When you leave a job with a traditional pension, don’t assume you’ve lost the chance to collect it. You’re entitled to whatever

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问题     When you leave a job with a traditional pension, don’t assume you’ve lost the chance to collect it. You’re entitled to whatever benefit you’ve earned — and you might even be entitled to take it now. "A lot of people forget they have it, or they think that by waiting until they’re 65, they’ll have a bigger benefit," says Wayne Bogosian, president of the PFE Group, which provides corporate pre-retirement education.
    Your former employers should send you a certificate that says how much your pension is worth. If it’s less than $ 5, 000, or if the company offers a lump-sum payout, it will generally close your account and cash you out. It may not seem like much, but $ 5, 000 invested over 20 years at eight percent interest is $23, 000. If your pension is worth more than $ 5, 000, or your company doesn’t offer the lump-sum option, find out how much money you’re eligible for at the plan’s normal retirement age, the earlier age at which you can collect the pension, the more severe penalty for collecting it early. You’ll probably still come out ahead by taking the money now and investing it.
    What if you left a job years ago, and you’re realizing you may have unwittingly left behind a pension? Get help from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. It has an online search tool that has helped locate $ 47 million in lost benefits for more than 12, 000 workers.
    If you have a traditional pension, retiring early costs more than you might expect. Most people assume you take a proportional cut for leaving before your plan’s normal retirement age. For example, you might think that if you need to accrue 30 years of service and you leave three years early, you’d get a pension 90 percent of the full amount.
    But that’s not how it works. Instead, you take an actuarial reduction, determined by the employer but often around five percent a year, for each year you leave early. So retiring three years early could leave you with only 85 percent of the total amount.
    When you retire early with a defined-contribution plan, the problem is you start spending investments on which you could be earning interest. If you retire when you’re 55, for example, and start using the traditional pension then, by age 65 you’ll have only about half of what you would have had if you’d kept working until 65.
If one retires early with a defined-contribution plan, he is expected to______.

选项 A、earn less interest
B、be better off than with a traditional pension
C、start investment immediately
D、get less Social Security benefits

答案A

解析 细节事实题。根据题干关键词retires early with a defined—contribution plan定位到原文尾段首句。原句中的start spending investments…earning interest与选项A对应。故答案为A。
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