agreed to a defined-benefit plan for them, presumably we'd have had to agree to some other system to support their retirement savings; employer-matched 401(k), perhaps, or perhaps just much higher salaries. quote:Nonetheless, it's not really fair to the public employees to try to bail out of a contract you (we (the country)) signed with them when we hired them.
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Oct 24, 2013 04:24
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redscare posted:It's also a hell of a lot better at investing than Joe Sixpack and with much better options available and can rely on the state to dump money into it if it comes up short, so it's totally the same thing. You do realize that pensions don't just materialize out of thin air, don't you? It's not as if the big, bad unions huff and puff and the magical taxpayer fairy farts out pension payments. I'm a union member; among other compensation I get a few dollars an hour paid into my pension. That's money I've already earned that would otherwise be included in my paycheck. Work somewhere for forty-plus years, putting money aside the whole time, and guess what? You're probably going to have a pretty goddamn good retirement. And if part of the whole contracted agreement during those forty years was that you'd have certain benefits once you retired, it'd be pretty hosed up to just have that taken away, wouldn't it? It'd be even more hosed up if you found out that the few dollars an hour that was supposed to go into the pension fund never even got there like it was supposed to, and got used for risky bullshit instead, wouldn't it?
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Oct 24, 2013 04:32
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People like Malkenhorst make great strawmen for right wing privatize everything, pensions are not lavish with the average highway robbery pension in Detroit being $19,000 a year and $23,000 per in year in Milwaukee. It's also convenient to blame the employee for being greedy when munis played kick the can on the pensions or in same cases outright raided it during lean times like in the 2009 recession.
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Oct 24, 2013 04:57
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 posted:I also agree we should throw the concept of "contracts" on the garbage pile because that'll make it easier to abolish the concept of private property entirely. I did one better and quit my job. I also support private sector unions and believe the animosity generated by public sector unions (some just, some not) is only exacerbating their problems. Of course, their blue-collar mindset totally left them unprepared for the death of the blue collar work idiotsavant posted:You do realize that pensions don't just materialize out of thin air, don't you? It's not as if the big, bad unions huff and puff and the magical taxpayer fairy farts out pension payments. I'm a union member; among other compensation I get a few dollars an hour paid into my pension. That's money I've already earned that would otherwise be included in my paycheck. Get your union to allow me and anyone else in the state who wants to buy into CalPERS and basically fund my own pension (and help fund everyone else's) and then I'll change my tune. The way I see it, public employees in CA can either help make things better for everyone else or they'll get jobbed out when the hammer falls because as it stands, public workers get an easy ride on the back of taxpayers who could never even dream of getting those benefits in this day and age. redscare fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Oct 24, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 05:12
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redscare posted:Get your union to allow me and anyone else in the state who wants to buy into CalPERS and basically fund my own pension (and help fund everyone else's) and then I'll change my tune. The way I see it, public employees in CA can either help make things better for everyone else or they'll get jobbed out when the hammer falls because as it stands, public workers get an easy ride on the back of taxpayers who could never even dream of getting those benefits in this day and age. We'd probably all love this because the more people in our pension, the less likely people are to gently caress with it. Plus the bigger bulk of contributions helps. You need to talk to your legislators, not unions. As far as we know, my union has no control over who gets in. The real question is why don't private employers get this benefit in this day and age. Used to be we all did. My grandfather had a bunch of pensions, virtually all were from private companies that now provide 401ks. Government employees didn't cause that to die. We just held on to what we had. The fact is that the big employers want us to lose our pensions too because once they're killed off once and for all, there's no risk you'll ask "why don't we have what they have?" nm fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Oct 24, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 05:20
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 05:28
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Thus far, pension reform measures have focused on new hires from the date of the measure, or on actual screwjobs like spiking. There have not, as yet, been clawbacks. Not to say it wouldn't happen, but it hasn't yet. I was specifically responding to a poster apparently advocating such clawbacks; specifically, that rather than taxpayer money going to re-fund pensions that had been inadequately funded, public workers should just suck it up and accept a cut, despite their contracts guaranteeing a defined benefit. redscare posted:I did one better and quit my job. This might be a completely different discussion, but the "demise of blue collar work," to the extent that is actually a thing, is due in no small part to corporate and government actions specifically intended to allow US companies to outsource manufacture to developing countries. It is also a red herring: there is no fundamental reason why white collar work cannot or should not be unionized. Moreover, most of the "animosity generated by public sector unions" is actually generated by union-busting Republicans. The majority of Americans, if asked about specific features of typical union contracts, are in favor of them; things like strict enforcement of safety rules, a wage that a family can afford to buy a house and live comfortably on, and a reliable retirement