Tag Archives: gutting it out

The Pension Couch: 8 More Years

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Believe it or not, I get fan emails from time to time. They come in many different forms. Some of it is precisely what it sounds like, meaning people take the time to drop me a nice note and say how much they liked the blog, the book (or both), or how much something I wrote resonated with them. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that my ego likes those emails. I’d also be lying if I said I have great tracking system for responding to all them. So, if I owe you a response, please accept my apology in advance as I try to work through the backlog. More importantly, please keep sending those types of emails because I find them extremely motivating. They help me write, even on days when I’m not feeling particularly creative.

Advice requests are another form of fan emails I receive. Those motivate me too because I get to help people directly. Most of the time, the advice being sought is pension-related. For instance, sometimes, people want me to analyze their pension as a whole. In contrast, others ask about a specific pension design element. Anyone who’d like to see or listen to me provide an overall analysis of a pension can check out the ChooseFI episode where I counseled a young married couple about the wife’s pension.

Less often, advice requests center on career/life issues associated with pensionable jobs. These issues sometimes include a mental health angle. Since I blog about my mental health issues connected to my previous pensionable job, it’s no surprise that readers reach out with similar problems or questions. That’s the gist of the latest email, which I discuss below. Continue reading →

The Pension Series (Part 17): Buying Years – A Case Study

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The Set Up

A reader (let’s call her Buffy) recently asked me if I could help her and her husband (let’s call him Angel) determine if “buying years back” from Angel’s pension would be worth it. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of “buying years back”, it basically means under certain circumstances a worker can pay the pension fund to add years onto their final pension calculation. I only learned of the concept of “buying years” after starting this blog. Although the concept appears common in many European retirement systems, and the Canadian national system; the feature is reserved for public pension systems at the local, state, and (non-military) federal level in the U.S. The worker usually qualifies through special circumstances like prior military service (that fell short of pension eligibility), or previous participation in a separate public pension system (e.g. a teacher who moves from one school system to another).

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Gutting It Out: What’s Worked For Me … So Far

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True Story Time

I was soliciting ideas for blog articles the other day in the Financial Independence (FI) pensioners’ Facebook Group I started called Golden Albatross/Golden Handcuffs. I floated the idea “Coping Strategies For the Last Few Years (i.e. Gutting It Out)” and received the following response from one of my group members:

“I have 6 years. Help me gut it out, and keep my eyes on the prize.”

Six-years eh? That’s probably not an all-to-uncommon time-frame for a person to lose motivation for their job, no matter the reason. I find that pension earners tend to get that “trapped” feeling near the end of their career. That isn’t the same feeling as my self-described Golden Albatross situation. I define the Golden Albatross as the tension a person feels between staying or leaving a pensionable career. In this case, the trapped feeling to which I refer comes after a person decides to stay at a job in order to earn a pension, but before that person can retire with a pension’s full benefits. That’s where I find that “gutting it out” truly comes into play, and it’s the topic I want to concentrate on in today’s post. Continue reading →