No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Samuel Johnson
I’ve very likely written as many words here as you over the last 20+ years.
(51,500 posts, however many words that comes out to.)
Good point. I often think of successful bloggers and think I might be making 6 figs per year for only equivalent effort had I aimed it correctly. Instead Ed is slowly losing money while I get zero for the same effort. SIgh.
If you’re curious, under your profile page there’s an option to export your history. Which results in a downloadable zip file containing several files, one of which is all your posts in a single ginourmous plain text pdf. Or is is a CSV? I forget.
If you download that, explode out the post file, and import it into Word, you can get a rough and ready word count.
I’m the master of CSV files, so I may try that, and maybe write some Perl scripts to process them. But after I finish the book I’m writing under contract. I miss the old post count on every post feature. I’m still behind John Mace, damn it.
I’m doing a countdown to retirement twofer today.
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We do our work schedules on a month-by-month basis. Today I received the data package for August’s work. My next step is to formulate my detailed work plan and submit it. August will be my final complete month of work. For Sep I’ll only have a partial month which triggers a bunch of special work scheduling considerations. So August is the last ordinary one where I’ll be running my usual plays for my usual goals. Last time.
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We do periodic refresher training by means of self-service slide show / vid programs administered through an app. They’re done quarterly. My final quarter’s training classes released today and I’m working through them now. If I can get them done within a couple days to make the cut-off I’ll get paid this month, not next month, for the time spent. Incentive enough for me to hustle.
In a further countdown filip, one of the larger topics of this quarter’s training is/was introductory info for a new automation system to be deployed after I retire. So now I’m forced to sit through slide shows on stuff I’ll never use. Another block of training was refresher for winter weather, snow, de-icing, etc. Baring a miracle instant-onset Ice Age, none of that will happen before I retire.
Feeling pretty short all of a sudden.
That’s how I felt towards the end. I had many tasks that happened on a monthly basis, and I was doing a lot of “that’s the last time for this” during the last week or two.
I even went to the dreaded sexual harassment presentation which happened during my last two weeks. I didn’t want to, but our HR person was nice and I wanted her to be able to meet her quota of employees attending. I just doodled on my note pad for the duration.
Cross-post from the Medicare thread:
Anyone with any insight here?
I gave six months notice. The only class that I skipped was on how to use Zoom since the cut over date was after my end date. Then Covid happened and they pulled it in. Luckily it’s very intuitive and easy to use.
Ref @teelabrown’s stories of Medicare and Supplement woes upthread a bit. …
After far too much procrastination with 60+ days to my 65th birthday I finally got serious about applying online for Medicare parts A & B, and getting my slightly older wife to do the same. Easy peasy. But at the end I learned that applying online was just the first step; the rest happens via snail mail. Eventually. Oh joy.
I also called SS yesterday to apply for survivor’s benefits from my late first wife, intending to take those once my W2 work ends while letting my own benefit grow to age 70.
After 1 hour listening to “our call is important to you”, a human came on. And told me that I could not apply for survivor’s benefits without also applying for, and therefore taking, my own. I was 99% sure she was wrong, based on a lot of reading, but I could not discount the possibility something had changed since I last checked. Anyhow, I said “Thank you. Never mind.” and hung up.
Did more research last night per my books, Google, SSA’s website, and reading their own internal policy/procedure manual that is also online. Conclusion: I’m right she’s wrong.
Call SS this morning at 8am when they open. After 5 minutes in queue I get somebody else who says “Of course you’re right and she’s wrong. Let me get that application started for you; you can’t do survivor’s benefits online.” A few minutes later that’s fully in train. But no, the application is not just this one phone call; that’d be far too easy.
The next step is a phone appointment with the local SS office to actually complete the app. The earliest appointment is 7 weeks from now. She said I was lucky; in some states it’s 3 months from now. And no, you must do it, even by phone, with someone in your local office. No matter that other offices have people sitting around with nothing to do. No, they don’t take walk-ins either.
