GREAT CHOICE!

Your pension will likely be the financial engine for your retirement. Has there ever been a better financial tool? A pension can be the golden goose that keeps on laying golden eggs, for the rest of your life. Let’s stick with this fictitious analogy for a minute. If you had a golden goose that laid golden eggs wouldn’t you want to protect it? Wouldn’t you want to make sure you cared for it and maximized its potential for the size of the eggs laid? Wouldn’t you want to make sure that your spouse, children, and/or other loved ones benefited from this magical golden goose? 

 Although fictitious, you should ask yourself these same questions about your NYS pension. Your pension can send you monthly checks for the rest of your life. Would it be worth your time to make sure you maximize it?

You will be faced with a very important decision as you put in your final paperwork for your retirement. You will need to decide to either take my full pension which will go away if I die? Or will I take a significant reduction in my monthly payment to protect a loved one, typically a spouse? Not protecting your loved ones is likely not an option. Fortunately, whether you will protect or not protect is not the difficult question. The difficult question is how you will protect them. We say difficult, not because it will be a hard choice, but simply because it takes some time to get educated. 

 This website is designed to give you significant information about your pension options and ways to protect it through your employer and through private options. NYSTRS says it directly on their website, your private options for protecting your loved ones may be more advantageous than the public options. In our experience, the choice you make will have implications to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The question is whose pocket will that money reside in? Yours, or your employers pension plan?

What if you could retain an extra 10-15% of your pension each year on your personal balance sheet? Would that allow you to enjoy your retirement even more? What if you could leverage dollars that otherwise would have gone back to NYS or your private pension plan to help provide for a long-term care or critical illness in the future, would that give you further peace of mind? What if you could enjoy your maximum pension and when you and your spouse are gone, you could pass on a tax free death benefit to your children or grandchildren, would that be a nice legacy to leave? 

 These are just some of the benefits of a pension max strategy. We are not here to say that the pension max is better or worse than taking one of your pension reductions. We are simply saying that getting educated can make a world of difference in your life and the lives of the ones you love.