Large companies like AT&T, Lockheed, and others have made employees fairly unhappy at every turn, as most large corporations tend to do. They cut jobs to save pennies on the bottom line and have shown general lack of understanding of the plight of average Americans today. But in recent years, they have started going a step further.

New lawsuits have emerged challenging those companies, and plenty of others, for their plans to dump off pensions into the hands of insurance companies owned by private equity firms. They have been turning said pensions over to Athene, which is owned by Apollo, who specializes in retirement solutions and asset management, such as private equity's.

In short, many of these companies simply do not want to deal with retirement and want to dump it onto someone else so they can save money. Financial planner Richard Rosso says many problems exist with this practice.

"The problem is if the insurance company goes under, then the state has to bail out the pension...and we know most states are not in great shape, so that is a concern," he says. "It would mean your pension is no longer insured by the guaranteed pension fund."

Your money then lands in the hands of people who can then invest in reckless or risky things, and there is not much you can do about it. If it fails, then whatever state you live in would foot the bill, and the idea that states in the current economy could afford that is delusional.

Insurance companies though are generally pretty conservative, and do not want to increase any kind of risk. They have to worry about not just pensions but a whole host of other things. But the problem with this set up is not the insurance companies themselves.

"If the private equity with their greedy little hands...decide to do something else, and interfere with the business to boost returns, that means more risk," he says. "And the one thing you do not want with a pension is risk."

As mentioned, many of these companies do not want to be in the retirement business, they want to be in the money-making business. AT&T and IBM alone last year brokered 773 of these specific kind of deals with pensions, breaking the old record of 568.

All of this has ignited concern among Americans of their hard-earned retirement money being gambled away, and these lawsuits challenging the idea might be the last line of defense.

"I do not see this trend stopping any time soon...but it will be important to see the results of the legal action being taken," says Rosso.

He adds that these moves put more pressure on employees to save money and do it all themselves.

Jimmy Barrett

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