Member-only story
Are Old-School Pensions Out of Date?
A closer look at my government pension.
5 min readJun 17, 2021
As my wife and I have started getting more serious about investing for our future, we realized that we needed to know exactly what options were available to us.
We started with our employer retirement accounts, since we were already contributing to them.
- Amelia works at a university and has access to their 403(b), which has the same limit as the standard, private sector 401(k) of $19,500 for 2021.
- I work for a municipal government and have access to a 403(b) and a 457(b) plan, both of which have the $19,500 limit.
- I also have access to a pension plan and will meet the 10 year vesting period in two years.
It’s this third line, the increasingly rare, often misunderstood pension that is the focus of this article.
Is My Pension Worth It?
To see if a pension is worth keeping, we first have to figure out my remaining vesting time and how much the pension pays.
As mentioned earlier, I am two years away from being vested in the State of Indiana pension.
I shouldn’t be this close and am only this close by a stroke of luck.
