https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/15/alexa-von-tobel-has-high-hopes-for-fintech-3-0/
She is also selling a bridge to nowhere and tickets for rides on her magical white unicorn.
24 replies (most recent on top)
No one said the cash lump sum pension plan is better, the company dropped the traditional pension plan in 2013 because it wasn’t sustainable as did many other companies, pretty much only government employees get the gravy train pension plan these days funded by us taxpayers. As someone else mentioned you can be more aggressive with your 401-k knowing you have this fixed income portion in your retirement portfolio. Any financial advisor would tell you to have a portion in fixed and the % amount should increase as you get older.
NM Used to have a real pension plan. We've got an NM annuity pal... and not sure where you are getting 13% contributions when the plan itself says between 5-8% contributions.
https://www.northwesternmutual.com/life-and-money/cash-balance-pension-plan/
With inflation around 3% and the plan management fees of 1.5%... the return is essentially nil at the rate they are offering. While it is better to have this benefit than not, the Cash Benefit plan was not a equal replacement for the Pension Plan they scuttled.
@2c1 It is indeed a pension and few other companies offer anything close. Instead of the lifetime guaranteed annuitized defined-benefit pension that ended in 2013 (and wasn’t sustainable) we now have a cash lump sum pension as you know, upon retirement you’ll transfer it to a IRA and manage or have it managed from there. As others mentioned we get 13% instead of a 401-k 3% match. I’ll take 13% at 5.5% over 3%. Here’s free tax advice, consider the pension as part of the fixed income portion of your portfolio and therefore you can be more aggressive with your 401-k. You’re welcome.
Vanguard provides an 11% average return. The NM cash balance only guarantees a 3% return each year. I would rather take the 3% match and take advantage of an 11% compounding return instead of a 13% match and 3% return. Do the math.
Not sure where you are getting your info... wages are continuing to rise YOY. Job openings are also abundant with the caveat that employment offers are job hirings are not a very good indicator atm.
https://www.epi.org/nominal-wage-tracker/
What is fact is that NM does pay lower than average wages and can't attract quality talent because of that and the fact that it's reputation is tarnished compared to what it used to be. People know that the company has problems and fosters a rather toxic workplace environment.
The retirement plan doesn't even matter, they could take it away and nobody would leave. Bottom line is the ground is shifting under our feet and as a result pretty much everyone at NM is way over paid as white collar wages continue to plunge. I almost feel bad for all the new dusky contractors coming in, after the body shop takes their cut they make less than the coffee shop baristas downstairs :(
Who wants to tell this guy that NM doesn't have a pension anymore? You don't even understand what kind of retirement plan your employer has you under... so no wonder that you don't know how mediocre that offering is compared to what other Fortune 500 firms are offering.
@ed plus $600 million to renovate 3 floors in manhattan to house the LV employees
plus paying 1.4x per employee in NY annually since then
plus the added healthcare costs going up every year to appease the expensive NY employees and their frequent demands
plus the entire PX budget, as the original goal of LV was to get off of the old vemdor, Advicent (NaviPlan/PPA)
welllllll over 1 billion for that mistake
@z5 The pension plan company contribution is over double the company contribution of the old 401k, and scales with age and salary as you advance your career
I got a 3% comapny contribution under the 401k if I contributed the min to get the full match. It didnt scale with anything. Now I get 13% company contribution in my pension without contributing, youre 100% vested at 3 years on the pension
I legit dont understand the complaining unless you dont plan to get vested. More money in your pocket w/ the pension changes they made with removing 401k
Active participants on form 5500 is referring to current employees. There's a different line for retirees or separated participants receiving benefits (in 2017 this number is 2597 and in 2023 it's 3602) and another different line for other retired or separated participants entitled to future benefits (in 2017 this number is 1793 and in 2023 it's 2201).
wat 2,736 employees ran out in a short duration to claim retiree healthcare eh? interesting, are you the wardon for this old age home ?????? lol
I think one reason the amount of retirees ballooned between 2017 and 2023 is simply because everyone that could, ran for the doors a couple years ago so they could claim retiree healthcare.
This company has lost its mind. If you want some entertainment, go to www.efast.dol.gov to see NMs 5500 forms. EIN is 39-0509570 plan 003 is the employee retirement plan document filed with the Department of Labor. There's a section toward the end called loans or fixed income obligations in default or classified as uncollectible. Why just waste policyholder money when you can also waste people's retirement money. There's also a section at the beginning showing active participants. If you look at the 2017 form and the 2023 form, you'll notice the number of employees has ballooned from 5,518 to 8,254.
There will never be any closure on LV nor any other real or perceived harm done to employees. NM is a corporate entity, not a family. NM is run by leaders subject to the same human foibles as you and me - they make mistakes. LV was super painful at the time, but relative to mistakes made by Fortune 500 companies over the past 10 years, it would barely be a footnote.
lol closure? were you and AVT dating or something?
It keeps coming up because there was never any closure for the LearnVest catastrophe. Employees lost a lot in the process so it’s personal for many of them.
Why does anyone care anymore? Because corporate executives and politicians are stupid and have a history of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. JES was the head clown behind LearnVest and he just retired last year.
I love visiting this site as it is a bit like watching reality television. The complaining, allegations, conspiracy theories - reading it all is strangely cathartic. What baffles me though is the constant rehashing of events that happened 10+ years ago. Why does anyone care anymore? Love them or hate them - that entire generation of leaders is long gone.
I was at a large meeting for the Field and CM was taking questions from the stage. An FR asked what we got from the LV purchase? CM danced around the question but he basically said we learned a lot and got some great people....
ouch!
what was the actual learnvest purchase vision way back when? was it to get knowledge of how to write a wrapper around mint.com? that's really all the learnvest service was.
some sort of backdoor play to get NM legal/compliance/etc comfortable with the cloud?
my favorite things from those days were
- learnvest engineers refusing to do any work to transform data; it must be presented to them exactly as it should be displayed
- the learnvest leader who would get drunk at local bars/restaurants and then walk around demanding to know if everyone in the establish had a financial plan or not
- AVT needing her own company paid for Vimeo platform to host her great and insightful videos because the NM video platform was beneath her
Oh god don't get me started on the 401k! It's been sooooo awesome having the money market fund while watching the S&P500 and Nasdaq explode the last two years.
Seriously, what kind of company... especially a financial planning firm... doesn't offer basic retirement options to its own employees.
@ed Paying $375 million was just the start. AVT made around $100 million on the sale for what was essentially a high school project web site. After buying LV countless millions were spent on trying to figure out how to bring LV into the NM ecosystem and the site was eventually scrapped. In the meanwhile they elevated LV staffers into high ranking high paying leadership positions at NM and virtually all of them were a disaster and eventually terminated, but with lingering residual effects like hiring their friends to high pay leadership positions. These clowns didn’t know the first thing about integration and scaling. Plus the millions spent flying LV leaders back and forth because they lived in NY and wouldn’t relocate, and the millions for the NYC office. The CM/JES LV disaster cost north of $800 million overall, I’m wondering if that’s where our matching 401-K went! lol
And the architect behind that deal WAS in the running for next CEO...
They paid $375 million for Learnvest?!?