In Cal Pers you can collect both because employees pay into both. This has not always been the case. At one time state employees only paid into Pers and did not get SS unless they had employment before or after working for the state and paid into SS.
There are approximately 15 to 18 states where the State pension system is considered to be “double dipping” as it relates to Social Security benefits. I can’t find the list right now but it’s true.
My wife retired as a Maine teacher with 39 years of service. She is completely ineligible for Social Security. Furthermore, if I croak first, the survivor’s benefits she should receive from Social Security for my earnings will be significantly reduced.
Here is a fact sheet that unfortunately does not list the affected states.
The GPO impacts government employees and retirees in virtually every state, but their impact is most acute in 15 states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia (certain local governments), Illinois, Louisiana, Kentucky (certain local governments), Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas . ***
Yep. Your father almost certainly had a CSRS retirement check, which was a pretty sweet deal if you were a career employee (less so if you job-hopped). CSRS employees did not pay into Social Security.
People stopped being eligible for CSRS in the mid 1980s. You had to have 5 years government employment as of a certain date (1986 or so; I think I’d have just made the cutoff if I’d gone into civil service) or you were automatically pushed into the FERS system which combines a government pension with Social Security. Neither system is really adequately funded, but FERS is somewhat less underfunded (at least that was the status in 1994 when I worked on the design for a FERS management system).
The big thing to look into is whether your father’s pension included a “survivor benefit”.
I’m pretty sure it must, unless your mother formally waived this in front of a notary or something. Typically the pension is reduced a bit during the earner’s lifetime, and then the survivor gets a further reduced pension afterward. Hopefully your mother did NOT sign any such waiver. It would be illegal for your father to have opted out without such a waiver.
Thank you for saving me the time and looking all this up.
This has been the law for years. It’s really a pretty raw deal for people with public pensions. I would assume the Idaho people pay both at the same time, and so can pull from both. It’s when you pay one and then the other, or you pay one and your spouse pays the other, that you get screwed.
You have to have 40 quarters of coverage to be fully insured. The earnings for a QC is quite small, and you don’t have to work in all four quarters in one year. But you do need the total of 40 QCs to be fully insured.
Polycarp:
You have them correct; however, if the person had less than 10 years (I believe that is the number, but I’m not sure) under CSRS, he or she could have elected to be in FERS without losing the payments. I switched over before I retired, and got a check for the amount I contributed to CSRS (for nine years).
Pretty sure it was 5 years of CSRS and you could opt to stay with CSRS. I’d have just squeaked in under the wire if I’d started just out of college.
CSRS was a much more generous plan than FERS, with better COLAs and some other benefits (IIRC, you could claim credit for unused sick leave with CSRS but not FERS but they may have changed that). Of course FERS employees could contribute more to the Thrift Savings Plan than CSRS employees.
CSRS employees also had more opportunity to purchase service time based on other government service - e.g. military time, I believe; it’s been 15 years and I’ve forgotten a lot of the details. But basically they’d forego any military pension they’d earned, and that time would count for boosting their CSRS-eligible time. The more years you were covered under CSRS, the greater your pension, and time over 20ish years got an even bigger bump, so this was a tremendous benefit.
Anyway - this is all aside from the OP’s question. I’d be interested to find out if the OP’s mother is receiving any kind of survivor’s benefit.
Hmmmm - did she pay Social Security while working for Maine?
If so, how do such states get off telling the employees they can’t collect from Social Security? Do the states somehow not contribute to any kind of pension plan, but instead act to pay out (and receive some SS money)?
I haven’t read the links yet, perhaps those questions are answered.
No, people in these situations do not pay into SS while working for the state, and if that was all there was to it, it would make sense. The problem is that if they paid in before or after, they do not receive those benefits in full, nor can they receive them as a survivor’s benefit.
So, for example, if Bob works in the private sector for ten years, quits and lives off his trust fund, he will receive SS when he is 65. If, instead, Bob works in the private sector for ten years and then goes and works for the state, his SS payments will be reduced by 2/3 of his state pension.
Likewise, if Bob spends his entire career working for the state while his wife works for the private sector, upon her death his SS survivor benefits will be cut by 2/3 of his state pension. If he had been a stay at home spouse, he would have been entitled to the whole amount. The law regarding this is known by the charming name of the “Windfall elimination act”, as it eliminates all the windfalls those widows were getting away with.
Note that in all these cases, private pension payments or any other sort of retirement income does not interfere with how much you collect in SS. Getting SS benefits from your husband’s contributions while collecting a GM pension is apparently just good planning: it’s only “double dipping” when the pension comes from a state government.
Actually, I saw the reason on one of the links and it does make sense (although you won’t like it ). Here it is from the SSA website
That doesn’t explain why survivor’s benefits are reduced. This is wandering into GD territory, and I don’t really feel strongly enough about it to pursue it too far: the law’s been in place since the 80s, it isn’t going anywhere, it’s just something that has to be accounted for in retirement planning at this point. I only mention it because there’s been a lot of crap lately about how sweet a deal state employees get, but this is a major disadvantage most people are ignorant about.
You’re right. It was five years, and I just did squeak in under the wire. I elected to switch over to FERS because, altho CSRS was a more generous plan in some respects, it did not have the portfolio advantages of FERS. Under FERS, an individual could invest up to 10% of his salary in any of several options (stocks, bonds, etc.) and the government would match up to 6% (Thrift Savings Plan.) After FERS was enacted, those in CSRS could also invest in a portfolio, but it was more limited and the government would match only up to 1%, IIRC.