The pension and severance fund Porvenir announced that, between January 1 and June 30 of the current year, the withdrawal of severance pay for home purchases picked upposting transactions for $960,372 million, which represented an increase of 5.75% compared to the same period in 2021 when these disbursements totaled $908,159 million.
According to Erik Moncada, Vice President of Clients and Operations at Porvenir, this saving with purpose allowed 382,594 workers affiliated with this pension administrator to leverage the purchase of a home, this concept being the one with the greatest weight in terms of disbursements.
As for the total withdrawal for all concepts, Porvenir has disbursed $2.5 billion and has attended to 1.09 million requests from its affiliateswhich represented a variation of 11.66% compared to the same period last year when these withdrawals totaled $2.24 trillion.
The figures provided by the entity indicate that, although the largest disbursements are recorded for housing, it is evident that due to termination of the contract the number of people benefited is greater, since 439,445 Colombians made use of these savings in this first semester to face periods of unemployment. “Withdrawals for this concept totaled $818,278 million, which represents a variation of 17.24% compared to the same period in 2021 when they totaled $697,922 million,” Porvenir noted in a statement.
For concepts such as locative repairs, disbursements have been made for $483,394 million, for educational concept $147,163 million and for other items (such as the payment of non-formal education, among others), $73,402 million have been transferred.
Porvenir also reported that layoff withdrawals due to Economic, Social and Ecological Emergency, between March 2020 and June 2022, totaled $252,518 million and 244,970 Colombians benefited.
“This measure, which was in force until last June, served as a relief to many formal workers who saw their monthly labor income decrease as a result of the pandemic. This confirms, once again, that having these savings not only allows projects such as having your own home to be carried out, as the figures show, but also to face contingencies such as those that arose due to the pandemic,” Moncada said.
The director reminded the workers affiliated with this fund that layoffs can be withdrawn without the need for intermediaries or processors and that the withdrawal of this social benefit can be done 100% online, which makes it possible to speed up this process and avoid having to travel to the branch network. To date, 97% of layoff applications are made virtually.