[NorthGuy11]

The death of pensions really did it. My wife and I each stumbled upon positions with a pension, and it seems as if the roller-coaster just stopped. We had no "loyalty" and moved around whenever the mood struck us, but now we look at the risk/reward of a more exciting job vs 25 years of stability and a secure retirement... it's not a hard decision to make.

[mikekchar]

Just be careful. I used to work at Nortel in Canada which at one point had over 90k employees. When I worked there, I believe they were making $18 billion a year in revenue. Profits appeared to be good.

A few years later it turned out the "good profits" were actually accounting fraud. The company tanked and everyone lost their job. But Nortel had a fairly good pension system, so the people who had worked there for 25 years or more were fine, right?

Well, the company feared that while they were tanking the "best and brightest" executives would leave. Oh my! What to do? They were allowed to siphon the pension money into "executive retention bonuses". Of course this didn't stop the company from ultimately running out of money, but it did get rid of a large part of the pension money.

Investigate your pension scheme and make sure you understand what will happen to your money should the company go out of business. Especially find out where the pension system is ranked as a creditor. No company is too big to fail.

As for me, I only worked there for 5 years and left when it was at its height. After I quit I got a letter from Nortel stating that my minimal benefits were not worth it for them to administer. They were going to keep my pension money and I was welcome to sue if I didn't agree. I guess as it turned out, it didn't make much difference...

[refurb]

Listen to this guy. I'd much rather get a big 401k match and have the money be mine than trust that my pension will be there based on the whims of the company and market.

Look at the airline industry. Plenty of pensions have been restructured during the string of bankruptcies. Pensions are guaranteed by a federal body, but only up to ~$50K/yr I believe. You'll never get less than that, but you $100K/yr pension might get cut in half and the gov't will say "that's the best we can do".

[limeyx]

Yes, these days a private pension isn't worth the paper it was written on in many cases.

These things should always have been administered by 3rd parties and required to be fully-funded.

No "executive" can look at so much money "just lying around doing nothing" without wanting to get their grubby little hands on it.

Very sad for a lot of people

[maximilianburke]

It wasn't mentioned if the job was public or private sector. Many government jobs have good pensions.

[chris_wot]

In Australia, this gets taken out of the equation as we have compulsory superannuation.