In my 17 years in the corporate world, I have never heard any of my peers my age speak of having a pension plan at work. When I first started work at Pennzoil in 1990, the company had just recently offered early retirement to most of the older workers. Many of those more mature workers at the time probably had some form of pension plan. However, pretty much every new employee hired with me and afterwards did not have the option to participate in a pension plan. Back then, pensions were becoming obselete. Today, they are pretty much non-existent for new workers.
A pension plan is commonly known as a defined-benefit plan. This is when the company pretty much takes care of funding your retirement. You really don't have any say in how the money is invested. The cash is automatically deducted from your paycheck and invested by the company as they see fit. In a way, it's kind of like how Social Security works.
Today, however, workers are pretty much on their own to ensure they fund their retirement adequately. The defined-contribution ( i.e. 401K ) is now the primary means by which workers handle their retirement. For someone like myself who enjoys investing and keeps up with the latest information, a defined-contribution plan is superior to the old defined-benefit plan. I prefer to have full control over my investment choices. I don't want my money going into a black hole and to have someone else responsible for my financial destiny.
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