Long story short, my father was an MTA employee (management) from the mid-1980s until his retirement about 10 years ago, and worked in another sector of the railroad industry before that. My parents have been divorced since ~ 1978, but as a divorced spouse, Mom was able to collect a portion of his Railroad Retirement benefit and let her own Social Security benefit increase until she turned 70 so she could max it out. But it’s still not a whole lot of money and I am amazed that she can manage to live on it (luckily she is a frugal person and bought a modest condo a long time ago, so her housing expenses are very low. Plus we help her with expenses here and there.)
To make a very long story short, it’s looking like Mom will outlive Dad. It sure would be awesome for her if she ended up getting his full retirement benefit as a surviving divorced spouse, but I know sometimes government employees don’t always pay into Social Security. I doubt she would be eligible for his MTA pension because they weren’t married when he worked there. But it would be nice to know what her budget might look like in the future - he probably earned the max SS contribution base for most of his career, if not more, and a max SS retirement benefit would be more income than she has ever had in her life.
(Yes, I know she can probably make an appointment at Social Security and find this out. But let’s just say Mom has a way about procrastinating about these things, and I am finding it surprisingly hard to google. I am finding some info on how it works for current MTA new hires, but not for longtime MTA employees.) If anyone knows how the MTA pension system works, that would be an awesome bonus.
As far as the pension, the first thing you have to do is find out which pension system he was in - NYC or NYS or a special MTA one. You might be able to find that out through SeeThroughNY :: Pensions. Here’s a link to some info I found. Once you have determined which pension system he belonged to , the rest will be easier. I have been a member of both the NYC and NYS retirement systems and paid SS in both of them.
Can you help your parents to set up accounts at my Social Security? They should be able to see full information on their contributions as well as retirement benefit estimates without having to make an appointment at Social Security.
I know more about model railroads than real ones but…
I understand that two groups that usually don’t pay into Social Security or receive Social Security benefits are employees of state and local governments or railroad employees. The MTA seems to fit in both categories. Railroad employees are covered by another pension system under the Railroad Retirement Act. State and local employees are generally don’t participate in Social Security though some do. I think the idea is that the federal government shouldn’t be taxing state or local governments the employers’ portion to fund retirement benefits unless the state/local government agrees. Accordingly, state and local governments usually provide separate retirement plans for their employees. I doubt that your father was paying into Social Security or accruing benefits while he worked for the MTA.
I second the suggestion to check online whether your father is eligible for Social Security. Good luck and I hope your father is okay.
I am sure my parents are both fully capable of setting up my Social Security accounts if they don’t have them already. But a) my father is currently hospitalized and has been for the past 3.5 months and can’t even handle reading email right now; b) my parents had a pretty acrimonious divorce and I am not going to involve him in this; and c) I have a my Social Security account myself, and although it shows my own contributions, it shows no spousal information at all. For that I would need to go to the source. So I assume Mom’s account would be analogous.
My father is eligible for Social Security/Railroad Retirement in some amount by virtue of the private sector railroad career that he had before working for the MTA (~ 20 years). The question is how many years of contributions he has, and therefore what his SS retirement benefit is. Divorced spouses (provided they were married for 10+ years and did not remarry before age 60, both of which apply in this case) are eligible for half of the former spouse’s retirement benefit if it’s higher than their own, and once the former spouse dies, the divorced spouse is eligible for the former spouse’s full retirement benefit.
Thanks for the good wishes about Dad - he is stable at the moment, but well, let’s just say it’s looking like Mom will outlive him.
Wow, thank you for that first link! Dad popped right up as a member of the NYS Employees Retirement System. Does that necessarily mean he did or didn’t contribute to Social Security if he started his employment with the MTA in, oh, I think it was 1985 or so?
If he started in 1985, he would have been in Tier 4 and as far as I know all Tier 4 members contributed to Social Security - if there was any difference for MTA employees , they would have had a separate plan like correction officers and police.
Certainly other states are different. I spent four years teaching at Univ. Ill. and their retirement system was a scandal. The state guaranteed a (rather minimal) pension, but it was totally unfunded. When I had a research grant that paid 2/9 of my annual salary during the summer months, the state billed the grant for the reputed state contribution to the pension. When I left, I got back precisely my contribution to the pension fund (which had in fact gone into the state budget) and not one cent more, confiscating the amount the federal government had contributed through the grant.
Interestingly, I got an offer from Indiana U that included a 15% pension contribution to the state, split between SS and TIAA and therefore vested from day 1.