So now my entire August work schedule, all 31 days, will pivot around needing to make myself available no matter what on one particular weekday afternoon for a coupe of hours. Sigh.
After that appointment she says it’ll be 2-3 months before the money starts coming in, and they’ll back-pay as necessary back to my first month of eligibility, Oct. Good thing I’m not counting on that cashflow to buy groceries or pay rent.
She also explained that Medicare is similarly backlogged so it’ll be a month or two before I see any action on my Part A&B app from yesterday. And, as Teela said upthread, without your Medicare number and part B acceptance, you can’t apply for C through Z. You can decide what you want now, and sort of grease the skids, but can’t actually advance the application.
Which almost certainly means a month or more gap in coverage. Which I can retroactively bridge with COBRA if necessary. Though Parts A & B will also be automatically retro, suggesting that for anything else I just bridge with VISA; it’ll probably be cheaper than COBRA.
She also said that Medicare will bill me right away for 4 months of part B, but that once my survivor’s benefits kick in they’ll pull my part B from that every month, including any retro months. Which will probably lead to an overpayment situation unless I short-pay their bill. If I do pay the 4 months in full, they’ll refund any excess premium I paid. But they only process refunds three times per year, so it’ll be awhile before I see my refund.
To her credit, she was friendly, knowledgeable, and in sympathetic good spirits as she delivered the various bits of bad news.
I’m pretty skilled at bureaucracy and pretty knowledgeable about this stuff. Shame about the procrastination gene; it is strong in that one. I wonder how the administratively-challenged, or English-language-challenged get through this process?
All this is irritation- or entertainment-level stuff for me, but there are people who need this to go right on time the first time to be able to eat or receive urgently needed medical care. I really feel for those folks.
Substantially all my problems are self-inflicted by assuming the process was both streamlined and not deeply backlogged. Oh well.
There’s no reason for anyone else reading this to be equally fooled. Do start early.
Wow, thanks for writing up your experience. I’m going to take SS next year when I turn 62 so I guess there’s fun in store. I’m four+ years from Medicare so I’m really really looking forward to this! 
OTOH, it sounds like you spent about 90 minutes on the phone total. I’ve spent much more time trying to secure an aisle seat on an airline when the ticket was code shared. And definitely less time in my local DMV which was actually a pretty great experience when I needed to replace my license – I was in and out in 30 minutes as a walk in.
Please let us know how it goes with your appointment in a few weeks. This is good stuff to know!
I’m a couple of years behind you but I don’t expect that to be a problem. You just tell them, “I’m ready now” and they start sending money to your bank account.
Well, that plus a couple of months of reading and studying books & websites. And running analyses of how to max-perform SS given my, my late first wife, and my new wife’s interlocking histories.
But yeah, once the background knowledge was on board, and a plan was in hand, it was an hour on hold, one 10 minute unproductive talk with a mistaken worker, and one 20 minute talk with somebody who really had her shit together.
So far. There will doubtless be more follies once I have my next appointment in 7 weeks.
ALso, had I not known to disbelieve that first worker and simply taken her word for it I’d have lost out on about $75K of benefits. “Oops” seems a bit weak for that SNAFU.
It’s not quite that simple. But yes, you start by creating your SS online account and filling out an online form to request your SS benefits. If your just taking your own, or your current spouse’s, benefits with no dependents, no poverty, and no disability complicators, it’s pretty easy.
It will still require a subsequent telephone meeting with the local office, so the smart person makes the application months in advance specifying their 62nd birthday as their intended benefit start date.
Also ref @teelabrown’s and other’s recent nervous times with paper checks paying out 401Ks, I just spent 2 hours wandering the metaphorical halls of Fidelity’s 401K support team. My goal being to figure out how to avoid high value paper checks floating around USPS for a two weeks when I could be earning money on that money.
Several departments later we pieced together a plan that should work.
Even mighty Fidelity can only roll out 401Ks to outside institutions by paper check after liquidating all your holdings and waiting for the funds to clear. Then they can FedEx your check(s) [traditional plus Roth separately] to you, but then you have to get it / them to your other brokerage / bank / whatever yourself. Then re-invest the funds in whatever assets you want. Gee thanks.
