My wife taught special ed for 40 years, with Masters plus, so her pension is about 3X my SS and my SS, because I spent 35 of my 45 years working in San Diego is fairly high for SS (wage inflation in SoCal meant I paid a lot more into SS than if I'd worked the same job in the midwest, for example, so I qualify for significantly higher SS than my brother who was an exec for UPS, but worked mostly in the midwest)...
Anyway, my wife's pension is surprisingly good... takes a lot of pressure off other income streams and allows us to leave at least one major source of retirement income untouched for now... if we were tapping all income sources, her pension would still represent 1/2 our income -- and that takes into account the fact that it was reduced to offset "survivor" benefits: i.e., when you retire from teaching in Cal, you decide if you want all of your pension, but spouse gets zip if you die, or they hack down the payment for options to give spouse 1/2 the benefit (which we opted for), or any percentage up to full benefit if the pensioner dies... we decided that if something happened to her, 1/2 the benefit would be more than sufficient and keeps the monthly deduction lower -- now if I die before she does, she automatically gets bumped up to the full pension payment monthly with no deduction for survivor benefits. |
