Addendum to Retirement Plan
April 4, 2007
We received our information pamphlets on the upcoming changes to our retirement plans and I found another tasty tidbit.
Remember the piddly 2.2% that the university was contributing for the unvested-until-after-5-years-tenure employees? Well, they’re preparing to freeze that plan at the end of the fiscal year. We knew that. And we knew that the benefit payout from that plan is still protected. But what we didn’t know was that we are now all fully vested in that plan, regardless of our tenure! So the 2.2% that I completely disregarded because it wasn’t really “mine,” is!
I’m a grad student and I was surprised to learn that I had $1000 or so in a university retirement account that had been automatically deducted from my TA paycheck over the past four years. I upped the percentage recently once I even knew I was eligible to be in such a program as a part time employee, but it was still nice to discover the $1000 unexpectedly. I also rolled it over into longer-term equity investments rather than the bond fund it was automatically placed in.