Week 1

Important terms:

A 401k is a company/employer sponsored retirement plan that allows workers to take out a portion of money from their daily paychecks, store it on a retirement plan account and earn interest that is tax-deferred, meaning this saved income is not taxable until you withdraw it when you retire.

With a profit sharing plan, the company can decide from year to year how much of the employee's pay to contribute (or whether to contribute at all) to the employee's plan. If the company does not have a profit, it does not have to make contributions to the plan. The employee makes no direct contribution to the plan.

Finally, a defined benefit plan is a company pension plan where an employee's pension payments are calculated according to length of service and the salary they earned at the time of retirement.

What I did this week:

This week I worked on sorting and filing account statements. Account statements are summaries of retirement savings accounts, either 401(k) plans. profit sharing plans or defined benefit plans.

Surprisingly, most of the account statements are received as physical mail. The result is two huge shelves filled with folders of account statements. It took me about a week and a half to sort and file two postal service baskets worth of mail. The most important part of this process was alphabetizing everything, which made the process a lot faster, though it was still slow.