hrj | Entries tagged with retirement

Medicare Advantage (through Kaiser) is all set up. I've paid my first 3 months of Medicare B through the website, since they can't automatically deduct it from my retirement benefits until they're actually giving me retirement benefits. (Still waiting on that one.)

Sent out my retirement announcement (and celebration invite) at work. I've promised people jars of Heather's Retirement Marmalade as door prizes for as long as they last. (I made 2 dozen.)

Other than the SSA thing, all that's left is:
* last-day stuff at the job (turn in computer/badge, exit interview)
* convert 401K to IRA and select investment strategy (the exact details of which may depend on market details)

Oh, and close my last two investigations. One is in final review, the other is pending completion of some corrections.

(My "retirement checklist" also has some other items on it that aren't directly retirement related but it seemed useful to record them as official to-do items.)

This morning I confirmed that SSA officially has me approved for Medicare Part B. I emailed my Medicare Advantage contact at Kaiser to ask for an appointment to officially set that up. Since my retirement benefit is still pending (which is usually where the Part B payment comes from) I assume that I'll get a bill. The "pay your bill" function on the Medicare website is active, but I only theoretically know what the amount is. (And some online searching suggested that direct payment is normally done in 3-month lumps?) In any case, I'm completely confident that I'll have everything set up by April 30.

On the work front, I've put together a mailing list for my retirement celebration/contact email. I'll send that out Monday (celebration is next Wednesday). Closed out my "attaboy catalog points" by ordering something trivial and consumable. (I almost zeroed out my points to get the Lowe's gift card that paid for my new dishwasher.)

Other than my official "exit interview," everything else work-related happens on the last day. Retirement benefits still pending but not urgent. Rolling the 401K into an IRA can't happen until mid-May. So not much else to do at the moment.

I had a breakthrough today on the Medicare Part B issue. I finally had a day when I had space in my schedule to hang out on hold with the local SSA office, and by luck I wasn't booted off immediately for the wait time being too long.

So I talked to a human being, gave her my info about my Medicare Part B application, and she activated it right then and there. (Alas, she didn't have the power to do that for my retirement benefits.) So in 24 hours, my status should be live in the system and I can get back to Kaiser about starting my Medicare Advantage. Yay for no coverage gap!

(I seem to be incapable of typing "Medicare" correctly the first time unless being very very careful. It keeps coming out "Medicate.")

So I now have a second "poke" in the system about the retirement benefit and she said if there's been no movement in a couple of weeks to check back and they can get a manager involved. "A couple of weeks" is at my retirement date, but this is less critical for the Social Security payments because I get back-pay from when I requested it to start (February) and I have plenty of savings to tide me over.

I am once again reveling in how much I can accomplish with my "pre-retirement long weekends." I posted about Friday's accomplishments already. Saturday was all about getting the vegetable beds set up and the tomatoes planted. Plus harvesting another bushel of Seville oranges, because I want to make a batch of "Heather's Retirement Marmalade" as give-aways at my work retirement party. (Previous instances of giving away Produce of My Estates have been very well received.)

( Boring Financial Geekery, but check back later because I will have an Interesting Announcement this afternoon )

An update on the path to retirement. For those who might need "what has gone before," in 26 days I will be retired.

My Social Security and Medicare Part B applications are still in process. Converting my 401K from the accumulation phase to the payout phase is still in the planning stages and can't be finalized until after my last paycheck, so not until mid-May. But in the mean time, I got a Very Nice Bonus (possibly the largest bonus ever in my time at the Big B), and I'll be getting 50 days worth of unused vacation paid out, so there are no worries about tiding over while things get sorted. I just get anxious when things aren't finalized yet, as a basic principle.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time in the last week interacting with Fidelity (who not only manage my employer's 401K and pension funds, but also handle pretty much all of the outsourceable HR tasks). After fighting through phone trees, chat bots, and HR tickets, I finally have answers or resolutions to all the issues I was pursuing. Some involved actions. Some involved clarifications.

I had two to-do items with regard to the Social Security Administration. I needed to deliver the "yes I've had employer health insurance for the last two years" form (one of the things I was fighting with Fidelity about) so they could complete my Medicare Part B application. (Needed to I can seamlessly transfer from Kaiser-from-employer to Kaiser-as-Medicare-Advantage.)

The other item was "I know the 30-day response time advertised on the website is a polite fiction, but it's been 100 days since I put in my application for retirement payments and I need to know if something's gone wrong and they just haven't told me."

Now, there are supposedly two ways you can make an appointment at your local SSA office: phone the local number, or phone the national number. Every time I phoned the local number, after listening through the whole 10 minute recorded message (it may have only been 5 minutes, to be fair) the chatbot would announce that since the wait time was too long they were just going to hang up on me and I should call another time. The national number, after listening through the whole etc. ect. etc. the chatbot would announce that since wait times were over two hours I should leave my number and they'd call me back. Yeah. Right.

Well, the third option is just to show up at the office and punt. Today was another of my "I need to use up my non-refundable days off" Fridays, so I showed up at the SSA office an hour before opening. This gave me time to peruse the posters on the door, one one which provided a qmr code that would allow you to check in online for the waiting list. Both the posters and the nice SSA person who came out to align our expectations said that there was no way nohow anyone without an appointment was going to get their business done today, but that we'd all get an intake interview to make a future appointment and get our needs classified.

Evidently my needs were exceptionally simple, because despite that caution, my intake interview covered everything I'd hoped to do. Turn in the Medicare form, and inquire about the status of my Social Security application. I was able to confirm that there were no problems/hold-ups noted on my application (my biggest worry), and the clerk put a "nudge" in my file for the person processing the application, noting how long it had been and that I was two months past my requested start date. (I'll get back-payments, once everything is approved.)

