Temple-Inland Retirement Plan

Temple-Inland Retirement Plan

Temple-Inland Retirement Plan is a single-employer corporate defined-benefit plan established to serve the workforce of Temple-Inland Inc., the Texas-domiciled containerboard and forest-products company that was acquired by International Paper in 2012. The plan is administered from Memphis, Texas, and remains responsible for providing predetermined monthly retirement benefits tied to years of credited service and salary history for the legacy employee base. The plan allocates primarily across private credit strategies, with a portfolio focus oriented toward distressed debt and mezzanine lending. This credit-heavy posture reflects a pension fund seeking contractual cash flows and elevated yield premia to service its long-dated liability stream, a strategy consistent with the post-acquisition frozen-plan structure managed by International Paper’s treasury organization after the 2012 deal. Plan assets are managed within the broader International Paper retirement framework, which reported approximately $12 billion in projected benefit obligations for US plans at year-end 2023 (per the company’s 2023 10-K filing). The Temple-Inland plan is a closed, frozen entity within that consolidated trust — no new participants have been added since the acquisition, and active accruals ceased under the legacy formula, shifting the investment posture toward liability-driven, capital-preservation and income-oriented allocations. Unlike an active corporate pension negotiating new plan designs, Temple-Inland Retirement Plan operates as a runoff liability portfolio for a de-merged industrial entity. Its structural differentiator is the frozen-plan mandate: with no new accruals and a mature beneficiary base, the plan is managed inward toward de-risking and eventual termination, rather than growth-driven accumulation, which informs the heavy tilt toward credit over equity in the observed asset mix.