Pension underfunding refers to a situation where a pension plan does not have enough money to cover the financial obligations and promises it has made to retirees or employees for their future retirement income. This occurs when the money set aside for pensions is not sufficient enough to provide the expected benefits.
Full definition
The vast majority of states underwent pension reforms in the past decade to address the financial challenges
of pension underfunding and none abandoned their defined benefit pensions.
But when one takes a step back and looks beyond the
temporary pension underfunding issue (which has already been largely rectified by market moves), things don't seem nearly as dire.
A colleague of mine who works at a pension fund did a study last year in which he concluded that, because of the extreme degree of
public pension underfunding, a 10 % decline in the stock market for a sustained period — i.e. more than 3 or 4 months — would cause every single public pension fund to blow up.
Ontario, for instance, has a Pension Benefits Guarantee Fund that's intended to
cover pension underfunding up to certain limits if a company goes bust.
However, an additional decade and a half
of pension underfunding, faulty actuarial assumptions, and extra benefits for workers have driven the system's unfunded liabilities sky - high.
Aside from
the pension underfunding discussed above, the largest adjustment was $ 16.5 billion in excess cash.
In reality, when it came to what the CTU most wanted in its 2012 strike, it chose pay increases over fixing
the pension underfunding, which then stood at $ 8 billion.
Poor investment performance and
pension underfunding are risks, certainly, but there is a very low probability that either will make your pension evaporate.
•
Pension underfunding was cut in half, decreasing to USD 224 billion (USD 218 billion deficit in 2002) from the record USD 452 billion