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Location: Finally escaped The People's Republic of California
11,314 posts, read 8,654,334 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by augiedogie
Age 60, wife 62. Planning retirement but both still working full time. We are planning to reduce to part time rather than retire, even though we have SS and savings coming up. I'd rather be useful and earning my own way as much as possible than be able bodied and sucking off others hard work.
Wait a cotton picking minute there doggy.... I've paid my 7% and my employer has paid Thier 7%, that's 14% of my wages over my lifetime.. You take 14% of my wages over a lifetime and the Feds aren't going to give me back all I've put in before I croak... So I'll be subsidizing those low wage earners your crying about...
Oh and yes I would be for dropping the wage cap to help fix SS....
Retried at 52 with full pension ;IRA and investments. Wife 5 year younger retired five year afterward with pension and IRA .Now 66 and doing fine with wife soon to get SS. She had planned to stay three more years but convinced I wasn't getting any younger; LOL. Doing fine and neither of us regret it at all. Now we actually planned to retire by 55 since we started working so it just was possible a few years sooner.
Retired 4 months shy of age 68; have a state teacher retirement after 44 years. Also have a small ss retirement; can't get all of my ss because of a federal law that reduced my ss benefit by 2/3 of my Texas teacher retirement benefit Also, can't get any of wife's very small ss benefit because of another similar federal law that won't allow me to get 1/2 of her ss benefit if it was more that the small check I do get based on my ss work history.
could have retired at age 53 with full benefits but chose to work 15 more years because of the federal law that reduced my ss benefit because I was a teacher. of course those extra 15 years greatly increased my teacher retirement benefit.
My wife retired at age 62 with a state pension and social security. I retired two years later at age 62 (she is two years older then me) with social security. The state provided health insurance until age 65 (for both of us) then it became our supplemental (with drug coverage) when our Medicare kicked in. We recently had to start taking IRA MRD's (I am71, she is 73). At present we do need the money so we have reinvested it.
Someone once said it is not how much you make. It is how much you spend. Our economic strength is we have no debt and all our medical bills and drugs (small drug co-pay) are paid for. We live a comfortable life and our income exceeds our expenses.
PS
If something happens to her I will have to start "using" our IRA's to maintain my life style which is sleep late, play golf, drink, eat, repeat.......LOL
My wife retired at age 62 with a state pension and social security. I retired two years later at age 62 (she is two years older then me) with social security. The state provided health insurance until age 65 (for both of us) then it became our supplemental (with drug coverage) when our Medicare kicked in. We recently had to start taking IRA MRD's (I am71, she is 73). At present we do need the money so we have reinvested it.
Someone once said it is not how much you make. It is how much you spend. Our economic strength is we have no debt and all our medical bills and drugs (small drug co-pay) are paid for. We live a comfortable life and our income exceeds our expenses.
PS
If something happens to her I will have to start "using" our IRA's to maintain my life style which is sleep late, play golf, drink, eat, repeat.......LOL
Great plan. I especially like to combine two of those after taking the first. That would be sleep late (7am wake up). The combo would be drink and golf. Dinner at the club and head home sounds great to me. No dishes to do!
I'd like to know that too. But in the meantime I glues we'll just have to hang our heads in despair and say daily mea culpas for having the temerity to be "useless" while living off two government pensions and two SS accounts we worked long and hard for. Oh, the shame of it!
True, if it's "sucking" at all it's off your own hard work......
Retired 4 months shy of age 68; have a state teacher retirement after 44 years. Also have a small ss retirement; can't get all of my ss because of a federal law that reduced my ss benefit by 2/3 of my Texas teacher retirement benefit Also, can't get any of wife's very small ss benefit because of another similar federal law that won't allow me to get 1/2 of her ss benefit if it was more that the small check I do get based on my ss work history.
could have retired at age 53 with full benefits but chose to work 15 more years because of the federal law that reduced my ss benefit because I was a teacher. of course those extra 15 years greatly increased my teacher retirement benefit.
My DH is in the same boat for collecting his SS benefits. He gets about 40% of the amount he would get if he weren't collecting a federal pension ( he was a pre-1983 employee), and worked in the federal system a total of 38 years, so it's relatively generous, at least we think so.
DH retired from his federal job and began collecting the federal pension in 2003, at around age 58. He took another full time job and worked there until October 2010, when he retired from that job. I retired from my state job in June 2011, at a couple months short of age 64 with a small state pension. I began collecting SS when I turned 65. DH also gets approximately $450 month in SS ( without the pension he'd be entitled to approximately $1100 month), and approximately the same amount in military-service connected disability, in addition to the pension. He was also able to take the health insurance from his federal service with him when he retired, so our health care has been covered. And I do contract work with a continuing education company in CA which requires only a computer and internet access, and some brain work on my part, so I can work on it when and where I choose to do so. And it pays quite a bit better than part-time work I could get in my field as a medical professional. I do pay quite a chunk of taxes, in addition to SS at the rate of 15%, and Medicare,for that work, so still paying as an employee into those systems.
