This is why i haven’t retired.
Means tested would be based on your net worth, not your income. I have a big nest egg but most of it is home equity and an IRA. My income is the earnings of my non-IRA savings and what I pull out of my IRA.
A little off topic, but when I became medicare elegible I let my prescription coverage lapse for 10 months (I take no meds) before signing up for part D. Now Im paying $3.20/mo in penalty…forever!
I ran the Covered California scenarios, and my premium if I had $37k income was $656 after $1057 subsidies, silver plan. I don’t know how you’re getting all the way to zero premiums and I’m quite curious how you did it. Thanks.
Holy cow, you had 1.2 years of accumulated sick leave that could be repurposed!? Wow, what a bennie and total score!
Yeah, it was the state (my employer) making an effort to keep us workers from using up sick time for non-illness related stuff, that we could use it after retirement rather than having it vanish.
Now, that account can’t be used for anything except health insurance, and it can only be used in very narrow ways and through plans approved by and used by state employees, and the cash value of the account doesn’t increase over time either. But even so it gave me a quarter million bux to buy plans like United Healthcare or a few others for Medicare Part B and drug coverage.
So a 1/4 mil you can only spend on healthcare, just as you retire. Not exactly tears of rage if this were my lot. Congratulations!
Thanks. They had to offer a few perks to have folks work in prisons for decades. Not sure it was worth it, but I did get to work with a population of patients who truly needed the healthcare I provided. Plus the patients/inmates had such interesting stories . . .
I got 1500 hrs of sick time converted to a Health Savings Account. I think the accountants at work realized how much they’d be paying out, because a few years ago, it got capped at 1500, and anyone hired after me got a much lesser deal.
At the time, I thought “Man, wish I could get it in cash (like a friend did at his work).” But with Medicare B and Dental and Prescriptions all adding up to a chunk o’ change, it’s good to know it’s there.
I have the Bronze plan. My taxable income in 2021 was $33.7k. Somehow that worked. My financial planner puts my income in the Goldilocks range between Medical/Cencal and zero premium CC.
You can get advice from advocates free of charge. The advocates get paid from a pool of money paid by the health insurance companies as a requirement for doing business here. Your choices will vary widely by county. I used askariana.com and was very happy but I imagine they are all pretty similar.
A year ago I had 360 hours of sick time, the max allowed. I burned through a lot of it over the past 12 months knowing retirement loomed. I’m down to 100 now, and we only cash out with 75% of it. Not sorry I did that.
mmm
I retired with over 900 unused sick hours, after a year of actively trying to use what I had. Doctor’s appointment at 10 a.m? I took the whole day. It actually worked out fairly well, since Mr. Legend had a broken femur, hip replacement, and subsequent cancer diagnosis just before my last year of employment.
I might have started trying to use more leave sooner, but the legislature had passed a bill four years before my retirement that supposedly allowed school workers to buy out time with unused leave to retire early. It turned out that because of my age and a later rule the school board instituted that workers can only retire at quarter year intervals, I would have had to pay actual cash money for the privilege of using my saved time.
I’m on the very generous (and expensive!) educational retirement insurance; my pension doesn’t quite cover the cost. If I feel the pinch later, I can cut back to less lavish coverage, but I only have three more years before Medicare kicks in. Mr. Legend went on Medicare six months before my retirement date, and he signed up for all the letters of the alphabet he could, knowing that he’ll be using it.
Mr. Legend has been trying to retire for the past two years, but he’s a co-owner of a small business, and it’s been really hard for them to find someone to replace him. He’s essentially working part time now, but we’d really like to get to a place where he can leave most of the work to someone they hire. He’s holding off on filing for Social Security until then; as long as the business continues to do well and he’s drawing a paycheck, we can wait and get more benefits later. Because I stayed home with kids for a long stretch and I’ve always worked in low-paying jobs, I’ll be drawing benefits bed in his earnings.
It’s kind of odd, when you think about it, that we have to make some of the most consequential and confusing financial decisions and crawl through the most red tape right about the time our mental abilities start slowing down.
Me, too. Plus, they pay for my supplemental now that I’m on Medicare. I’d have worked until 65 minimum otherwise. Instead, I got to retire at 61.
We generate a pretty good quantity of sick leave over a career. Your total is capped, but somebody with typical health luck over 30 years ought to have enough. In fact many folks end out up near the cap. But …
It’s 100% use it or lose it. For awhile they offered something like 10 cents on the dollar up to about 1/4th of the cap put into an HRA to pay for post-retirement medical OOP expenses. But somewhere along the way that was “too expensive” and got cut.
