Gannett freezes employee pensions

Company stock could be a great thing... just not for journalists. Imagine if you worked for Microsoft or Google when they hit it big that stock could have netted you a lot of money for retirement or what have you.

 

Yeah, that didn't work out so well for all the people I knew at Adelphia, either.

 

Look on the bright side: If the stock price continues to slip, you're going to be getting one hell of a lot of shares in that match mechanism. ;D

 

I know people who did really well with stock options at Home Depot.

Of course, there are extremes. For every Microsoft, there's an Enron, I'd imagine.

 

At CNHI, at least at my shop, all we have is 401K. Thank God, there's been no mention of company stock. Blech.

Did take a five grand hit in my 401K last quarter, though. Ouch.

 

The memo says the change will affect most of the company's employees. However, there are many Gannett employees (myself included) who are not yet vested and therefore are not affected. In fact, for us, the 401K change is a good thing (an employee currently contributing 6 percent can cut that by 1 percent and come out 1 percent ahead of their current plan).

From a business standpoint, this does seems smarter than buyouts. This way you only have to give departing employees the money that is already coming to them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't a lot of industries going away from the pension model altogether? I seem to remember hearing something about the auto industry having a problem with those.

 

Damn how long have you been working there to amass that kind of coin on a CNHI salary...

 

The smoking gun line proving Gannett is lying

"- This is a large improvement in the 401(k) match"

Why would you put that in there, unless you were pulling a fast one?

 

So Gannett will be issuing more stock, and providing the perfect conditions for people to dump that stock en masse at four set times each year. That's a formula for driving the stock price even further down, leading to more layoffs, cutbacks, etc. Some real financial wizes there, I tell ya.

 

Very typical of the illustrious folks at Gannett. Glad I left them behind long ago.

 

I think this is the way things are heading in many industries.
Gannett stock will probably rebound some (eventually), but it won't make you rich. It does put the onus on personal savings, like the Roth IRA and putting as much as you can in the 401(k).

Let's face it, newspaper pensions weren't going to be enough to live on anyway.

 

I'd strongly advise putting in the bare minimum, if anything at all, into Gannett's 401(k) and doing what someone else suggested: open a Roth IRA. And once you're maxing that ($5,000 this year), open another stock fund of some kind.