Colorado PERA Good or Bad The Truth
As a former financial planner in Colorado, I get a lot of questions about Colorado’s PERA program and is PERA a good retirement plan. For those of you who are not from Colorado, PERA stands for Public Employment Retirement Association. It is a public pension plan for employees of the State of Colorado and public-school teachers, similar to CalPERS, the public pension plan for California. Most Colorado PERA jobs are with state and local governments, as well as many teachers in Colorado. Recently, PERA has taken some lumps in the media. For whatever reason, Republicans hate PERA, even though it is a version of exactly what they want to do by reforming Social Security to be based on investing in the markets. Sometimes, these criticisms are valid, and sometimes they are not. What is true is that PERA is not just another ordinary pension plan, and to really understand it requires delving into those details. PERA and Social Security The most important thing to understand about PERA is that it replaces Social Security. You know how people are always saying that Social Security would be better off if it invested worker’s contributions in the stock market? That is exactly what …