written by a lady in the USA who explains in depth the importance of income as opposed to capital value but I can't remember her name. I saw her interviewed on tv here in the UK on a US channnel a short while back. If I search from the UK I get bogged down with UK related stuff. Try search from US.

It MIGHT be this one : http://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Heist-Companies-Plunder-American/dp/B00AK3WCZ8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362573925&sr=1-1&keywords=pensions

See also : Trading In Your Pension http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004292957113104.html

And : http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/301767-1 video

is just outstanding. It will make you very angry, everyone should read it and pass it on.

and what she said made sense to me . I'd edited and added while you were responding. Now mentioned above too.

fully funded, into executive compensation, then they bankrupt the company and tell the people who've paid into pensions all that time there is nothing left for them.....sound familiar?

notice that their life, as they knew and expected it to be, was over. It was sickening and more so to know that nothing has changed.

and if a company were up for sale, those OWED funds counted against the value of the company..somewhere along the line they started being counted as an ASSET of the company so of course a prospective buyer had no problem (a la Romney) in buying that company on the cheap, gutting the pension plan by forcing mega-debt onto the company and forving it into bankruptcy..

It's magic!

The owed pensions get taken over by PBGC (which is mostly broke and offers pennies on the dollar), and is paid by US taxpayers. The vultures take their "management fees" from the borrowed money.. the borrowed money makes the company insolvent and it goes away, taking the jobs and the pensions of the former workers..

And she busted Suze Ormann as one of the vultures selling investment products.

the shark in Jaws. I don't know why...just a gut reaction that she is not to be trusted. The gleam in her eyes...too fanatical, or something.

We've been sold a bill of goods in this country and the lemmings ate it up. The media perpetuates it. If you're old enough to remember the beginnings of this "plan your own retirement" phase (aka - the Reagan years) you'll remember the mantra we heard constantly about how 401Ks and IRA's would make all of us millionaires. The premise was put the max in your IRA every year and by the time you're 65 you'll be a millionaire. So, I actually did put the max in my IRA every single year except one, starting when I was 30 and now I'm 63.

Go ahead. Ask me. Am I a millionaire??? And I happen to think that I'm of an above average intellect and made/make a point to educate myself on a continual basis, so if it didn't work so well for someone like me, how do you think it worked for those who didn't have a clue about investing?

In my estimation, Americans just aren't skeptical enough about everything that is shoved down our throats by the media. Hell, they're still selling this b.s. about planning for your retirement and I still see young people just starting out in their careers lapping it up like it's the gospel truth.

My brother was right when he said, "Put it under your mattress. It's safer there."

Mine is gone. My husband's is there, but it's half of what it was at the max he had coming out of the Clinton years.

I was urging him awhile back to buy gold or silver as a diversification and counter balance, but that time has passed for now I think.

We've both gotten out of the big banks and into a credit union on my part and a smaller one on his. He has one large bank, but it's mainly to transfer money to another relative and doesn't have a lot in the account. We moved our mortgage too.

Where did it go?

Did you sell out in 2009 at the bottom of the market? Where you not contributing during the rebound?

Where did everyone's money go? How is it "gone"?

Mine took a monster hit at the end of W's reign, but it's back to where it was then and all the contributions being made 2008-2013 have done nothing but grow. I didn't "lose" anything. What was worth 14DJ IA in 2006 is worth 14DJ IA now.

How could it be half of what it was in the Clinton years when DJ IA10?

We had major home repairs to do which came out of his funds and my unemployment went over a year.

We're still lucky by my estimation.

I think the max I had was about 30K, then it dived and there wasn't enough room for a bounce, so I took it and used it to live on.

So it's not the vehicle of the 401K that took your money, it is the fact that you came on hard times and had to use it.

I think everyone can get that ...

I do not get someone who says they put the max in for 30 years and it's gone? If it's gone it is because you did something with it.

If your savings would have been in any other vehicle, CD's for example, the same thing would have happened to it, you would have used it to pay your bills and live. The 401K did not lose that money, your personal circumstances did.

Hope everything is going better for you now.

If it had been a CD I'd have had more to use and not the same penalties. But 30 K in a volatile market could have vanished. Not much of a nest egg really. It had gone down to 12 K when I decided to cut and run, use it to live on rather than lose it completely.

My husband's has recovered a lot, but it also lost a lot and then there were the major expenses, like I said.

some years ago when he worked there. One day the top executives sent out memos ordering all the lower level the employees NOT to sell their stock.

Meanwhile the higher-ups dumped their shares of Fannie Mae stock, made a profit, and the price of the stock plummeted. The stock shares of the regular employees were essentially worthless. This stock was from bonuses or part of their retirement plans. One guy lost more than $1 million in stock value.

There was some kind of lawsuit. My husband recovered a whopping $1500 or so of the $45,000 he lost, money we can ill afford to lose. The recovered money will buy a lot of cat food for our "retirement".