So now as we’re having a giant waterfall of oldsters approaching retirement, most of us are burning our saved leave as fast as we can. My marginal utility of an extra day off 6 months before I retire is small. But it’s more than the marginal utility of letting the bastards keep all that money while I get nothing.
So now they’re paying double to get great gouts of the work done; the person out sick plus the person flying overtime to cover for the sickee. Way to go Beancounters: you really showed us. Not!
Wait, WHAT??? This is the first I’ve heard of this, and I Do Not Approve This Message.
(more seriously: damn. You are under orders to beat that diagnosis).
To the OP:
I’m quite jealous. I’m 2-4 years away from being retirement ready, given the demands on our income (though one drain is to go away soon, as we can finally sell the parents’ condo in Florida). Enjoy yourself!
I remember when I was on a project dealing with federal retirement systems, unused sick leave did benefit you, but I don’t recall the details. It was something like unused time getting treated as if you’d worked those weeks, in calculating your pension, e.g. x % of your high-5 income times the number of years you worked, and it might bump your tenure from, say, 30 years to 30.5 years. Not a huge amount, but better than nothing. A lot of people who were nearing retirement were (cough cough) sick a lot toward the end, I suspect.
Me, there will be no defined benefit plan. Well, there is one I was grandfathered into, but it’ll add up to about 250 dollars a month. There is a pot of money my company put aside for people in specific age groups, now worth 30K or so, that can be used to pay for retiree medigap-type coverage (as opposed to having us under a retiree plan through the company) - but apparently they’ve just “improved” that so that it can only be used for a Medicare Advantage-type program. Bastards.
OP check-in with three days to go.
When I first started thinking about retirement, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I had a few people in my life who were approaching their own retirement with some trepidation. “Not me”, I thought. I will be 100% ready to dance a jig out the door on Day Last.
Well, it is not like that. I know it is the right time, and I have all of my ducks in a row, but I not 100% gung ho like I pictured I would be. I am maybe 80% gung and 20% uh-oh.
And here is another perspective that I had not heard verbalized before. During my countdown to retirement - which has been going on for literally five years - I was in countdown mode. Woo-hoo, another month gone by! C’mon, time, haul your ass!
But, what happens to this mindset once retired? Time has absolutely flown by, with my urging. Now what? It is still going to pass in a blink of an eye, but this time the endpoint is not the termination of work, but the termination of…let’s just say it…life.
That sounds depressing. I’m really pretty excited. But there are feelings and thoughts within that I never would have predicted.
mmm
This guy is pretty good. “The four phases of retirement”. About 14 minutes.
Meanwhile, I am in Thailand and very clearly in phase 1 
:
It’s definitely a huge, huge change, so of course it gives you pause. Best of luck in three days!
My post-double-bankruptcy-and-triple-merger DB plan is about like yours. Yaay us. NOT!
With a week and a half left, I didn’t expect to be struggling with what things I will and won’t do before I leave. I cleared out my outlook calendar completely last week, this week it was populated with invites for four meetings. I told my boss that he can invite me to as many meetings as he wants to, but I won’t be going to any of them.
It’s just down to working this little list of things I want to do, and ignoring everything else. But I do have more than enough leave time that I can walk out the door this minute and be done with work. Not sure why I don’t do just that. In a few months no one will care that I did most of these things on my list.
Maybe I should delete a few items from it.
It occurs to me that, although this does cover the general phases of retirement pretty astutely,
it’s geared towards people who have had a well-defined career for most of their adult lives. In my case, I had always thought of my work as a job rather than a career, and when I had my first child, I had no problem leaving the workforce. I had a supportive spouse who recognized and valued the work I was doing at home, and I didn’t feel like my work in an office was worth more to society than my work at home. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I stayed out of the paid workforce for 18 years. This also enabled my spouse to take better-paying jobs that involved extensive travel. As my kids grew, I ended up doing more and more volunteer work, so I never felt I wasn’t contributing in a larger sense.
When I went back to work, I took another clerical job, this one in a school. It was low-paid (and low-status, really), but it had good benefits and a lot of vacation time. I stayed in that same school for 13 years, so I formed some pretty strong bonds with many of my co-workers, and by the time I retired, I was the repository of a huge amount of institutional knowledge. However, I still never thought of it as a career in the larger sense, and not a lot of my sense of self was wrapped up in the job.
Now that I’ve been retired for about 8 months, I can say that I’ve gone through some of those phases, but I don’t think it’s quite as extreme. I have felt at loose ends now and then, and there’s an element of existential doubt, but really, I’ve done this before.
I found I was the opposite. I never used Calendar when I was working – my job was such I rarely had meetings – but started with it after I retired. I had too many scheduled things to keep track of.*
I fell out of the habit of checking it on arising during COVID and am struggling to get back into it.
*Partially due to declining mental processes.