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President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress in early March, as part of his fiscal 2015 budget, to reduce some of the tax advantages for employer-sponsored retirement plans for higher-income earners, according to published reports. Plus, the president wants to limit the value of all tax deductions, defined contribution exclusions and IRA deductions to 28% of income — and include an overall cap on all retirement accounts, including pensions, that could bring in $1 billion a year in new tax revenue, according to a Pensions & Investments report. Read Companies bracing for 1-2 retirement punch . According to the report,...

President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress in early March, as part of his fiscal 2015 budget, to reduce some of the tax advantages for employer-sponsored retirement plans for higher-income earners, according to published reports. Plus, the president wants to limit the value of all tax deductions, defined contribution exclusions and IRA deductions to 28% of income — and include an overall cap on all retirement accounts, including pensions, that could bring in $1 billion a year in new tax revenue, according to a Pensions & Investments report. Read Companies bracing for 1-2 retirement punch . According to the report,...

President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress in early March, as part of his fiscal 2015 budget, to reduce some of the tax advantages for employer-sponsored retirement plans for higher-income earners, according to published reports. Plus, the president wants to limit the value of all tax deductions, defined contribution exclusions and IRA deductions to 28% of income — and include an overall cap on all retirement accounts, including pensions, that could bring in $1 billion a year in new tax revenue, according to a Pensions & Investments report. According to the report, the proposals are designed to direct more of...

The president’s myRA plan tells you a lot about where the country is headed. Many Americans have virtually nothing saved for their retirement. That is a fact. President Obama emphasized this point in his State of the Union speech and proposed a dramatic solution. He wants you to trust your retirement money to the government—so you can be protected. One of the most important rules in investing is never invest in something you don’t understand. Just behind that is never invest in something just because some guy in a good suit tells you to. You work too hard to waste...

<p>When you hear, “Hello, I’m from the federal government and I want to help you manage your retirement savings,” the best advice is to run away, as fast as you can.</p>

When President Barack Obama introduced a new retirement savings plan during his State of the Union speech last month, the Republican response was uncharacteristically muted. Although Republicans were upset about the president’s new reliance on executive authority to push his agenda, they had few harsh words about the details of the retirement idea. Dubbed MyRA, Obama’s initiative is intended to allow workers who do not have access to other workplace savings plans to open an account overseen by the government that would invest in low-risk Treasury bonds. It’s a relatively modest proposal, one that would be entirely voluntary for employers...

Over the course of their 60-year marriage, Bernard “Bernie” Karpinkski and his wife, Violet, took few chances when it came to their retirement. “From the time we were married, we started saving,” says Bernie, 89, who lives in Pueblo, Colorado. “We lived much more conservatively than most people. We had three cars our entire lives and drove them until they had close to 200,000 miles on them before we bought another. We didn’t buy our second home until we had enough saved to pay cash.” While their friends moved into bigger homes, took vacations and put their life on plastic,...

Prepare For When The New MyRA Becomes "TheirRA" Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement Feb 10, 2014 - 06:47 PM GMTPeter KrauthBy: Money_Morning Personal Finance Peter Krauth writes: In his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama unveiled something new: a retirement savings account to "help" Americans build a nest egg, coining it the "MyRA." Something immediately felt wrong about the proposal... but I couldn't put my finger on it. So I researched the new MyRA and found details to help you understand just how it works. But I also saw some potential dangers there that you need to prepare...

In his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama unveiled something new: a retirement savings account to "help" Americans build a nest egg, coining it the "MyRA." Something immediately felt wrong about the proposal... but I couldn't put my finger on it. So I researched the new MyRA and found details to help you understand just how it works. But I also saw some potential dangers there that you need to prepare for now... What MyRA Really Means Like most government programs, getting to their essence can take some sifting. So I've distilled here what I think are the...

AOL Inc. blamed President Barack Obama’s health-care law for its plan to reduce its spending on contributions to employees’ 401(k) retirement plans. AOL, owner of websites such as the Huffington Post, will still match employee contributions to retirement plans up to 3 percent of their paychecks, Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong said. Under the new policy, it will make the matching payments in a lump sum at the end of the year, forcing employees who leave before then to forfeit the benefit, he said in an interview today on CNBC. “Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as...

