Your future and the stock market
Here’s some good news on the pension fund front from California’s Marin County where the pension fund soared $225 million bringing assets to $1.7 billion. Pension officials had predicted a 7.5 percent return but a rising stock market made the increase more like 15 percent.
It’s a story that shows how tied in public sector pensions (and pay and benefits as well) to the performance of the stock market and how reckless certain members of Congress are to jeopardize our economic recovery by shutting down the government and threatening to not raise the debt ceiling.
Even Bill Monnet of Sausalito, author of a recent “pension roulette” report by Marin’s watchdog Citizens for Sustainable Pension Plans and a harsh critic of public sector pension plans said he was pleased.
Brown Armstrong accountants reported an investment gain of $223 million, taxpayer contributions of $103 million and employee contributions of $17.7 million in its audit of pension programs for the system accommodating county employees, the city of San Rafael, fire agencies in Novato and Southern Marin, and a handful of other special districts. Expenses included paying out $102 million in benefits to 2,679 beneficiaries, $3.8 million for system administration and nearly $1 million for legal counsel, the audit disclosed.
It gave the system a clean bill of health, saying the average funded ratio for the benefits promised by system agencies was 71.3 percent. “In general, this indicates that for every dollar of benefits due, we had approximately 71 cents of assets available for payment as of last June 30,” Brown Armstrong reported.
Hopefully the good news will continue in Marin County and the rest of the country despite the foolhardy actions of some of our elected representatives in Washington. If you live in a district where your Congressional representatives are playing Russian roulette with your future, you might want to contact them and let them know what you think.
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