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My DH needs to choose his pension plan, single life annuity vs joint and 50% surviving spouse annuity. I told him that I don't want to survive him so he should choose single life. He thinks I am irrational. Maybe I am because I don't know how to make sure that I don't survive him. Anyway how did you make your decision?
Wow....maybe this needs to go into Health and Wellness or the Psychology forum?
If you do outlive him you'll need SOMETHING to live on. Perhaps you don't want to foreclose on that later income NOW when you may actually decide you DO want to live later?
Without getting into the obvious personal issues you have, it may be best to plan to cover all your bases so that you can leave your options open.
What is your age now? How long does your husband have to make his decision?
My DH needs to choose his pension plan, single life annuity vs joint and 50% surviving spouse annuity. I told him that I don't want to survive him so he should choose single life. He thinks I am irrational. Maybe I am because I don't know how to make sure that I don't survive him. Anyway how did you make your decision?
With the surviving spouse in mind and maximizing the fixed income for them. That means spousal pension but in our case the reduction was only 17%. and we each had pensions. Fifty percent could have created another plan. It also meant delaying SS for me as the larger benefit to age 70. We did 62/70 so she filed for SS at age 62 on HER benefit and I filed for SS at age 66 on HER benefit. That gave me 50% of what would have been her age 66 benefit. That being said with the activity going on in the federal government and not knowing what could be coming I filed for benefits at age 69 to have it over and done with and not have to worry about anything radical in changes down the road impacting receiving benefits. Now means testing is something you may want to consider if you think there will be an impact.
I originally had planned to choose one with no survivor benefit because my husband is 5 years older.
I also considered the option of designating my daughter as the survivor but my annuity would have been cut in half.
In the end, I selected the 50% survivor benefit for my husband with only something like 7% reduction in my annuity. I figured that it was a small amount to insure against life uncertainty.
Later on when I had a discussion on this subject with some former work friends. They told me that they plan to choose the no survivor option and use some of the 'saving' over 50% survivor option to buy a life insurance for their spouse. This option may work out the best for some people depending on the amount of their pensions and their ages. I did not even think about the option because for maybe 'emotional' reasons, I simply do not like to buy life insurance except years ago when we did not have a lot of saving and my child was young.
My DH needs to choose his pension plan, single life annuity vs joint and 50% surviving spouse annuity. I told him that I don't want to survive him so he should choose single life. He thinks I am irrational. Maybe I am because I don't know how to make sure that I don't survive him. Anyway how did you make your decision?
I don't understand why you "don't want to survive" him. Are you saying that if he dies, you want to die, too?
I was going to suggest checking the price of life ins as above. It might be cheaper to get a term policy and take the single life option but you would have to check into it. And yes, you are being irrational. This is about economics, not emotions.
I was going to suggest checking the price of life ins as above. It might be cheaper to get a term policy and take the single life option but you would have to check into it. And yes, you are being irrational. This is about economics, not emotions.
There is that school of thought. Especially with the 50% reduction in pensions. The problem can be inflation and 20 years from now or when ever the policy expires and trying to get new coverage
Different plans are different, but for me picking even 100% survivor benefits for DW only cuts my payout a few percent. To me it's hardly worth thinking about anything else.
I don't think the OP means survivor benefits cuts the pension by 50%, she means the survivor benefits would be 50% of the original pension. We don't know how much the pension actually is reduced but usually isn't it a few percent, maybe 10%?
Since between us we have 3 pensions I suggest you definitely do the survivor benefit plan. You never know and this will protect you.
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