So two years later, we have moved to our retirement home in our dream location- which we had built with funds from an equity line of credit on the house we lived in for years and had paid off in 2000. We sold that house in January 2013, and realized a nice profit on that (nearly $200,000) even after we paid off the equity loan. So our retirement home is both new and without a mortgage. We find our monthly income stream is actually more than we brought home when we were both working, due mostly to the decrease in payroll deductions. Our expenses are significantly less than the income, so we're able to save some of that as well. We do help out some family members- at this point a daughter who developed a serious cardiac condition several years ago and was forced to drop out of school, and lost some jobs and pretty much had to put her life on hold due to this condition. Thank goodness, she's had good health insurance ( which we paid for), had surgery which corrected the condition (albeit with a pacemaker) and she's working to get her life back on track now. And we're both on Medicare, with the insurance we had prior to Medicare as a secondary, so things are looking good now. We also have funds in IRA's, 401K's and some annuities which we have no need at this point to touch, but which will come in handy later, most likely.
I love retirement, we're able to do whatever we want to, and that includes volunteering opportunities ( that let us indulge hobbies as well)and meeting nice people in the small town we moved to.
I know not everyone is as fortunate to be able to take advantages of the opportunities we have had, and I noticed as others mention that it seems to mostly be folks who've worked in either government, muncipal, or teaching jobs with defined pensions, and portable health insurance who are able to retire either before their full retirement age, or even close to their retirement ages these days. But as my DH reminds me, that it's not just luck, it's also planning.
Just a quick note. During the Reagan Administration the Congress and the Administration increased social security taxes a bit in order to provide for the future. They understood the baby boomer population would be larger. In reality the baby boomers paid for their parents and for themselves. Today, our politicians are forging a bit of a propaganda campaign to pretend Social Security is a welfare program. In truth it is not. Social security is a contract of sorts as is insurance. You pay in ( as in premiums) and eventually you are given something back. Remember, not everyone even lives to collect their social security and not all of us will live well into our 90's. As such, as with insurance, there should be sufficient funds for all. Social Security was created to avoid leaving seniors destitute should the worst happen as it did in the 20's when people lost all. Our politicians are wrong. They borrow from Social Security to support their favored programs whether it is war, oil companies or other. They them tell you Social Security is in trouble. It is not. It is simply that those who borrowed the funds have no intention of repaying that loan they took without your permission. It is time we held the politicians accountable for telling truth instead of repeating talking points written by their strategists and their sponsors. We need to be educated enough to question them instead of accepting talking points only.
Just a quick note. During the Reagan Administration the Congress and the Administration increased social security taxes a bit in order to provide for the future. They understood the baby boomer population would be larger. In reality the baby boomers paid for their parents and for themselves. Today, our politicians are forging a bit of a propaganda campaign to pretend Social Security is a welfare program. In truth it is not. Social security is a contract of sorts as is insurance. You pay in ( as in premiums) and eventually you are given something back. Remember, not everyone even lives to collect their social security and not all of us will live well into our 90's. As such, as with insurance, there should be sufficient funds for all. Social Security was created to avoid leaving seniors destitute should the worst happen as it did in the 20's when people lost all. Our politicians are wrong. They borrow from Social Security to support their favored programs whether it is war, oil companies or other. They them tell you Social Security is in trouble. It is not. It is simply that those who borrowed the funds have no intention of repaying that loan they took without your permission. It is time we held the politicians accountable for telling truth instead of repeating talking points written by their strategists and their sponsors. We need to be educated enough to question them instead of accepting talking points only.
This is my understanding, as well.
An additional problem is Supplemental Social Security which doles out billions to people who never paid into the system. Many elderly immigrants whose families signed agreements not to ask for help as a condition of immigration, apply as soon as they arrive.
OTH, I paid into SS through many back-breaking, minimum wage jobs when I was young, and don't qualify for anything, because I am short several quarters (min. 40), and as a Cal. teacher, would not get most of it anyway.
I am 52 and not retired yet. I hope to retire at 55. I pay 8% of my income into CalPERS. I also pay into Social Security. I started working at age 16 at good ole Micky D's.
Between myself and my employers a total of $224,495 has been paid into Social Security and Medicare taxes. I print out the statement every year. I hope to live long enough to get back my investment. If you added in the amount with investment returns, it would be worth around $800,000. As in if you put that amount in an IRA tracking the S&P 500 since age 16 I would have $800,000.
To get that amount back based on the $1,587 I can collect at age 62, I would need to live to age 84. Sounds good. But I don't consider it an entitlement, but a return of investment. By the way my Mom lived to age 92 and got back far more than she ever paid in. Probably 100 times what she paid in.
We baby boomers are the first generation to truly fund our retirements in social security.
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