You may have received a funding notice from LLNS.
The funding percentage keeps dipping year after year even with hefty employee contributions. It is sitting at 92% for 2023 down from 115% in 2022.
It makes sense to retire as soon as possible while the plan is solvent.
Is my panic justified?
I was told the plan invests heavily I'm corporate bonds. These have been performing well. So, what could be the reason for the underfunding?
9 comments:
@Scooby
The funding percentage hasn’t been dropping year after year. Yeah, in the latest report it dropped from the beginning of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, but for the year before it increased from 112% to 115%.
Also, the large drop in funding percentage in the latest year wasn’t unexpected because the stock market lost around 15% from the beginning of 2022 to the beginning of 2023. It bounced back by the beginning of 2024 so expect next year’s pension report number to look much better than the 92.88% for the most recent reported year of 2022-2023.
-Damon
5/06/2024 7:01 PM
It is not all stock, as they also invest in bonds so just looking at stocks is not the best measure.
But if you want to panic there is plenty of doom mongers out there. Below is the latest one with somebody predicting a 50% in the stock drop because of some pattern he found about the yield curve. Take these predictions for what it is but remember if you you are going to panic, panic first.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13389467/american-households-retirement-401k-stock-market-recession.html
I read a book authored by David Wiedemer PhD called, “Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown”. In one of his chapters, he described the multi-trillion dollar debt, which are figures hard to relate to. So he describes the federal debt using a home mortgage comparison. In this analogy, he compares a 30 year home mortgage, to an attempt to pay off the federal debt in 30 years, which is not a particularly aggressive repayment.
Assumptions:
Annual Federal Revenue $X
Interest rates ~2% - 3%
Fixed Federal Expenditures $Y
(social security, defense, etc.)
Goal: 30 year debt repayment
His conclusion was in order for the Federal Government to achieve this 30 year repayment goal, they’d have to double the Federal revenue through taxation, drastically cut federal expenditures, print money, or a combination of all 3.
By the way, his analysis for this chapter of his book, wait for it, was in ~2011, when the Federal Debt was ~16 trillion dollars, today it is 34 trillion dollars…
In 2024, how would our GDP/Federal Revenue and fixed expenditures, fit into this fictitious 30 year federal debt repayment plan? And what about those assumed 2% - 3% interest rates?
For the folks that were hired just before the transition, that would make them about 40 give or take if they were hired right out of college. The future doesn’t look good!
8:56 the only possible solution is to default, which will cause the stock market to collapse, which will cause hyperinflation, which will require the fiction we call the dollar to be revalued and we can start again under totalitarian rule. Meanwhile the woke student population will be run over by this train while still complaining that they need $60 per hour minimum wage to give them something to do with their PhD in social science.
8:56 the only possible solution is to default, which will cause the stock market to collapse, which will cause hyperinflation, which will require the fiction we call the dollar to be revalued and we can start again under totalitarian rule. Meanwhile the woke student population will be run over by this train while still complaining that they need $60 per hour minimum wage to give them something to do with their PhD in social science.
5/08/2024 5:32 PM
This brings up a number of issues. (1) To avoid default we need more people in the US to keep economy going hence the need for mass migration. (2) To keep the dollar the worlds currency it means we need to win the war in Ukraine, help Israel, and keep China in check. (3) We need to start implementing some "totalitarian" rules as you call them now to keep the economy going, and keep the population from being upset. This includes making sure Trump or any threat to the state is not put in power. That some kind of housing for migrants is found, that threats to democracy are stoped, and that we can contain any kind of terror threat. Expand the military more, or have enforced military service which could be supplied by the migrants. To keep the dollar alive we need to a much bigger and stronger American empire.
As ironic as it sounds the young people and students are completely on board with this if you ignore some some small issues like the Israeli protests but they are all for the rest of it. In general the woke are for much supportive totalitarian type rule and embrace big-state controls. They are literally the inverse of then student protests of the 60s. All you have to say is that we need to conquer the world to save oppressed people and they will go along with any war, invasion of military aid. This by the way is why the Israel protests are so problematic on campuses and why they are being shut down faster than any BLM riot ever was. It is one the first times the woke generation has not gone along with the narrative.
On the subject of the TCP1 pension, does anyone know what the website address of the BNY Mellon pension website of LLNL is or if it even exists anymore? I accessed it soon after I retired a couple of years ago to make changes in my Federal and State tax withholdings, but is seems to have disappeared. And yes, I called up the BNY Mellon phone number a couple of times to ask, but gave up because no one answered after long holds so if anyone knows the answer I would really appreciate it.
-Damon
Hello Damon,
Here it is:
https://my.accessportals.com/app/bdw/login
@Scooby
Thanks! Much appreciated.
-Damon
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