package are uncontroversial. What the public actually hates is when essential services become unavailable due to a strike; conservative politicians and public service management manipulate this fact to their advantage by taking a harder line in negotiations, knowing that public sector unions can't really win; either they accept a lovely deal, or they exercise their ultimate right to collective action and get eviscerated by the press and the public. Oh, and the public also hates the fact that non-union private sector jobs, for the most part, are underpaid, have lovely (or no) health benefits, and have lovely (or no) retirement benefits. The public sees public sector union jobs as being unfairly highly compensated only because of the massive and sustained deterioration of private sector compensation, a deterioration that has occurred in no small part due to the pronounced decline in union membership in the private sector since the 1950s. We saw exactly this thing happen just now with the BART strike. It also happens with teacher strikes, and in some cases the rules don't even let union members strike at all (firemen, police, etc.) due to the need to protect public safety. How hosed up is it, then, to attack public sector unions as the bad guys, when they're one of the last remaining bastions of union protection of labor rights? Practically every other area, including domestic manufacturing, has seen unionization dwindle to almost nothing. I'm glad you support private sector unions, but it's bullshit to imply that public unions make unions themselves look bad. What makes unions look bad is anti-union propaganda perpetuated for the last 40 years by the right. quote:Get your union to allow me and anyone else in the state who wants to buy into CalPERS and basically fund my own pension (and help fund everyone else's) and then I'll change my tune. The way I see it, public employees in CA can either help make things better for everyone else or they'll get jobbed out when the hammer falls because as it stands, public workers get an easy ride on the back of taxpayers who could never even dream of getting those benefits in this day and age. I really don't think the public unions have the ability to do something like that. They can negotiate with the government (their bosses) for their own benefits, but they cannot create legislation that extends taxpayer-guaranteed benefits to the private sector. Of course, you already have a defined-benefit plan into which you, along with every other wage-earner in America, pay; it's called "social security". In any case, as members of major union organizations, and given that major unions are major political contributors and lobbies, public sector union members are in fact actively spending huge amounts of their own money lobbying in favor of pro-union legislation, better public services, etc? The democratic party is in favor of improved access to health care, for example: the public unions, with a few exceptions, support Democrats. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Oct 24, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 06:19
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redscare posted:I did one better and quit my job. Clearly the response to an abusive system giving preferential treatment to a certain subset of subordinates is to destroy those subordinates, and not try to change the system creating those inequalities. Thanks, for being the useful idiot, I suppose? e: haha, forums poster redscare warning us all of the dangers of collective action
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Oct 24, 2013 07:43
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SWITCH HITLER posted:Clearly the response to an abusive system giving preferential treatment to a certain subset of subordinates is to destroy those subordinates, and not try to change the system creating those inequalities. Thanks, for being the useful idiot, I suppose? The abusive system will never be changed in California. The unions and pensioners will ride this state into the ground if everything continues.
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Oct 24, 2013 08:33
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Simpleboo posted:The abusive system will never be changed in California. The unions and pensioners will ride this state into the ground if everything continues. Such capacity for problem solving strikes me as more of a reason we're in this pickle. There's no hope! California is a stone who shall give blood no more, the gold rush is officially over.
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Oct 24, 2013 10:02
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redscare posted:Get your union to allow me and anyone else in the state who wants to buy into CalPERS and basically fund my own pension (and help fund everyone else's) and then I'll change my tune. No problem, you seem like a stand-up guy who's concerned with solidarity and fairness. Get your co-workers together to unionize your workplace and we'll find a local for you. I advise you to stay current on your dues, though; reps get pissed off when you're behind.
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Oct 24, 2013 16:36
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I really don't understand why there isn't a state-run pension fund. It would have to get me better return than my terrible 401k (15 years at 3.8%! Whoopty loving doo!) and I would absolutely pay into it rather than the goddamn STOCK MARKET.
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Oct 24, 2013 17:28
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 18:38
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Having trashed 401(k)s a bit, I feel like it's worth mentioning that there are good ones available. My 401(k) includes bond funds, and if I really don't want to be in mutual funds at all, I can pick money market or even just cash. And of the stock funds, there are good low-cost index funds across the board. This still isn't as good as defined-benefit, since I am bearing all of the risk, but it's better than a lot of people's lovely 401(k) plans that have nothing but high expense-ratio managed funds that are basically a huge ripoff. The The Long-Term Investing and Retirement Savings: gently caress eTrade thread in BFC has a lot more to say on the subject, and the advice there is really good. Broad declarations of "gently caress stocks" are kind of ignorant.
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Oct 24, 2013 18:41
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