May 21, 2023

If you think CEO pay is bad, check their retirement fund

 New Republic -   Do you save enough for your retirement? Probably not. You know who does? Rich people. Not much of a surprise, I know. But you may not have considered how extravagant retirement planning for top executives beggars the rest of us. That’s something that never occurred to me before I read a new report on retirement inequality from the Institute for Policy Studies....

According to the IPS study, at the end of 2021, the average retirement balance for an S&P 500 chief executive was $19.4 million. The IRS report is filled with examples of similarly grotesque inequalities. C. Douglas McMillon, the chief executive at Walmart, where median annual pay is $27,136, will, when he retires, receive monthly checks of $1,042,300. Ralph Lauren has $54.4 million socked away in deferred compensation for his golden years (which have begun already; he’s 83), while fully 41 percent of his employees have zero balances in their 401(k)s, which means either they never funded them or they had to pull out whatever they put in (paying a considerable tax penalty in the bargain).

No comments: