So I called the state’s General Accounting Office, by some miracle reaching the woman who manages RASL, the state benefit whereby employees get paid a portion of their hourly wage for each hour of accrued sick leave they’ve accumulated. You could hear her hair rising off her head to stand straight on end as I described the story I’d been told: that a layoff means you lose all your RASL.
Nay. Nay verily. She told me that was absolutely, positively not true.
Termination, as it develops, is separate from retirement. You may be canned for any reason ranging from budget-driven layoffs to being caught with your fingers in the till while screwing little boys. That is irrelevant to retirement. Retiring is a different process. To get your RASL, all you have to do is arrange to start your retirement within 14 days after your last day on the job.
Layoffs, she declared in every way she could think of, do not, do not, do not affect your earned retirement benefit.
Thank God!
Nice, eh? This factoid came to me first through the rumor mill, which you would expect to be inaccurate. But then it was confirmed by HR! There’s where the strategy to declare fake retirement plans was actually hatched.
Now all I have to do is perch up here like a sitting duck and wait to be laid off. At least I don’t have to cook up any schemes to make it look like I intend to retire when I most certainly do not.
Not that I wouldn’t like to.
What a huge relief for you. I hope the layoff ax holds off for as long as possible. These are scary times.
I work for an auto parts manufacturer that sells 25% of our output to GM. GM shut down all of their engine plants for the entire month of January, and some of them for the first 2 weeks of February as well. Half my department is now gone, and we joke about taking out the empty desks to install cots for those of us left with double the workload.
So far I am still employed and saving well over half my take home pay. That has been tough to do; those of us who remain were on forced furlough 10 days out of the last 30. For the next 2 months, we’ve taken a 10% pay cut, but at least they aren’t talking about furlough on top of that.
My husband survived the layoffs that were announced at his company in December, so we feel doubly fortunate. We are nearing 50 and live in a semi-rural area. There aren’t that many local jobs available for a couple of 50ish manufacturing engineers in the best of economic times. Like a lot of parents these days, I’ve told my college-age kids that they don’t need to go into any manufacturing field.
The backlash from this economic recession is going to be felt for a long time.
Wow! That’s just awful.
I just ran some numbers and figured out that though the furlough-driven pay cut is presented to us as “8 to 12 percent” actually, over the four months that it will be in effect for me, is more like 19 percent of net pay. It’s $140 a month more than I’m presently putting into savings.
To be able to put any money into savings under these circumstances is quite an accomplishment.
I am luckier than many in that I have help. Hubby’s paycheck covers most everything except groceries, household expenses, and two of the bills that are my lot to pay. A big chunk of my check had been going to keep my two college students in ramen noodles and to pay off a 0% credit card I used to finance a traditional IRA last year (tax avoidance).
The credit card is paid off now and both kids told me in November that between their good part time jobs now and scholarship benefits, they were ready to do without mommy’s money. If it had not been for those two things, we really would be hurting. Now I’m just salting away everything I can. Who knows how long we can keep dodging the bullets?
I found your blog some months ago and it has become one of my daily must-reads. Watching you cope with institutional lunacy at work and reading about your retirement planning really helps me focus on my efforts to get to a better place financially.
Hi,
Does anybody knows if “retirement layoff” will qualify me for unemployment insurance, I have worked for almost 29 years in was told last week that my position will be terminated due to loss of funds.The benefits office told me that being retired(not by choice)prevents me from getting unemployment pay.I simply have to get retirement in order to get medical benefits continued.