Here in England, I worked for 14 years for one branch of Government and then 26 years for another.
So now I’m retired I get two pensions, covering 40 years of full-time work.
And you suggest that I only receive a pension for 26 years or “perhaps” crediting my total service.
That makes no sense to me.
I thought the abuse people were mostly upset about was the NYPD cop that “retires” after 20 years who then goes and serves in Nassau County Police Department for 20 years and retires with two police pensions each of which are not simply funded by their contributions but by taxpayer subsidies that are in place to make sure that retirees have enough money to live comfortably.
IIRC the federal government offsets federal pensions with some anti-windfall provision so that you don’t get more than you would have gotten if you have had one job the entire time. i.e. two 20 year pensions might be $40,000 each but one 40 year pension would be $65,000 and that is what you get.
There’s a lot wrong here.
That NYPD cop isn’t paid a retirement by the good people of NYC so that he can live comfortably. He’s paid that because that’s part of the total compensation package that the city felt was requirement to get the police force that they wanted. It wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts via a subsidy.
There is no anti-windfall provision that I’m aware of either. If you earn a military pension you get it. If you earn a federal civil service pension you get it. If you earn them both you get them.
I worked 25 years as a Sheriffs Deputy and retired. When I was hired in 1982 the retirement plan was “25 and out” and I was locked into that even though the retirement plans changed several times over the years… The pension was set up and paid for by the county and paid 2.5% of my highest annual wage multiplied by the years of service. I of course worked a ton of overtime my last year so that my highest annual wage was higher than what it normally was. This increased my pension amount drastically.
I then went to another agency and started a 2nd career, first part-time but then full time. Their pension is vested after 5 years (but cannot be collected until age 62. I’ll be 57 this year) and also pays 2.5% of the highest annual wage times the years of service. But it is a state pension.
There is no way those 2 pensions could be merged as they are from 2 separate units of government and 2 separate pension funds.
The OP needs to realize that if I didn’t do the work and earn the pension, somebody else would, even if they weren’t receiving a pension from another job. The position would be filled either way. Either way the governmental unit is going to pay out the money in the form of a pension to somebody, whether it’s to 2 people or 1. Also, if a younger person took this job they would probably work for more years than I will (I’ll retire from this job with only 15 years on). Which means the pension payout will be less than if a younger person took the job and worked 25 or 30 years. The state saves money by having me work and retire with a smaller pension than a younger person work longer and retire with a larger pension.
All together it is better for the taxpayers for me to “double dip” than to stay home and have someone else eventually collect more pension money.
I qualified for an immediate pension because I was age 55 and had 30 years of service. The minimum is 55/25.
I believe what people are upset about in those cases are those “20 and out” pensions which lead to bumper stickers that say “hired in my 20s retired in my 40s”. It’s not that they think it’s preferable for that officer to work 40 years for the NYPD rather than 20 for each department - the problem is that there seems to be little justification to let someone retire and collect a pension at 41 if they are fit enough to get another job. And it means they can potentially collect the pension for 15 or 20 years longer than pensions with an age requirement. There wouldn’t be nearly so many complaints if those NYPD officers had to wait to collect their pensions until 55. (I know that’s the deal they have, and no one can take it away from those who have it now , but that’s a different issue)
Damuri Ajashi , I think the anti-windfall provision you are talking about refers to people who are receiving a pension from a job which was not covered by social security who also have enough credits to collect social security from a different job. An adjustment is made to the social security benefit in those cases.
In at least some cases, there’s the opposite problem. My mom taught both in the Catholic schools and in the public schools during her career. While she was in the Catholic schools, she was paying into Social Security. The public schools had their own pension plan. Her public school pension is based on the time she taught in the public schools, and the the Social Security is based on the time she was teaching in the Catholic schools. But the Social Security is also pro-rated downwards because she has another pension, supposedly to prevent double-dipping.
Doreen wrote: " There are systems ( usually I’ve noticed this in education) where people can save their sick leave for years , get paid for all of the accrued leave at retirement and inflate the final salary the pension was based on. Also ridiculous."