I know this happened to bunches of people who had "all their eggs in one basket" and I do know that some companies certainly fucked their employees over. Enron comes to mind immediately being in Houston.

Situations like this suck ass for sure and I feel for anyone who got caught up that type of scam. Again though, a basic investment principle is diversity, but I have heard that people were not allowed to sell to diversify.

Sorry to hear that something like that happened to you.

Not really an example of an IRA though, more like company stock options with no control over where they are invested ... the opposite of "Individual Retirement Account".

All he has to live on now is SS and what little money he gets from his restaurant job- he's 74 now.

I'll ask .... are you a millionaire?

If you put the max in an IRA and it was invested in the market and you let it ride I would like to know how much that actually did work out to. I have been in my 401K for 15 years and I have placed the max every year with a 7% company match and it's a chunk of change for sure.

So ... what did it work out to?

A lot of people aren't offered any, or offered far less than 7%.

OK, so all I am asking is that someone who says they have put MAXIMUM contributions into a retirement vehicle to tell how it worked out, and why it worked out that way.

You want to bash the IRA vehicle for whatever reason, I would just like to hear how it fucked so many people out of so much money so maybe I do not make the same mistakes.

So, you get no match and you did what? Over 15 years that match for me is about 70K, well less than what I have contributed into my account. My account has grown with time and was at a high in 2007 before it blew up ... I let it ride and kept on feeding it, it grew back to what it was before that and then some. I do not do anything special really, just pretty much what the guide says to do with the majority of it ... I play around some with moving it here and there, but not with major balances.

I just keep hearing all these stories, and they come up weekly, about how some lost all of their money in some type of IRA I would like to know how. Not to difficult of a question really.

You lost money when you took that hit and just because it bounced back and then some doesn't mean that you didn't lose money, too.

As I stated down thread, when you are approaching retirement you should not have your monies in stocks and other investments that fluctuate that wildly. So, if you got hit just as you were retiring you did not follow even the most basic of the guidelines of the IRA, which is to move money out of stock and into guaranteed income funds which are immune to the market's ups and downs as you age.

I did not lose money on theoretical money, it is worth what it is worth when you sell it ... the value of it any other time is meaningless. No different than a house, you lost money on your house in the downturn if you had to sell it.

I have yet to see anyone who followed even the most basic of rules of an IRA explain to me how they lost all their money without just being completely oblivious to how an IRA works. And most of the 401Ks will make these adjustments for you automatically if you just let them manage the fund.

If you decide to not manage your money, you will not have any ... that is true. But it is true with or without an IRA.

Unless you are a Romney, or have a stable of financial experts in the family, that $150K over a lifetime will NOT allow you to retire comfortably.. Interest paid has SUCKED for a very long time, and the interest rates bandied about on TV are mostly fantasy..

When people start a family in their 20's & 30's they usually have NO EXTRA MONEY to fund IRAs or 401-ks... as they enter their 40's they are often paying/saving for college, and as they enter their 50's they are too late to the parade.

Most people live paycheck to paycheck and have NO EXTRA MONEY TO SPARE...

to be able to retire comfortably. About the only way is if they owned their houses free and clear and were able to sell them for a decent amount of money.

Many people cannot do that.

Do-it-yourself savings plans like 401(k)s aren't pensions and are nowhere near as good.

that the $5,000 max didn't happen until the mid to late '90's (I think) and that amount was only for those over 50.

You are absolutely correct about the rest of it. We had no extra money whatsoever when we were in our 20's and early 30's. I believe I was 35 when I started the IRAs. At that point we had some extra money. I am an extremely frugal person and never bought anything on credit unless it was an emergency. Both of my children put themselves through college by working and saving their money and one of them lived at home and attended a nearby university.

the work world, have been holding the line on their middle-class lives with what they had left of those 401 (k)s and IRAs and taking serious tax hits as a consequence, so those investments are not secure, those investments which have survived have not done as well as they should have, and lots of people are now being penalized for the mistaken expectation that they could have worked a few years more and would have made it through some of what has happened to their investments and built them back, but that didn't happen either.

"Brightsiders" and the whole "Brightsiding" industry revolves around a philosophy that gives the overlords who are suppressing us at every turn a free pass and instead, turns tables and insists that it's YOU who's the problem. It's rooted in victim blaming without even once examining the reasons WHY we can't save, without even examining the reasons WHY we have no extra money.

The Personal Financing brightsiders are also rrrrrrrrrreally over-assumptive on the ROI of investment vehicles over time. One would seriously have to have a moderate to high net income, live with a bare-minimum life for decades and have absolutely no landmines of any kind for the million-dollar goal at 62-65.

Pick your Guru, Orman, Howard, Ramsey, The giant guy whose name I can never remember, hucksters and charlatans all, that got rich telling suckers how to get rich.

