Pension

A pension (also known as superannuation) is a retirement plan intended to provide a person with a secure income for life. Although a lottery may provide a pension, the common use of the term is to describe the payments a person receives upon retirement.

Hybrid and Cash Balance Plans

Hybrid plan designs combine the features of defined benefit and defined contribution designs. In general, they are usually treated as defined benefit plans for tax, accounting and regulatory purposes. As with defined benefit plans, investment risk in hybrid designs is largely borne by the plan sponsor. As with defined contribution designs, plan benefits are expressed in the terms of a notional account balance, and are usually paid as cash balances upon termination of employment. These features make them more portable than traditional defined benefit plans and perhaps more attractive to a more highly mobile workforce. A typical hybrid design is the Cash Balance Plan, where the employee's notional account balance grows by some defined rate of interest and and annual employer contribution.

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In the US, plan conversions from traditional to hybrid plan designs have been controversial, notably at IBM in the late 1990s. Upon conversion, some plan sponsors retrospectively calculated employee account balances -- if the employee's actual vested benefit under the old design was less than the account balance, the employee entered a period of wear away where he or she accrued no new benefits. Hybrid designs also typically eliminated the generous early retirement provisions in traditional pensions.

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As a result, critics of cash balance plans have seen the new designs as discriminatory against older workers. On the other hand, the new designs may better meet the needs of a modern workforce and actually encourage older workers to remain at work, since benefit accruals continue at a constant pace as long as an employee remains on the job. Court cases have not resolved these problems, and currently there is legislation before the United States Congress to clarify the legal status of cash balance and other hybrid designs.

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