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IBM offers staff courses, advice on financial planning

International Business Machines Corp (IBM) said on Wednesday that it was introducing a US$50 million five-year initiative aimed at improving its workers' financial education and planning.

Employees, as well as their spouses or domestic partners, will be offered a series of live and Web-based investment seminars starting this month.

Starting next month, employees will be able to get unlimited one-on-one personal financial planning and counseling by telephone through Fidelity Investments and the Ayco Co LP, a division of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Financial planners from Fidelity and Ayco are trained in all of IBM's benefits programs and will receive no additional pay or commissions for selling their companies' products, the blue-chip giant said.

"No other company that I'm aware of has ever done anything this comprehensive for its employees," said Randy MacDonald, IBM's senior vice president for human resources.

The move comes at a time when IBM and other companies are shifting retirement planning responsibility from the company to the employee.

Traditional pensions, which promised employee a guaranteed retirement income, are being replaced with "defined contribution" plans, in which employees put aside money for retirement, often with a partial match by employers.

IBM, for instance, closed its traditional pension to new hires in 2005 and said last year that employees hired earlier will have their benefits frozen after this year.

To compensate, the computer maker doubled the matching contribution for recent hires in its company-sponsored retirement plan, and will do the same for all workers starting next year, paying dollar for dollar matches up to 6 percent of the salary a worker defers into the account.

IBM also added an unusual lump sum contribution of up to 4 percent of salary regardless of whether an employee defers any pay into the company-sponsored retirement plan.

That means the company's share of a worker's retirement savings could reach 10 percent of salary -- more than three times the rate of many such plans.
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