PERA

State Government Pensions

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state government pension retirees.

State government pension plans represent a touchstone of public finance, providing long-term financial stability for millions of public sector workers. This comprehensive, yet focused guide will take you through what these pension plans are, how they function, and the benefits workers receive in their retirement years. How Does a Local Government Pension Plan Work? At its core, a state government pension plan is a long-term savings and investment plan designed to provide income to public sector employees after they retire. These plans are typically defined benefit plans, meaning that the retirement income is predetermined based on several factors including salary, length of service, and a benefit multiplier, unlike defined contribution plans where the retirement benefits depend on investment returns. The most significant advantage of these state government pension plans is their predictability. Because they’re structured as defined benefit plans, they provide retirees with a steady, guaranteed stream of income for life, regardless of market fluctuations or economic conditions. This ensures that the retiree can maintain a desired standard of living post-retirement. How do these state government pension plans work? The process is fairly straightforward. Both the employee and employer contribute a certain percentage of the employee’s salary towards the pension …

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Colorado PERA Good or Bad The Truth

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PERA logo

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 …

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Where Is My PERA 401k History?

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the history of pera 401k accounts is missing

Did you login to PERA 401k account and find all of your historical data missing? Do you wonder where your PERA 401k history is on the website? I had the same questions when I tried to log in and plan out buying some PERA retirement years with the 401k. Turns out, there is an easy answer to why all of your PERA 401k data is missing. PERA Changed Custodians If you have a balance in the PERA 401k, then you got the same mailers, emails, and notifications I did. You probably took a quick look at them and figured it wouldn’t matter and decided to ignore them, like I did. That is where the answer lies, however. The PERA Board of Trustees decided they could do better for PERA members. For an organization as large as PERA, doing better usually means lower expenses. 401k Blackout Period Once PERA figured out that they wanted to change 401k custodians, they needed to figure out how. For better or worse, the process of changing 401k administrators is highly regulated with a whole host of rules that must be followed. One of the rules that migrating 401k plans must follow is the imposition of …

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Vacation Almost Over

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Wow. What a crazy time to be on vacation. Let’s see… The Fed raised interest rates. There was a bit of hiccup regarding that. In my humble opinion, this is the last “freebie” interest rate hike the Fed has in its quiver. In other words, this interest rate hike probably doesn’t have the possibility of tanking the economy. But, the next one might be a different story. If the Fed pulls the trigger on the next hike too quickly, that could be the one that pops the whole economic expansion and heads us into the next recession. If you are a conspiracy theorist, it’s too late to affect the mid-term elections, but a series of ill-timed rate hikes toward the end of this year, and into the next drops the economy into recession just in time for the next Presidential election. That’s pretty far fetched, that they would do it on purpose, but it could happen nonetheless. (I like that nonetheless is one word 🙂 Also, a trade war! Again. Not just with China this time, but with Europe and Canada?!? Actually, there are a few glitches in our trade with Canada, but this taking a club to some pealing …

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