State of Mich retiree here: They used to do that (well pay a %age of it anyway) then stopped, turning sick leave into a “use it or lose it” proposition. They were surprised when people, gee, started using it.
It’s not to prevent double dipping, strictly speaking. It’s because of the way social security benefits are calculated - for lower earners the benefit replaces a higher percentage of income and averaging, say, 10 years of of Catholic school teacher over the 35 years Social Security uses gives a false picture of how much that person earned if they also spent 25 years teaching in a public school system with a pension and not paying into SS… The offset doesn’t apply to someone who pays into SS on the wages earned from the pension providing job - I’ve paid social security on both public sector jobs I’ve had and am eligible for social security with no offset. It also apparently doesn’t apply to someone who has attained 30 years of SS coverage by age 62. ( which can happen if you have a second job during the years you work in non-covered employment)
There's probably a better way for social security to get to the same result- like calculate the average earnings based only on the years where there was private sector employment rather than dividing those earnings by 35, but I suspect that would cause other issues I haven't thought of .
This whole thread makes no sense to me. Pension rights accrue through employments that offer appropriate pension arrangements. Why would exercising accrued pension rights from multiple employments be even remotely controversial?
There’s hints upthread that some schemes set the annuity payment based on final-salary including overtime payments. Well, heh, that’s a badly designed scheme, to say the least.
No it isn’t. What if the overtime is mandatory? During my first career I got tons of mandatory OT, especially after David Clarke took over. Fucked up my off days, personal plans, family events, etc… One time I went 31 days without a single day off, plus several double shifts in between that. None of that was voluntary like the OT I accepted my final year. So when I retired I wasn’t supposed to reap the benefits of having my personal time robbed from me? :mad:
It is a messed up way to calculate it. It should be an average of the last three or five to prevent skewing like this.
Completely agree. This is another version of affirmative action.
FERS or CSRS? I’m more familiar with FERS, but either way I think you are going to be pleasantly surprised. Pretty sure that you can start drawing the annuity right away.
It was. But even with that Deps were able to collect more because of tards like Clarke.
I wouldn’t mind if new pensions had some sort of sliding scale depending on how much social security or other pensions you’re also collecting, but to change it now for existing upcoming retirees would break the informal contract of what people were expecting when they signed up for the job. Believers in the free market should wonder if some of the more talented people might have chosen a different career if they had known their pensions would be cut.
There are a number of ways to prevent this sort of skewing- average over three years is one, and I know some pensions where they use the “average” over three years but no single year can exceed the average of the other two by 10%. But those solutions only work if there is a single year with a lot of overtime. If it’s a a situation that goes on for years, there’s really no way to prevent it if the pension is tied to earnings.
I think you are confusing fairness with necessity.
I don’t think that the retirement benefits that some are receiving are there because of fairness. They are in place because the leadership and or the HR leadership determined that this was the package was necessary to get ‘X’ quality of worker to stay ‘Y’ quantity of years.
I’d guess that being in the NYPD isn’t a picnic. And I’d further hazard that a lot of those stay for their 20 because they can retire then. And if that wasn’t there, a great many of them would leave prior to that. If you took the 20 year retirement away, you’d have to pay a lot more year-to-year to keep them. What’s the break financial even point? I don’t know. But the next time someone is upset about the NYPD pension, and you should ask them if they’d like to join the NYPD starting at $42k. I bet they’ll say “F no!”
I was in the military and I did over 20 years. I’d spend a lot of time in the local VFW in a reach out program and I hear “I wish I had stayed in for 20” I don’t know how many times. And inevitably, I ask how long they were in and I’d get "2 years,“4 years” as if that last 18 years was all down hill!
My first 8-10 years in the military, I didn’t get paid that well. My college friends would laugh out loud how little I was getting paid to go on a 6 month deployment. But I stayed because there was a benefit at the end. You can pay compensation now or defer it. But you can’t defer both and get the type of worker you’d want.
Sure there is. Just tie the pension to base pay. That’s how it’s done for military retirement.