Will Someone Buy Your Pension?

How safe is your pension?

How safe is your pension if it’s bought out by a Wall Street firm or hedge fund?

The Washington Post has a great story on just this issue. The paper says “some financial services firms are trying to clear a regulatory path that would let them buy out pension plans, freeing employers from pension obligations while potentially giving profit-driven financiers direct control over the retirement savings of millions of Americans.”

Is this a good idea?

“Critics counter that buyouts are a dangerous idea,” says the paper, one “that would further diminish pension benefits at a time when baby boomers are beginning to retire and longer life expectancies mean more years of pension checks. Opposition groups mistrust the motives of the financial firms seeking a piece of the $2.3 trillion in assets in corporate pension plans around the country.”

Remember when HMOs were supposed to help patients by fighting for better care and lower costs? The idea of pension money being handled by hedge funds and Wall Street firms is an inherently-bad idea — imagine if your money was invested in a stock and the sale of that stock would benefit the stock broker or hedge fund. Maybe a nice, tasty subprime loan package…

The full story is at:

On and Off Hook

Does this impact reverse mortgages? You bet — if your pension is reduced you may well want a reverse mortgage, if only to eat on a regular basis.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Reverse Mortgage . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.