... it is already too late, we will have two choices, live in abject poverty for what ever is left of our miserable lives or suicide. If I were younger, I would be making connections with revolutionaries and preparing myself for the upcoming shitstorm.

Thank you Ronald Reagon, I wish there were Hell for you to burn in for all eternity.

The value will be protected* from inflation and you might have an extra $5000/year to draw on once you reach retirement age. Beyond social security, that is.

Buy and open an account at: www.treasurydirect.gov for I-bonds. There are also Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. I have not bought one of those yet.

Equities (stocks) are way oversold as a solution for retirement investing. You cannot be assured that your portfolio will not be flushed by a market crash when you need to start withdrawing money.

* The inflation adjustment is not an exact match to the cost of living; this is still a safer plan than risking your wealth in the stock market. For that matter, you cannot make a safe portfolio out of bonds today because their interest rates are low and the bond market is going to get crushed when interest rates go up.
--
A stock market portfolio is suited for somebody creating intergenerational wealth. I think annuities like Social Security are more appropriate.

Just going by what my IRA vehicle tells me (401K) that by the time I reach my retirement age most of my holdings should be into safer investments that have less fluctuation then stocks.

As it stand now approaching 50 years of age I have around 30% of my holdings in "guaranteed income fund" which makes barely nothing but is completly protected from market fluctuations. Everything that I read tells me that by the time I am retireing that number should be upwards of 75%, and then either turned to an anuity or other type of disbursement.

Either I do not read this stuff right, or my level of understanding of it is way off.

That "guaranteed income fund" is a pretty good product to use right now. CDs and bonds don't have that rate of return.

I plan on a baseline of a few thousand dollars a year of inflation protected products that give me a stable standard of living when added to my social security pension.

This is my last, favorite book on finance by Zvi Bodie and Rachel Taqqu
http://www.amazon.com/Risk-Less-Prosper-Guide-Investing/dp/1118014308/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362583268&sr=8-1&keywords=zvi+bodie

further: www.zvibodie.com

gotta go

They were never designed for retirement savings. It requires each of us to have the financial savvy of an MBA. Pension funds spread the risk of investment among many people and allows for the hiring of competent investors to manage the money.

So what are 401Ks for then? The money in a pension is in the market, just like the money is a 401K.

Same market.

You do not think that Prudential hires competent investors to manage the money? 401Ks spread the risk of investing over many people, that is the point of mutual funds with value in the billions, diversity.

Is there something I am missing? Was there this golden time in the US that the majority of people had pensions? I know in my family, outside of retired military, no one has a pension.

I can find no reasonable numbers anywhere, but how many people had pensions back when ever it is everyone longs for?

Here's just a few facts and details of what has happened in my lifetime.

Husband worked for very large corporation that was over 100 years old. They filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The employees had a defined benefit plan. They had to file a class action suit on behalf of those employees to get something from that defined benefit, but no one got 100% of what they had been promised. My husband's benefit after 12 years of working there (and it took 10 years for the class action lawsuit to finalize)? $5,465 lump sum.

Husband then worked for another very large corporation that discontinued the company match of $.50 on the dollar for about 4 years during the Bush/Cheney great recession. So all we put in was our own money even though it was tight. That corporation had massive layoffs in 2008 and my husband was let go along with thousands of other people. That company still had a defined benefit plan which amounts to $900/month after nearly 20 years of service. Where do you go to get another job when you're in your 60's and what kind of job do you think you'll get? Even with all that, I've never touched the IRA.

Back when we started our IRA's I believe the maximum you could contribute was $1500 each. (I don't feel like looking it up right now.) At some point the maximum increased and then they changed the rules so that you could contribute $5,000 if you were over 50 and then it was changed to $6,000 if you were over 50.) As I said in my initial posting, we contributed the maximum every year but one, and continued to contribute the maximum until this year. I'm 63. I've had an IRA for 35 years. It was never all invested in the stock market (as you so pointed out - it's not a good idea at any age to have all your eggs in one basket).

If you reread my initial posting, I never said I lost it all. What I said was that we were told over and over and over again that if we contributed the maximum to our IRA's we would be millionaires. We have $375K and that's only as of yesterday when the market hit an all time high.

As someone else upthread commented to you, if you think you have complete control over when you'll retire, you better think again. You could be forced to retire for many reasons - health issues, company goes out of business, company lays you off.

A pension is a fixed monthly income that is guaranteed for life. It is a defined benefit plan.

A 401(k) is a defined contribution plan. Whatever is in the account is all you have. It is not a lifetime benefit. Few people have enough money in it to last them 20 or 30 years past retirement.

An IRA and a 401K are two different "vehicles".

I thought they were both ways to save for retirement with tax deferred money, one is usually company sponsored and the other is not, other than that what is the biggest difference?

They would either be arrested or under investigation by the FBI and IRS.
But, we have to live by a different set of rules, don't we?