Thoughts and Riches

.....a blog about personal finance, motivational stories, deals, and special offers

Books

Web Domain Registration

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Between golf and a hard place - perils of early retirement

The pittsburghlive.com article discusses the potential problems of early retirement - changes to post-retirement benefits at your former company. The article profiles the situation fo Jeff Rea, who thought he had saved sufficient money for his retirement and decided to take an early retirement in May 2004, at the age of 50, after having worked 30 years at Allegheny Ludlum's Brackenridge plant.

However, things changed after his retirement when in June 2004, his former company decided to cut pension medical benefits beginning Jan. 1, 2010, for salaried retirees. In addition, the company decided to cap its benefits contribution at the company's 2004 level. Result? Rea who is now 53, and still 12 years away from being able to collect Medicare, estimates that he will need to cough up up to $1,200 per month to keep the same health-care coverage he has now.

"Asked if he would've worked a couple more years, Rea said, "Quite possibly I would have. Being that close, I could've worked a few more years to put myself in a better position, but it's hard to tell."

The article hightlights the potential problems with early retirement. Not only you may not be eligible for partial social security or medicare benefit until a later age but you may not have enough medical insurance. While the article discusses medical insurance problems for early retirees, the issue is faced by many younger workers too who have pre-existing conditions and cannot qualify for or don't get affordable insurance. Hopefully, we will finally have some form of universal healthcare so that people don't have to worry about not having medical insurance.

For complete article, see:

Pittsburghlive.com: Ludlum retirees worry about pinch

Points.com eLearners Earn Rewards at MyPoints.

posted by Ruby @ 7:39 AM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

See important Disclosure and Disclaimer

Favorite Quote

"If you look at what you have in life, you will always have more. If you look at what you do not have in life, you will never have enough".
- Author Unknown

Disclosure

This site uses cookies from companies like Google and others to enable the companies to deliver their services, personalize their ads and product offerings, and for traffic analysis. Information about your use of this site is shared with these companies. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. Additionally, this site, including blog posts, may contain reviews, links, banners, text and other forms of advertisements for products, services, courses, and so forth of companies of which we may be an affiliate member or for which we may get paid for referrals. This site may also contain blog posts for which we are paid, as well as blog posts regarding products or services of companies from which we may have received complimentary products or services.

Reward Surveys/Panels/Shopping/Contests