The Forgotten 70%: Strategies for Pension Plans Accruing Benefits
- While up to 70% of all single-employer pension plans have participants who are still accruing benefits, risk management solutions discussed in the pension community typically focus on the needs of the other 30% of plans—those that are hard frozen.
- The mechanistic “glide path” approach tailored to hard-frozen plans is likely suboptimal for accruing plans, as it would lock in the need for permanently higher contributions.
- We recommend a more flexible, holistic risk budgeting approach that seeks to maximize expected return subject to each sponsor’s unique risk tolerance.
- Pursuing excess returns through active, alpha-driven strategies is particularly valuable for accruing plans, which face many years of future benefit accruals that must be met through either asset returns or contributions.
For many US pension plan sponsors, the déjà vu of falling discount rates and volatile equity markets again raises the question of how best to hedge pension liabilities, if at all. The issue of liability hedging is especially pertinent in today’s complex and asymmetrical interest rate environment.
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With the initial chaos of the COVID-19 market dislocation behind us but uncertainty still ahead, now is the time to refocus and potentially recalibrate core tenets of pension plan management. In this video series, we share our recommendations on how to address these challenges.
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