Pardon if you’ve seen this photo already. Jpegs are not tracked by my filing system, and this is just a filler picture for the day. This is the Young Hotel downtown. some people want it preserved as a landmark. Others want it torn down as an immigrant labor sweatshop and eyesore. The fanciful wall paintings of what went on in hotel rooms caught my photographer’s eye.
I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I can get my full pension at 60 regardless of years of service. That’s a long time from now so I have to decide whether or not to wait. The bad news is the individual payments may have been reduced. I think I will wait, based on some hard numbers that finally became available today.When you read your company pension or Social Security, make sure you understand that the amount they project you will get is “based on continued earnings at the same rate of pay until your normal retirement age”. It is not the amount you get if you quit working today. I spotted that in my early twenties and calculated it through. But I also calculated that it was the money you put in first that paid off, and was thus able to find the date on which I could quit work and still get most of my pension. That date was just 15.1 years into the future at that time.
So yes, folks, I’ve only worked 14 years in my life at what you’d call a job. My thinking at the time was let the others slave away their lives in that office. I had also shown that I would get almost as much as people who worked at the company 44 years. They scoffed, but it looks like I was right. What they spent on their houses, I spent seeing the world. I’m not going to state what I’ll be making, but I can now buy a house any time I want. I wonder if the others can still see the world?
One interesting figure is the difference between what I will get and what I would have got if I worked through to this day. A lousy $154 per month. For that some people will listen to an alarm clock ring five days a week? Don’t get me wrong, I’m no millionaire. But Colorado is beginning to sound pretty nice. You see, I don’t have to save up for the future any more. And, that pension cannot be touched by any American agency.
Wait, there’s more. It turns out there are 28 different ways to arrange for this pension and I believe it is wise to decide now. Put another way, I believe it foolish to leave the decision until the last minute like some people do. Rather than try to sort it out over the phone, I’ve asked them to send the formulas to Everett so Marion and I can figure things out from there, years in advance.
Wait, there’s even more. Since Robyn and I were together more than six months, we became legally married in the USA. That’s the law in Washington State. Even though we never registered [as a dependent], she was listed as a dependent on my medical insurance. Nobody in Olympia would buy the story that she was my daughter, born when I was twelve—but it was worth a try. (If she was my daughter, I would not have to spend a thousand bucks to get her off my medical. It's the rules they have.) I’ll be filing for divorce later this afternoon. Do you have any idea what she would have got if I had croaked?
[Author's note 2016: in the end we did not divorce until much later. I simply changed my beneficiary. I would not mind her having the money if she stayed single, but I do not subsidize other men any more than they subsidize me.]
Later. I ran more numbers forward and backward. Here’s a peek at my original perspective. In my twenties, I noticed people were not really buying houses as much as they were buying what they believed to be security for their old age. Rusty and I bought our first house when I was 21, but it was an investment. That investment eventually bought this trailer. That, peeps, is planning ahead.
I also noticed that owning a house ties you down. Badly. I began to think of real estate as one massive con job. It seems the two million people whose property was foreclosed in the past year may suddenly agree with me. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. I listened to so many years of bragging about houses “going up” that I can’t hear the complaining as prices fall.
Much later. I will be getting almost everything I calculated. You don't know this, but at the time I did the original calculations, I was the ONLY person in the phone company who knew how to work a spreadsheet. I had calculated that under their existing rules, I would have almost as much pension if I quit after 15 years than if I stayed there the full 44 years and became one of their asswipe monkeys. (They've since changed the rules, but I was right.) I will be getting just $154 less per month than the top paid workers who wasted a lifetime over there. I lost a few battles, but I think I won the war.
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
