Vested Benefits

Benefits from a pension or other retirement account that belong to the employee and that he/she keeps regardless of his/her future employment with the company offering the pension. While different companies have different rules as to the number of years at which benefits vest, the time period is usually five years. If an employee quits before five years (or before the set time period), he/she loses the benefits that he/she has accrued up to that point. If the employee quits after the benefits vest, he/she may keep them.

vested benefits

Pension benefits that belong to an employee independent of his or her future employment. An employee usually becomes vested after five years of employment with the same firm, although there are numerous exceptions requiring longer employment. Compare pension plan.

Vested Benefits

Pension benefits owned by the taxpayer.

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References in periodicals archive ?

The per-participant flat premium rate for plan years beginning in 2019 is $80 per participant for single-employer DB plans; the variable-rate premium is $43 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits, capped at $541 times the number of participants.

Pension Risk Transfer on the Rise

Because plaintiff is "[a] former employee who has neither a reasonable expectation of returning to covered employment nor a colorable claim to vested benefits," he is not a participant under ERISA, and his claims are not preempted.

Man's misclassification claim not preempted by ERISA

Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) has completed a lump-sum offer for eligible former associates who have deferred vested benefits under the company's US pension plan to receive the value of their entire pension benefit in a lump-sum payment.

Unisys completes lump-sum cash-out offer

First, many firms have offered buyouts to terminated employees with vested benefits. Those individuals no longer accrue benefits, so their cost is not growing, but removing them from the rolls makes life simpler for the human resources (HR) department.

Next Generations' Plans

This means that vested benefits for participants can be reduced as necessary to avoid insolvency (taking into account any partition), as long as the reduction keeps benefits at no less than 110 percent of the PBGC guaranteed rate for multiemployer plans.

Is it too little, too late for multiemployer pension reform?

For many multiemployer plans, the result has been inversion of the pyramid: fewer dollars flowing in from fewer employers and for fewer active employees, while the number of individuals having vested benefits for themselves and their spouses swells.

Ebb and flow: P/C is quarter results: unions swim against the tide as pension issues surface

Under applicable ERISA provisions, stopping contributions was deemed a withdrawal from the Teamsters Fund, in which case Scott Brass became liable for its proportionate share of the Teamsters Fund's unfunded vested benefits, totaling approximately $4.5 million.

Pension liability shifted upstream

In this rare scenario, a CASD SERP will typically deny the executive all vested benefits and make the credit union the sole owner of the policy.

CASD SERPs-worth a close look

* Calculating a plan's unfunded vested benefits under the PBGC variable-rate premium rules; and

Retirement plans and executive compensation

The Retirement Equity Act was passed due to the "inequitable" possibility that the surviving spouse would receive "no survivor benefits under the plan even though the participant had accrued significant vested benefits before death."iv The concern of Congress was even more acute when the spouse was a homemaker without assets of his or her own.v To remedy this, Congress required all defined benefit plans, and most defined contribution plans, to provide a default payout option of a Qualified Joint and Survivor Annuity (QJSA).

Making IRAs Last Two Lifetimes

In general, the rules are designed to allocate all of a plan's unfunded vested benefits among the employers responsible for contributing to the plan based on each employer's share of the plan's contributions.

Employer contribution obligations: considerations for employers participating in multiemployer pension plans