Since that was the only task I'd assigned myself for the day and it was completed by 9:30, I also dropped by the nursery and picked up tomato sets (which adds one more necessary task for the day).

Then I finally hunted down the physical location of my credit union (which merged with another CU a couple years ago and closed the location I'd gone to previously) to split off a new savings account (money market rates) to hold my "emergency funds" so I can use my regular savings account for "stashing money away for special projects and highly variable expenses." For quite some time now, I've had the privilege of not having to worry much about what I'm spending. Now I need to pay a lot more attention, so I'm setting up systems to make spending thresholds more visible and to save more aggressively for things I used to be able to do by feel. I have spreadsheets...

Today's major task for "pre-retirment prep Fridays" was an appointment with a Fidelity financial consultant. An actual in-person appointment (in Walnut Creek), which meant that I could use his facial and body language to figure out when we weren't entirely communicating clearly. (I hate had HATE doing business over the phone with no visuals.) After the hour-long phone consult last week, I was under the impression that today's appointment was to decide upon the specific details of how to turn my 401K into retirement income. I'm not entirely sure what *his* idea about today's appointment was. I have a feeling that I fell in an awkward mid-point between "has no idea what she's doing" and "knows enough to be a financial planner myself and what do I need him for."

So a couple times during the discussion I found myself asking, "What is the end goal of the things you're asking me about and presenting me with? What are the next steps in the process?" Because it felt like he was working very hard to avoid making specific recommendations, but whenever I started to discuss concrete specifics, I'd get presented with a basic-level lecture on How Things Worked.

I mean, he kept circling around to "based on even the most conservative projections, you can afford to live to age 97 with 90% confidence." But then he'd pivot to, "So what other sources of income were you planning to pursue?" ("Other sources" besides my 401K, my tiny fixed pension, and my social security. We did discuss my writing income, both current and projected, but I said I didn't want to include that in my financial planning due to the variability and uncertainty.)

In the end, we did manage to pull in harness and come up with a tentative plan for a mixture of two different types of annuities and the rest in one or more managed funds. I was hoping to walk out of the office with everything set up, but it turns out we can't move my money from the Bayer 401K into my prospective choices until my Bayer account is "inactive", i.e., after my last paycheck. Sigh.

So we have another appointment set for 3 weeks from now to lay out the specifics and set things up to be ready for a "push-button start" when that happens.

(I just had a really crazy thought that I might pitch to him. If I took a fraction of my retirement account and simply paid off my mortgage, it might make financial sense, because what I'd save in mortgage payments far outstrips what I'd lose in investment dividends.)

I keep pledging to post here more often, focusing on things that don't fit as well into my author blog. It just feels so hard to make time, but mostly it's my perennial problem of having trouble focusing on more than one social media venue at a time.

Retirement planning continues. I've gone back to taking Fridays off and using them for pre-retirement tasks, since I have some Personal Days that I won't get reimbursed for if I don't use them up. Last Friday I powered through most of the checklist items for things my employer has outsourced to Fidelity. There's an in-person appointment this Friday to hammer out the details for my 401K.

There has been slight movement on the Social Security front: Medicare asked me to get a form filled out by my employer saying I've had healthcare coverage for the last two years. So I guess that means that my application has actually been reviewed to some extent. Still no word on the Social Security itself. I think next week's task will be to see if I can get an in-person appointment to see if there's anything holding it up and maybe get an estimate (given that I was supposed to have started getting payments this month...).

Work is pretty much going to keep me running full speed until the last day, but I'm officially off the list for being assigned "major" investigations, since I can't guarantee that I'd get them finished before I leave.

Maybe next post I'll start getting caught up again on Things I Have Read.

My relationship with social media is not expansively polyamorous: I have a tendency to settle on one or two venues that I read compulsively, while forgetting about all the others (except when I want to post some blog/podcast publicity). Thus Bluesky has been getting all my love, Mastodon has been left to languish, fb gets browsed as a timewaster, and Dreamwidth...well, I'm not going to check when I last posted.

And yet, I love blogging long-form, and there are all manner of things that aren't really appropriate for the Alpennia/LHMP blog. So here I am. Maybe I'll even get caught up on my book reviews.

As of today, it is 60 days to retirement. I'm still angsting over whether my social security and medicare applications will get processed in time. I thought I'd allowed way more than enough time, but then they blew past the "normative processing times" posted on the websites. Well, I did some searching online with questions about current wait times and found a discussion with crowdsourced data that looks reliable. The conclusion of that discussion is that social security applications are being processed by start date, not application date, and that people have waited multiple months only to have their applications approved just in time for their desired start date. That helps a little, though it means I should be hearing very soon now.

In reality, as long as my payments start by May, it makes no difference in cashflow. (I picked February as my start month because it was my earliest 100% date and if I waited after that I was leaving money on the table.) The Medicare Part B start is a bit more critical since I need it approved before I can switch to Kaiser as my Medicare provider. I suppose I should research what my options are if there ends up being a gap before it kicks in.

The spring season in my garden has officially started. I've harvested my first two artichokes and am having some successful experiments in treating the artichoke leaf stalks as cardoons. I planted the replacement persimmon tree (and discovered the one it was replacing had rotted at the graft, so I may have planted it too deep). In the cleared bed around the persimmon, I'm seeing if I can manage to start an asparagus bed. And I also decided to squeeze in one more citrus tree--a mandarin. I think this weekend I need to begin processing the Seville oranges. I have plenty of marmalade in several varieties from last year, so I think this will be a candied peel year for the most part.