flea: (Default)
flea ([personal profile] flea) wrote2008-09-22 02:36 pm

thomas pajamas and rollover

Two completely separate topics.

As the weather has turned here, I was sorting out fall clothes for Dillo last night. He seized on the (size 4) Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas that Cashmere recently sent, and happily wore them to bed, sleeves and waistband turned up so they didn't fall off. (And then he slept through until 5am, for the first time in perhaps 10 days!!) But this morning he did NOT want to take off the jammies to get dressed for school. He is so rarely opinionated about such things that I was a bit nonplussed, and thus not very firm - I sent him off in pants, socks and crocs and a long-sleeved fleece pajama top. With a spare t-shirt, since it is supposed to be 84 degrees today.

The roll-over concerns my Looniversity pension funds. I worked for the Looni for 5 years and 10 months, as a non-salaried employee, so my only retirement choice was participating in the Looni pension - us non-professional staff can't be trusted to make our own choices about retirement, no siree! Well, I vested and I left, and now they are going to send me the money. I have the option of receiving $22 a month from now until the day I die, which cracks me up. If I lived to be 80 (a reasonable expectation, given my family history and limited interest in skydiving) I'd ultimately receive $11,000+ from them, but by the time I am 80 I expect $22 a month will not keep me in chewing gum. So I'm taking the rollover, and putting the money in my existing IRA. Guess how much I get? Less than $5100. For five years and ten months. If I'd been fully funding an IRA during that time (which I wasn't; I was paying for child care instead) I could have socked away $21,000. If I'd been salaried, they would have been contributing 8.6% of my salary annually, which would have come to maybe $15,000 (I would have been required to contribute 3% of my salary on top of that). So it feels very hinky to only get $5100 from the Looni. Am I misunderstanding the economics here?

[identity profile] jonquil.livejournal.com 2008-09-22 07:09 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't know how the Looniversity works. At one of my previous employers, they put more money in for you every year you got closer to retirement. That way they only spent money on pensions they were pretty sure they'd need. That $5100 may represent (minus the amount they stole) pretty much what they put in for you.

[identity profile] veejane.livejournal.com 2008-09-22 09:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Where I come from, the exempt staff, non-exempt staff, and faculty all get the same retirement deal. Go go gadget union!

Univ contributes 5% of salary for the under-40 set, up to Soc. Sec. wage base ($102K), after 6 mos. employment and vesting after 3 years. Employee doesn't have to match, and can do a separate tax-deferred thing (TDA, I think a 403b) at a minimum $20/mo up to $15.5K per year under age 50.

So yeah, $5100 seems awfully low, for nearly 6 years of service. That's a lot less than 5%, am I right?

[identity profile] casperflea.livejournal.com 2008-09-22 09:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Annual salary ranged from $28-$35K, so if you assumed $1K a year, it would be between 3.5 and 2.8%.