About half of the US population is enrolled in a pension even today…
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Passerby6497@lemmy.world 10 hours agopension
I’m not sure how old you think most of us are, but I don’t think pensions are a common retirement vehicle anymore, and haven’t been for a while. 401k would probably be the modern equivalent, and it’s still running on the stock market for the majority of its life prior to beginning to withdraw.
julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
teslasaur@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Pension is the correct English term. 401k doesn’t mean anything unless you’re american.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
I don’t think it is.
A pension implies benefits are distributed to the person in retirement, usually with some fixed amount per month. My understanding is that in the UK, defined contribution plans are required to be invested largely in annuities by retirement, which satisfies that, whereas in the US, 401ks don’t have such restrictions. So a 401k could be depleated well before death, or be passed on to children as inheritance, unlike an annuity. There are required minimum distributions, but they don’t kick in until your 70s.
If 401ks switched to a defined benefit plan at retirement, I could see calling it a pension. But since they’re not, I think that’s misleading, and employer sponsored plan makes more sense.
julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Not true of UK defined contribution, you can do what you want just like a 401k, though it may be disadvantagous for tax purposes.
It’s pretty normal in British English to use pension as a synonym for retirement account, though I can see why you don’t like that.
Lucelu2@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
I am in the US. In regard to employer based retirement, there are a few pension programs still available, mostly union based. In other corporate environments that do not offer union pensions (as they are non-union)- they offer the 401K if a for-profit or a 403B if non-profit. As you get closer to retirement, many 401K/403B recalibrate to a larger proportion of Bonds vs riskier stocks/futures. Although I also invest in some ETFs that are not pretax (only the earnings are taxable).