Financial Tip of the Month: Think your pension fund is safe? Think again!
To read the full July 2016 Newsletter Click Here[/button] Company pension funds used to be managed with care by a team of financial planners who kept the fund balanced
with a close 50/50 split between stocks and bonds. If stocks were up and bonds were down, the fund was still a safe bet and generated the income needed for pensioners. This long-term strategy has been used for decades. What has happened since the crash of 2008, pension managers cannot simply get 6-7% earnings out of those two vehicles, largely due to “Quantitative Easing” by the US government. So what are the managers doing? They are actually gambling with the pension funds to keep the 6-7% payoff! They are certainly doing careful research before investing, but the vehicles don’t have the safety of the old 50/50 mix. More and more pension fund investments are being spread into US Large Cap funds, US Small Cap funds, Non-US Equity, Real Estate, or Private Equity funds. While this strategy spreads the risk, it also increases the Standard Deviation of the fund from 6-9% to a staggering 17-18%. Standard Deviation is commonly known as the wobble factor. This is the range of high and low returns when compared with previous history. For example: the standard deviation on a CD at a bank is zero. This is because the CD is guaranteed to pay the percentage promised at the end of a specific time period. No wobble factor at all. Most of us want guarantees in retirement. But, if you have a pension, where are the investments? You might want to open that report the next time one shows up in the mail to see what the managers are doing with your money. Want to read more? Great article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Pension Funds Pile on Risk” by Timothy Martin. Still confused? You are welcome to attend any one of our FREE Retirement Income Planning workshops for more details on how to make your money last! Register online at americanretire.com or call us at 602-281-3898.