It’s your pension: take time to read about it
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Congratulations! As a member of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Pension Plan, you are part of one of Canada’s leading pension plans.
The purpose of the OPSEU Pension Plan is to provide retirement income (a pension) for you and your eligible survivors.
The OPSEU Pension Plan is a defined benefit pension plan. A defined benefit pension aims to provide a monthly pension for life, based on a formula that uses salary and pension service to calculate the amount of the pension benefit.
In cases where there is detailed information on a topic, we refer you to one of our other pension booklets or fact sheets. These publications are available free of charge from OPTrust either in print or online at optrust.com.
THE DEFINED BENEFIT ADVANTAGE
The advantage of a defined benefit plan is that the risk of outliving one’s retirement savings or losing one’s retirement savings in an economic downturn is spread among all plan members. You may live a long time but others may not. It all evens out when the risks are shared.
This is the key difference between a defined benefit plan and a plan such as an RRSP or defined contribution (DC) plan. If you only have an RRSP or DC plan, all the risk is on you as an individual to save enough and to ensure your investments are protected against a market downturn. If you haven’t saved enough, you might have to work longer than expected. The goal of a defined benefit plan is to protect against these risks.