Some 12.5 million employees have a savings plan within their company. The amounts paid into a company savings plan (PEE) are blocked for five years, whether they are voluntary payments by the employee, participation, profit-sharing or employer contributions. But they become available in the event of termination of the employment contract, as soon as the employee leaves the company after resigning or being dismissed. Is this the best solution? In the event of a buyout, the capital gains are tax-exempt but social security contributions of 17.2% apply. The operation makes sense if you need this sum to finance a major expense.
But it would be a shame to pay the social security contributions and then put the sum into another savings account if you don’t need the money in the short term. “At the very least, it is recommended to keep your former employer’s PEE until the following spring, the time to receive the profit-sharing and/or participation, the amount of which is calculated pro rata temporis,” recalls Bruno Lourenço, sales director of individual savings at Eres. Thus, an employee leaving their company on October 1, 2024 will receive in spring 2025 the equivalent of nine months of profit-sharing and/or participation for the past year. If they decide to receive them in their PEE, which they will have wisely kept, they will be exempt from income tax. Nothing prevents them from then proceeding with a buyback if they wish.
Grow the amounts already present in the plan
There is therefore no urgency to settle your employee savings when you leave a company. The rules of the game are nevertheless changing for holders who are no longer employees. First, it is no longer possible to make new voluntary payments. It is only a matter of continuing to grow the sums already present in the plan. It is nevertheless possible to make arbitrages between the available funds to change your asset allocation. In addition, account maintenance fees are no longer covered by the company. They are billed to the plan holder, for an amount between 25 euros and 35 euros per year. “Employees who only have a few hundred euros in their plan therefore have an interest in liquidating it, at the risk of seeing the fees eat away at all their capital in a few years”, notes Maxime Chipoy, the president of MoneyVox.
Young workers at the start of their professional careers, who regularly change employers, can quickly find themselves with three or four different PEEs. “The risk, after a few years, is to forget them. To avoid this, the best solution is to transfer your savings to the PEE of your new employer”, recommends Benoist Lombard, the president of Maison Laplace. A small precaution is necessary, however. “You must wait for the legal period allowing you to benefit from the employee savings scheme of the new employer, which can be up to three months after signing the employment contract”, reminds Bruno Lourenço.
Account maintenance fees
In practice, the company mutual funds (FCPE) held as part of the employee savings plan of the former employer are sold, then the sums are transferred to the new employer’s PEE and reinvested in the FCPEs offered by the latter. The operation takes a few weeks and does not trigger taxation. Once the savings have been transferred, it is the new employer who bears the account maintenance fees. The transfer does not allow the new company to benefit from the top-up, but the operation retains tax seniority. “The sums therefore become available five years after their payment into the first plan,” explains Bruno Lourenço.
Please note that it is not possible to transfer an employee shareholding fund: it must be kept in the company concerned. Unlike the PEE, resignation or dismissal do not constitute grounds for early release of the collective retirement savings plan (PER). The solution is therefore to keep it with your former employer or to transfer it to the new employer if they also offer such a scheme.
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