The ATRS Board of Trustees obtained great news about the investments the ATRS Board has made over the last several years.
For the calendar year 2013, ATRS finished the year ranked in the top 3% of larger public pension plans for its trust fund returns. The attached executive director update goes into much greater detail. A couple of highlights include a 2013 calendar year return of 19.8% and a return of 11.9% in the first half of the current fiscal year. ATRS assets increased about $2.4 billion dollars in calendar year 2013. The ATRS Board's investment allocations and its choice of strong managers while maintaining a asset allocation that is diversified throughout all investment types and across the world are the reason for such strong returns returns relative to other large pension plans. The ATRS Board continues to proactive in making adjustments to managers and allocations to meet the liquidity needs of ATRS while targeting investments to the actuarial characteristics of its members and benefit structure. This is also an important notice to ATRS employers that the ATRS Board voted to leave the current 14% employer contribution rate unchanged for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2014.
Additional executive director updates will be provided in the coming weeks for members considering entering T-DROP or beginning retirement. The attached notice has some very basic information for members to consider as retirement season approaches in the very near future. ATRS staff remains committed to serve members and is available at any time for calls and both scheduled and unscheduled meeting with counselors during regular business hours.
If you have questions or need more information, please feel free to call me on my direct line at (501) 682-1820, my cell at (501) 318-5998, or email me at georgeh@artrs.gov. In addition, if you use Twitter, you can follow events at ATRS and issues of interest by finding the Twitter ID of ATRS or find George Hopkins in the Twitter directory. Also remember that you can go to the ATRS website at www.artrs.gov and sign up to get updates from ATRS automatically on your public or private email address, or both. The update attached to this email is also available on the ATRS website under executive director updates. Over 3,800 people have already signed up to receive this type of email update and other ATRS information via this email list. Feel free to sign up for updates on the ATRS website. By the way, you can also get helpful ATRS information on the ATRS Facebook page under the name of Arkansas Teacher Retirement System! Go to the Facebook page and "like" ATRS.
Respectfully,
George Hopkins
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