Originally Posted by slowplay

I agree that maxing out retirement contributions is a big deal. As it was explained to me, what you want to do is prevented by IRS rules. There are more limitations than just the 415 limit you wrote about. There's one for maximum individual contributions (around $16K, I think?), and another one that limits the "qualified" amount of income from which you can make contributions. If you're over 50 you can make catch up contributions, which aren't included in any of the limits. Once you hit any of those limits I think you're done.

The R&I folks are doing seminars at all the pilot bases during the next 3 weeks. This would be a great question to ask them



I agree on getting the percentages up. We get a 1% bump each year up to 14% in 2012, but that's only 3% better than AMR's B plan pays in addition to their 1.25% per year A plan. It's not enough, in my view. Still, when you compare it to everybody elses numbers on the main page of this site, it's not bad. UAL gets 16%, but LUV's is only 7.3%. CAL gets 12.75% plus a frozen pension. Airtran is 10.5%, and JetBlue only has a match up to 5%. Everybody else's numbers will make it more difficult to raise ours, but we should at least equal UAL in my view.