Loading...For two days, May 10 and 11, Bishop Ted Gulick and the Rev. Canon Jay Magness will answer phones in the diocesan offices. They are doing this so diocesan staff members may attend the Church Pension Fund’s “Lay Planning for Tomorrow Conference,” and they hope churches in the diocese will do the same for their lay employees.
The conference will give participants an overview of retirement planning and information about building financial security, Social Security, Medicare and wellness. Workshops will look at strategies for insurance, savings and financial management. Participants also will have the opportunity to schedule individual appointments for financial planning. The conference is open to all full and part-time lay employees and their spouses or partners.
Stressing the importance of this opportunity for church workers, Bishop Ted Gulick said “it’s a question of stewardship. How is the church a good steward of the gifts that are represented in its lay employees? We have a better history of being good stewards of the gifts of our ordained employees, and we’re playing catch-up ball at this point.”
Click here for registration form
Marketing and financial services specialists, including professionals with Church Pension Fund, Church Life Insurance, and Pension Services and Church Life, will staff the conference. May 10 will be a full day of presentations and meetings, beginning at 10:30 a.m. (EDT). After dinner, individual financial planning appointments will be scheduled between 7:30 to 10 p.m. (EDT). (Individual appointments also will scheduled the next morning and after lunch on May 11.) Workshops on financial and retirement planning are set for May 11 between 9:45 and noon. All meetings will be at Diocesan House, located next to Christ Church Cathedral at 425 S. Second St. in Louisville.The conference could hardly be more affordable. Thanks to subsidies from the Church Pension Fund and the Diocese of Kentucky, registration will cost each participant only $20, which includes the cost of all meals, parking and lodging (for those coming from outside the metropolitan Louisville area).
Becky Meyer, the diocese’s controller, urges church workers to take advantage of this opportunity. “The Church Pension Fund has for years had a ‘Planning for Tomorrow Conference’ for clergy. It is an excellent conference…. Just recently they developed one for the lay professionals, and this is the first time they have offered it here,” she said. Participants will get an “in-depth” look at what they will be facing when they retire, she said.
Canon Magness and his wife, Carolyn, attended the conference for the clergy last year in Lexington and said those planning to attend the lay conference should also register to attend with their spouses or partners if possible. “We really benefited because of the open-ended nature of the meetings and the special interest group meetings that were geared toward answering all of our questions about planning today for retirement…. and trying to get an understanding about what the requirements are in retirement, such as long-term care, life insurance and pensions.”
Participants at the clergy conference, he said, were expected to bring financial information, including social security earnings and projections, income tax statements, investments and insurance. They had to do “real-time thinking about what it actually costs to keep your life going as a retiree,” and they had to take stock of their benefits and round up all of their insurance policies, he said. “The real genius of all that is not that you get all this together and somebody analyzes it for you, but that you get it together.”
[Click here for a registration form. For additional information, call Betty Williams at the diocesan office at 502-584-7148 or 800-222-3462.]
