These issues keep coming up again, and again. Are annuities safe? Should you lock up all your money in one single annuity? As Dennis Beaver, columnist for the Hanford Sentinel, and a Bakersfield, California attorney told his readers in a recent column “determining if an annuity is right for you requires a careful financial analysis conducted […]
Defined benefit plan sponsors have been quietly working to reduce corporate liabilities by moving retirees out of defined benefit plans and into group annuity contracts. This practice, known to retirees as “pension stripping” takes away the uniform protections intended by Congress under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and dumps the retirees into the […]
ProtectSeniors.Org is leading a grass roots campaign advocating for the enactment of state legislation to protect retirees who have been moved out of their ERISA protected defined benefit pension plans and into group annuity contracts. As Special Counsel to ProtectSeniors.Org, Edward Stone Law has assisted the organization in their efforts to educate their membership on […]
Edward Stone spoke at the Society of Settlement Planners, 2014 Annual Conference in New Orleans on April 28th. Mr. Stone’s presentation, “ELNY – Lessons Learned and the Impact Going Forward” was well received by those attending the conference. For those settlement planners present who were not active in the industry over 20 years ago when […]
On behalf of ProtectSeniors.org, a retiree advocacy group, Edward Stone debated the issue of pension de-risking at the Spring 2014 National Conference of Insurance Legislators (NCOIL) meeting in Savannah, Georgia on March 9th with Prudential Insurance’s pension expert, Dylan Tyson. Moderated by Rep. George Keiser (ND), former NCOIL President, the debate addressed questions such as […]
While the ELNY liquidation was finalized in August 2013 and cuts to annuitants began immediately, the ELNY Hardship Fund that was voluntarily established by a group of life insurance companies was not prepared to make funds available at that time. The ELNY Hardship Fund, administered by JAMS, now reports that its “regulatory review process” is […]
Edward Stone will participate in a point-counterpoint debate on pension de-risking at the NCOIL (National Conference of Insurance Legislators) spring meeting held in Savannah, Georgia March 7-9, 2014. The proposed Pension De-Risking Model Act, sponsored by Rep. George Keiser (ND) would establish protections at the state level for retirees whose pension benefits were transferred from […]
Edward Stone was a guest speaker at the National Association of Settlement Purchasers 2013 Annual Conference in Las Vegas in November 2013. Instead of sweeping the ELNY debacle under the rug, NASP and the conference participants embraced the opportunity to hear about the history of ELNY’s failed rehabilitation and its impact on both the primary […]
As more companies seek to reduce their pension obligations by transferring their obligations to insurance companies via annuity buy-outs, regulation of these risk transfers, including disclosures and protections for retirees will be paramount. Retirees often refer to annuity buy-outs as “pension stripping” transactions because the offloading of pension obligations to an insurance company or other […]
Peter Bickford’s Insight Column in the September 9th issue of the Insurance Advocate is an eloquent post mortem for the Executive Life Insurance Company of New York, the death of which took a long, arduous twenty-two years and left many injured people to drown in its wake. While New York seems content to sweep ELNY out of […]
