How exactly is that an improvement to our retirement?

I’ll throw the BS flag on this one…assuming at some point you fly 5 years in the left seat of any aircraft or upper seniority right seat international it’s be hard to not get $260k. You all have to stay healthy, but generally we all assume that too.

if you manage to not make $260k 5x in your career you likely have other/family/spousal $$ and don’t care about the pension.

So much bologna, I just don't know where to start.

No, I did not see what words were slid across the table to The Company. That was before my time at the MEC table. If I knew the words, I would not have been permitted to share them in public, and if you think you know the words, that's a problem.

To say that the quantity and value of the pancakes only matters if the fund exceeds the the hurdle rate and they appreciate in value is more evidence that you just don't understand how it works. The value of the pancakes can change, either up or down, every year. The value in any year where income is earned determines the number of pancakes that are "bought", and the value in the last year of employment determines the size of the retirement check.

A person could determine what their minimum pension would be only if a minimum is somehow determined and protected. Is that what you want? A minimum benefit? A minimum benefit equal to what we have with NO CHANGE AT ALL? IF it's only a minimum benefit you want, then why are we bothering to change anything in the first place?

Sorry, a minimum benefit equal to no change ain't good enough for me. 50% income replacement from the pension is the lowest acceptable solution.

Why do you keep talking about the Portable Pension Plan that other non-pilot FedEx employees receive? Do you think you'll convince people by confusing them with irrelevant noise? Nobody is talking about what handlers or AMTs get. This is a conversation about your waffles.

Nobody knows what their pension will be under our "A" Plan, but they can know what it will be under a variable benefit plan? Do you realize how absurd that is? Everybody can go the retirement.fedex.com website and find out EXACTLY what their benefit will be based on when they choose to retire, when they choose to commence their benefit, and how they plan to plan for their spouse. You can create and save multiple scenarios and compare up to three different retirement options.

That will not be possible with a variable benefit plan because there's not a variable called "How much money I will make 17 years from now" or a variable called "How well the fund will perform in the market 8 years from now." Do you think they chose to use the word "variable" to describe the plan because it had a cute combination of letters and a sexy sound when spoken, or do you think maybe it had something to do with the fact that the benefit is ... ahemm ... variable?

There you go again saying Pension Plans are Defined Benefit Plans. That's like saying that fruits are apples. Third graders can spot the problem with that logic.

I'm beginning to wonder if you're actually interested in a meaningful conversation based on facts, or just creating chaos and confusion.




Small correction here. Not everybody can see what their retirement benefit will be by navigating to the above-linked website. The first question (link) asks the question, "Are you a FedEx pilot?" Some participants in this conversation, I'm afraid, cannot answer in the affirmative. ;)





.

I see stuff like what I've posted below at most retirement planning sites. So why would we want pancakes or waffles?

Note: Pensions are most common in the following fields: military, government, education, gas and electric, insurance, and health services.Having a pension is likely winning the lottery. Enjoy it for the rest of your life! Most people are not so lucky. In a low-interest rate environment, a pension’s value has increased significantly.

And yet...somewhow, a company with a fiduciary responsibility was able to build a Modeler, available to every FedEx Pilot, to make just such an impossible prediction.
A Modeler that used your Current Traditional Pension, that allowed you to input expected career longevity, as well as expected performance, and returned a Prediction based upon your Personalized Inputs.

When I used The Modeler, I assumed zip, nada, zero "secret sauce", maple syrup, so the comparison The Modeler created for me was based solely on the Floor value of my predicted earnings.

I absolutely love your circular logic, just because a PSPP style plan is a Pension plan and covered by the PBGC doesn't mean it's a Defined Benefit Plan.

But, hello, Defined Benefit Plans are the only plans the PBGC actually provides coverage for.
Just because you don't like how the Pension Benefit is defined, doesn't make it anything other than a Defined Benefit plan.

And yes, I can go into FedEx's Retirement website and make a prediction of what my future Pension will be. But that prediction is only accurate if I actually earn, what I expect to earn. Earn the high 5 I expect to earn.
Barring those of us who've already maxed out the High 5, I doubt anyone is using their current High 5 as the value for their 25 YOS of Pension.

I can’t believe you actually believe the modeler. That thing was garbage written by a grade schooler!

Syrup for your pancakes.

Bless your heart, you are so funny.

Either you don't understand what fiduciary means, or you don't know who Cheiron is ... or maybe both. Let's take them one at a time.