But they can do an instant internal electronic transfers from their 401Ks to their own Fidelity-branded IRAs. So first I need to open a trad and a Roth IRA at Fidelity. Then we roll my 401ks into those two new accounts. Some of the 401k assets are already publicly traded stocks / ETFs / mutual funds, and those can transfer in kind. Other assets are in the form of the usual BS themed “funds” that most 401ks offer. Those will be cashed out, but the cash will transfer instantly into the Fidelity IRAs.
Then from there I can electronically transfer all that in kind to my existing IRA accounts at my existing brokerage. The cash can be invested first at Fid then sent over in kind, or sent over as cash then invested at my current brokerage. In any case, the money is mine the whole time and the income it earns the whole time will be mine, not theirs.
Lotta monkey-motion, but worth it IMO.
What a pain. Someone upthread said that the first month of retirement is more work than being at work, because of all this folderol you have to go through, and they were right.
Mr. brown’s 401(k) rollover into his Schwab IRAs is complete, and the funds reinvested into Schwab’s high-paying money market fund. So now all of our financial finaglings are behind us. We don’t need the income from our IRAs at the moment, because I paid off our mortgage and we’re seeing if we can get by on just our SS benefits. I do plan to go to Schwab’s “Intelligent Income” robo-managed income portfolio, but honestly, the 4.94% that the fund pays makes me want to leave the cash there awhile, secure from downward-plunging stock markets but still accruing gain.
Our SS benefits will be curtailed for awhile starting this month because the Medicare Part B will start coming out, and we’re dinged for doubled Part B premiums because of the two year look-back at income. We both started taking SS benefits while we were still working, and that kicked up our income. I posted upthread about the look-back and the resulting increased Part B, but it bears repeating so you guys won’t get surprised.
Blame Covid. Pre-Covid we scheduled an appointment at our local office (walking distance from my house,) though it took a couple of months. There were walk-ins, but they had to wait a long time. Post-Covid phone only.
As for paper vs electronic 401K rollovers, my son-in-law just went through this. He said they could do electronic transfers, but it took longer than sending a check. (!)
As long as my money is invested how I want it, I don’t much care how long it’s in transit. 100 shares of AAPL will appreciate the same whether it’s in my account at A, my account at B, or somewhere in the plumbing between.
The problem(s) come in when they cash out my holdings, sit on my money for 2 weeks of float to their benefit, then dispatch it to some other institution who does the same before it finally gets to me in re-investable form.
That was not my experience.
About 2 months before my desired beginning of benefits date I created the application online. 5 days later I get a phone message from someone in a SS office across the country. I call back, and all he wanted to do was sort out some minor discrepancy in my earnings for the year 2000. It appears the contracting company I worked for at the time used different corporate names for payroll versus their SSA filings. Not a big deal, and with my records and memory of the time, he was satisfied.
Within a few days of that, my online account showed everything Complete, along with amount I would receive and when; letters arrived a few days after that.
So, FOR ME, no appointments and everything completed within 10 days.
For Mrs. Raza, she is STILL waiting for completion despite filing in late April. She does have a provisional benefit letter online, but determination of her benefits under spouse (me) record is still in process (likely because my benefit period just started this month).
But: no local office visit or even phone call required.
Cool. Evidently the process is a bit inscrutable, with different requirements for different situations. You’d certainly hope that most benefit commencement processes would be automated with little touch labor or meetings required.
Your situation is a lot more complicated. I am a divorced person so it’s just me and my work history.
I’ve been retired for three years, but my first SS check is coming this month, the month after I turned 70. So it feels real for the first time. Just waiting for that addition to my checking account,
I put off SS because I sold my house when I retired, and moved into what was my vacation home fulltime, and I could afford to live off the money from my home sale for three years. Covid helped. I didn’t go nowhere or do anything for 2020 or 2021, so that kept my expenses down.
Now I’m ready to travel again, and I feel I should, because I ain’t getting any spryer.