I’m a retiree receiving a pension check from the Office of Personnel Management and I went out when they offered an Early Out. No extra money involved as a bonus to get you off the rolls but your pension check was based on your high three (average salary of your high three consecutive years) and total years of service including military time. They told people that if you don’t go and the decision to cut your job was made, they could transfer you to a facility up to a hundred miles away. That was your incentive to retire, the loss that they could make your working life very unpleasant. Once they cleared as many older workers off the rolls this way, then in the next Early Out offered a few years later, they offered a $25,000 bonus to retire. It would have been nice to have that, especially for those retirees like me who are ineligible for Social Security because our time was federal. I’m living on a modest pension and look forward to hopefully getting a small COLA for 2018. See my next post.
Federal and postal retirees receiving a pension check from the Office of Personnel Management wait every October for the news of whether they will get a Cost of Living Adjustment, COLA, in next year’s monthly check. We get the same COLA as Social Security recipients. Obama denied everyone a COLA for three of the eight years of his presidency, which had never happened before, and his COLA for 2017 was .3%, which to make clear was NOT three percent but a fraction of one percent, a miniscule amount that doesn’t begin to cover the increase in our federal health plan benefits of 2017. President Trump’s budget plan speaks of giving a 1.5 COLA for 2018 which would be very helpful, but it also proposes punishing federal and postal retirees by removing .5 percent of that COLA and giving us only one percent COLA, which is still better than Obama but it would be a slap in the face to the many federal and postal retirees who voted for Trump. Where then should such voters go in the next election cycle?