Airline Pension Plans
 

The way I read it, the Legacy Carriers have the following "Pension Plans/401K matches":

AA - 16%
UA - 16%
DA - 12%
AL - 13.5%

Are these numbers correct?

dl-15%

ten

Allegiant - 4%

Thanks. I've got 15 years left in this Industry and want to evaluate the best Retirement plan among the Legacy carriers. I realize there will be some possible significant changes in the next 5 years, but Contribution percentages along with Mandatory retirements (early UG) will allow all of us to make better informed decisions regarding our eventual retirements.

16% is correct for UA. At 50 y/o you can do the "catchup" pretax contributions of $22,500 and have a good chance of reaching the 415e limits. So, consider retirements and W2 potential in your analysis. Good luck

A 401k is NOT a pension plan. Don't confuse the terms.

Yes, these are not "matches", they are defined contribution plans which means that DAL at least will put 15% in addition to your pay into a 401K type account. There is no match component, but you can put as much of your own pay into your 401K account as you want (up to the IRS limit) in addition.

I think FEDEX and UPS still have traditional pension plans in effect so they would be the place to go if pension is your #1 motivator.

All this is correct and the 415 limit this year is suppose to be 52,000. So if one's only goal was to save for retirement they could shovel a ton of money into that account. 15% + (employee contribution)

Plus profit sharing, which you can choose to allocate to your 401 I believe. While that's harder to predict (and may go way down or away entirely) so far its been quite nice. 8% this year, I think 6% the year before that, etc.

You are correct. You can have anywhere from 0%-100% of the profit sharing put directly into your 401k. I did 100% last year to avoid the taxes on the bonus which tend to be higher than your tax bracket. Bonus money seems to be taxed at roughly 30-40 % which you can recoup some of that on year end taxes.

I have recently flown with several guys who are only contributing to the ROTH 401K (after taxes) because they hit the IRS limit by September. May as well keep putting money in year round but when you make 250k and the company contributes 15% the company is alone putting away 37500 per year toward your IRS limit of 52k. May as well put the 14.5 into a ROTH 401K :). Unfortunately, I do not have this same dilemma.