FIDUCIARY -- Quick Google search yields, "involving trust, especially with regard to the relationship between a trustee and a beneficiary." Cheiron has no fiduciary responsibility to you or me, or to ALPA. They sell stuff. They want us to buy it.

CHEIRON is a consulting firm, and FDX ALPA is a customer. Another quick Google search reveals this on their "Meet Cheiron" webpage:
As an aside, I highlighted a few of the points they brag about. If ours was a struggling, troubled plan, they might be a good place to look for ideas. It is not. It only needs to be updated to match current pay rates and IRS rules.

Oh, and you should take a look at their best example (I'm assuming it's the best example, because it's the one they use on their website) of a Variable Benefit Plan implemented for Greater Boston Hospitality Employers Local 26. They only had a 401(k) benefit, no pension of any sort. They only received the formal Internal Revenue Service determination letter to the plan in July 2017. What a long track record!



Every bit of the modeler was assumptions. When you would upgrade was assumed. Annual pay rate increases were assumed (and in my opinion, unrealistic). Market performance was assumed. How much you would work each year was assumed. You were given the opportunity to use your own assumptions for some of the factors, but even if you did not, those "options" were based on Cheiron's assumptions. And when all of those assumptions were wrung through a spreadsheet formula, the best you could get were percentile predictions.

Did you see the option to work less than 100% in any year without reducing your retirement benefit? Nope. If you looked at that "Floor value" of your predicted earnings and are making retirement plans based on those figures, you might be in for a big surprise.



You need help understanding what "circular logic" is. In the first place, it's Circular Reasoning, which is a logical fallacy that constitutes an improper premise.

The error you continue to make is a propositional fallacy, namely affirming the consequent. It goes like this. If A, then B; B, therefore A. An example I gave you to try to make it clear was If this is an APPLE, it is a FRUIT. It IS a fruit, therefore it is an apple.

To bring it back to the current topic, If A) it is a Defined Benefit Plan, then B) it is a Pension. You say B) it is a Pension. So far, you are correct. The error is to then say, A), it is a Defined Benefit Plan.

(I thought we had questions like this in our battery of interview tests. I thought most of us could pass those tests. I wonder what the minimum passing score was.)


The PBGC protects lots of different kinds of pension plans. You can download a list (I did) of the Pension Plans they cover -- all 22,800 of them. Included in the list, of course, is the FEDEX CORPORATION EMPLOYEES' PENSION PLAN, which covers 200,205 participants. I'm sure you'll agree that the vast majority of those participants don't have the same Defined Benefit Plan that we pilots have.

Oh, and guess who I did NOT find on that list. Greater Boston Hospitality Employers Local 26.



Unbelievable. You think you can predict a Variable Plan with Cheiron's spreadsheet (to call it a Modeler makes it sound far more robust than the single cell formula that drives the whole thing), but you can't multiply 3 numbers?

Nobody can tell you what they'll get under the Variable Benefit Plan because they cannot predict how much they will work each year or how the stock market will perform this year or next year much less the year in which they will retire. I can tell you TO THE PENNY how much I will get from our Defined Benefit Plan whether I work my tail off and bring home a million dollars next year, or I go out on long term disability and never touch an airplane again. We all know that every year is worth 2% of our FAE, and that average of high five years is the only other thing in the formula which can vary, and we have control over how much we want to work. I don't know how it would even be possible for a pilot to work for 25 years and not very easily achieve a High Five of $260,000, even in the right seat of a widebody and commuting from Podunk Home, U.S.A.

In a word, your argument that a pilot can predict his retirement benefit under the Variable Benefit Plan but cannot predict the retirement benefit of our current Defined Benefit Plan is ludicrous.






.

"they are tenacious in their mendacity" I commented on another thread. To what motivation is the tenacity?

Do we all get to make up our own definitions of a pension and then let people argue over if my definition is correct? The governing groups, who are the rule makers for pension make the definitions, not some self proclaimed internet pension expert (TonyC).

This whole discussion has turned into a comedy club. Each person gets to take the stage and throw around self proclaimed truths (Jokes). All the while the experts (in the crowd) are painted as idiots. Wow true pilot behavior. The experts on everything, just ask them. Are a few really this dense?

If the pension has a floor return, you most definitely can go at any time and figure out what your minimum annual amount will be.

Now back to letting the internet pension specialist educating us all.