Have a little extra to hang out??
I wonder what the neighbors would think if I hung out some money. Problem is having the money in the first place.
So maybe some of you already started your rollovers and pension stuff. I didn't do much other than look at the account online until today. I just called the benefit center (877-275-8947) today and went through the automated selection hell (different voices at the various stages - someone should rate these prompts). Finally, spoke to a rep and started the pension cash out process.
Ok, for you that already did this or maybe didn't have a vested account you can skip reading this now.
So here's my unofficial advice
1) if you don't know your password - find it or get that fixed - you need it
2) rolling the money over - setup a rollover account now that moves this process along
3) expect this to go slow
4) They only do the pension payouts on the first of the month
5) to get the next month the paperwork needs to be in by the 10th of month before
6) I already missed Oct (oh, you don't care about that - sorry back to advice)
7) the calculation changes based on some government interest rate (I think it's Treasury bond rate) - the important note here is the calculation changes month to month.
8) back to that slow part - now I'm waiting 7-10 days for the paperwork
Comment - I wish the company helped us more with setting this up before we left.
4 comments:
I was told that my pension would take 20 days to manually recalculate because corporate apparently was adding funds to my pension account while I was a contractor (prior to being an official full-time employee). Well... it turns out that the manual recalculation was the same as it was before they started the process.
Heed the advice thus far. You NEED the password to access the asinine voice prompted system. I got my paperwork the other day, signed and mailed it to Lincolnshire. I now will wait for the check to send to my broker.
The Fidelity process was somewhat smoother. You need to have the IRS disclosure papers in front of you otherwise Fidelity will not roll your dough. I got that check this week too.
All in all, I do not have any major complaints about my time since June 2003. The last 30 days though have been another story.
As two of you commented, I also expect the 401K transfer to be easier than the pension payout.
So now that some of you have these self directed IRA investments what ideas do you have for investing?
I expect some of you may have a bias against VZ, but in my IRA investing that stock has been one of my better ones. Of course, I always seem to find some loser stocks.
A bit of stock investing advice I heard recently - It's certain you will lose money, you just need to gain more than the losses.
Anytime I start talking stocks, I like to set the expectations with the story of my diversification buy of Enron. Wow that was a bad trip.
Well maybe you'll go with some funds or bonds like many people do.
I think the control of the money is important.
One of my sisters is a broker for Edward Jones and I get a break on some of the fees. I talked with her this morning and she is recommending some Goldman Sachs funds in a Traditional IRA. I am going to throw the pension money in there too.
As for the severance money, I also have a Roth IRA -- which I will contribute to on a semi-monthly basis. I am throwing a portion into a set of rolling CD's as well.
One of my sisters is a broker for Edward Jones and I get a break on some of the fees. I talked with her this morning and she is recommending some Goldman Sachs funds in a Traditional IRA. I am going to throw the pension money in there too.
As for the severance money, I also have a Roth IRA -- which I will contribute to on a semi-monthly basis. I am throwing a portion into a set of rolling CD's as well.
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