OMERS AVC
August 24th, 2017 by PotatoThe Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) is one of those big pension funds you hear about, providing sweet defined benefit pensions to government workers, and buying up companies and assets to help fund those pensions.
A reader asks:
Because I participate in an OMERS’ pension fund at work, I have the opportunity to invest in Additional Voluntary Contribution (AVC) within the same fund. This fund has been doing quite well so should I consider this?
The AVC is a neat option at OMERS: you can treat them like a mutual fund or ETF and invest in the same investment portfolio they’re using to try to meet their members’ pension obligations, on top of what they’re investing for you for your pension. It’s widely diversified with reasonably low overhead/MER-equivalent (~0.6%), and you can set it up to automatically take contributions straight from your paycheque. As a one-fund solution, you don’t have to see the performance of individual asset classes or worry about diversification and rebalancing decisions, you’ll just see the smoothed over-all performance.
I should note that this is not buying additional service or pension credits — it’s an investment managed by them, with no guarantees about what the funds will pay for in retirement (unlike the DB pension itself). The fact sheet also mentions limitations to the timing of withdrawals that limit the liquidity, which appears to limit you to only withdrawing in a 2-month window in the year, and then only 20% of what you have invested, which can really limit flexibility if these funds are for anything other than retirement.
Now, if anyone could waltz in and sign up to invest in the OMERS AVC, this would be a really interesting option to present alongside Tangerine, robo-advisors, and TD e-series. However, only people who are already OMERS members can do it. And that’s where my natural paranoia suggests this is not the way to go. OMERS has a great management team, the portfolio is diversified, and has competitive past performance relative to a passive index fund portfolio… but you’re already depending on them to come through for your DB pension, which is likely a big part of any member’s retirement plans. And as great a basket as it may be, you’ve already got a lot of eggs in that OMERS basket. In the unlikely event that they fall on their faces and have to trim DB benefits, you wouldn’t want the rest of your investment portfolio with them, too. And it adds one more thing to transfer (or think about transferring) if you get another job.
What do you think, would giving the AVC a pass be prudence or overly paranoid?
Edited to add: Over on Twitter, Sandi adds this:
I’d want to know what % future income relies on OMERS before cautioning against. (“It depends!!”)
And of course, that’s a good extra factor to consider. If you have 30 years of service with OMERS, your basket with them is going to be much bigger (and the over-exposure may be more of a concern) than if you have 5, and most of your retirement needs are funded elsewhere (where doubling up for some additional investments may not be a big concern).