**SNIP** The biggest change will be a new emphasis on retirement readiness, rather than simply getting workers to join a plan and contribute. The idea is to focus on actual retirement outcomes, and it reflects apprehension about the large number of Americans who are approaching retirement unprepared. If that's something you're worried about, it turns out your boss shares your concern. The 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey by the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) found that just 13 percent of workers are very confident they will have enough money to live comfortably in retirement. And a 401k benchmarking survey released last...

A conservative Southern California group has launched a public pension database that includes retirees’ names, their annual pension payments, years of service, last employer and year of retirement. ---SNIP-- A center press release announcing the database notes that nearly 100 former government employees received a quarter-million dollars or more in annual pension payments in 2012, that more than 1,700 CalPERS pensioners received at least $150,000 from the fund and that California’s two university systems paid 27,115 retired public employees pensions of $100,000 or more. “It’s indefensible,” Bucher said.

Last week in his State of the Union address, the President of the United States laid the groundwork for a new government program he calls “MyRA”. As he explained to the American people, this program will allow US taxpayers the ability to loan their retirement savings to the federal government (which, according to POTUS, carries ZERO risk). Given that US Treasury yields fall far below the rate of inflation, this is a big win for the government, and a big loser for the poor suckers who loan them the money. The President then hit the road, touting his one-of-a-kind program....

Simply put, the new myRA program put forward by Obama is at best a sucker's deal… or worse, it's a first step toward the nationalization of private retirement savings. (Note: If you haven't yet heard of myRA, I'd strongly suggest you read this excellent overview by my colleague Dan Steinhart.)Even before the new myRA program was announced, there had been whispers about the need for the US government to assume some risk for US retirement accounts. That's code for forced conversion of private retirement assets into government bonds.With foreigners not buying as many Treasuries and the Fed tapering, the US...

The president’s annual state of the union address is another example of how dysfunctional our government in Washington has become. Article 2, section 3 of the US Constitution says that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union….” The president is the chief executive of our government. As chief executive, it makes sense that he report periodically about the state of affairs to the body responsible for passing laws, the Congress, so they have a sense of what needs to be done. If handled correctly, the State of the Union...

Real life isn’t always a “Field of Dreams,” where “if you build it, they will come.” Instead, there are times when you build it, and they go “Ho-hum,” and mostly ignore you. So while any effort to encourage increased retirement savings among workers deserves to be applauded — arguing against increased savings is like disputing the value of parenthood and apple pie — it’s hard to see President Obama’s myRA program achieving most of its goals, because once you get past what he described during the State of the Union address, it appears to be a lot of wishful thinking....

I spend a lot of time browsing FR, and have noticed a lot of FReepers have a lot of knowledge/opinions pertaining to finances. There also appears to be a good number of Freepers who are about retirement age with a good conservative viewpoint. Taking into consideration current events and the steady devaluation of the dollar, my question to the experienced Freepers out there is this: Let's say you're 25, are debt free, make no car payments, earn O-2 pay and are unmarried. You don't have any retirement accounts but are apprehensive of starting an IRA or contributing to a Thrift...

With California facing a massive teacher pension shortfall, Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, D-Los Angeles, unveiled an effort Wednesday he hopes would fully fund the system. An influx of revenue has allowed California to emerge from years of yawning deficits and protracted budget fights, and the pressure is mounting for the state to do something about an avalanche of liabilities that runs into the hundreds of billions.

RUSH: Well, now, that's fascinating you mention that, because that's the next item up in my Stack of Stuff and I talked about this weeks ago, maybe even months ago when Tom "Dung Heap" Harken proposed this. Now, before you condition Alicia, let me refer to what she's talking about. It's Mark Hemingway in the Washington Examiner: " Will the government outlaw your 401(k) plan? It seems like an absurd possibility, yet earlier this month two Democratic senators, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., held a hearing on Capitol Hill exploring the possibility of doing exactly that....

January 30, 2014 (PLANSPONSOR.com) – Proposed legislation from Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) would expand access to privately run, portable retirement plans for all workers. Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, began scouting the idea of an auto-enrolled plan for all workers in 2012 to address the country’s growing retirement crisis "The plan would be shaped as a lifetime stream of income,” Harkin said in a press conference. Unlike 401(k) plans, there would be no lump sums and no borrowing. The assets would be annuitized at retirement age.