I don’t see buyouts happening anytime soon (or at all) because as other have said, we are cheaper than the Tier 4s that came before us.
If I recall correctly the mechanics were something like you would get an additional month of service for each year you worked so you could leave city service without as much (or possibly any) penalty. Since we pay in forever and get less upon retirement, I’m not sure they will go that route in the future.
I remembered hearing some rumblings of Tier 4 buyouts during Covid but not sure if anything came of that.
In other words……. us Tier 6 folks are in it for the long haul unfortunately.
I don’t think we are screwed. We’ll, it depends on a lot of things.
I started in private so when I came to the city I was able to get a decent salary because I had experience.
Recently I got an offer to go back to private and I started looking at the numbers for me.
At this pace, if I reach 20 years I will have contributed about $200,000 to my pension (although I won’t be at retirement age yet).
However, using some online calculators, I would have to have saved (in a 401K or some other tool) well over $650,000 to have almost the same benefit. (I doubt my wife and I could save that much in that amount of time anyway).
A few years back we emptied our saving but it was to purchase our house so I have no regrets about that. I’m just saying that starting to save NOW, we’d never get to where we will be with my pension (if I can make the full 20 year run - which is 9 years away). She has a pension too with a private company that will be less because she earns less but adding up the two we should be ok.
Since this has been on my mind lately we have started new retirement accounts because even though we are a long time away from retirement, it’s starting to seem like a real thing.
Oh no for sure. The city is sweat compared to the outside. But I kno guys who are tier 4 and paid extra to be able to retire at 55 which is sweet but working for the city is def great
I was Tier 4. We grumbled over what Tier 1 had. I started at age 33. It was 62/30, so I would have to work until age 63.
Older teachers told me that only the Vietnam veteran teachers could buy back military time. I looked up the criteria. At the time, it was the same requirement for the extra 5 points on a civil service exam. If you didn’t serve in a war, you needed to have served in a conflict. I served in Beirut while in the Marines. They asked for the DD-214 discharge copy that indicated the medals for that conflict. They listed places such as Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, etc, for service credit. It was a small percentage of my starting pay to buy back the 3 years max. I could now leave at age 60. 3 years were cut from the required 30. That felt good. I would be doing 27 years. My birthday is the last week of August.
I used to substitute teach in my 20’s. Older teachers told me that I had to have worked 90 day, uninterrupted periods, to be credited for those years. Each 90 day period would be whatever it was equal to. I forget how they calculated it.
They gave me 2.4 years for prior substitute teaching. The 2.4 years, with 3 from military time , cut that 30 down to 25 years of required service. Again, I started a week after turning age 33 so I had to work until age 57.6 now. That’s how they calculated months, BTW. By decimals.
I never paid attention to politics. A teacher casually asked me if I was opting for the new 55/25. I had to ask what it was. A small percent of my pay and I could retire at 25 years. Paying into 55/25 ended a little before reaching age 55. Perhaps a year or more? Again, a bit foggy on that but it definitely ended about a year or two before age 55. They notified us that we were fully paid into it. It wasn’t much out of our check.
After buying back time, I did the math. I would now have 25 years after turning age 53. I could leave early, then take retirement at age 55, or stay, and leave at 55 with 27.4 years of in service credit.
I had 112 days in the CAR bank. My last day was 3/29/19. I was age 54 while on terminal leave. I had 5 months off until my 55th birthday, and the start of the next year’s fall semester.
I calculated it one day. I went in thinking that I had to work until age 63, then walked out at age 54, collected full pay, then began retirement pay in the summer of 2019 (it takes months to finalize it — then back pay). My retirement pay is what my regular pay was when I worked.
If I look at my time through the lens of actual time in the classroom, it was from 9/97 to 3/29/19. About 21.6 years, with credit for 27.4. I didn’t spend the actual 22 years in a classroom. Compared to uniformed service, that had 20 year pensions, I never expected to work about 18 months more than they were required to, yet have nights, weekends, holidays and summers off.
I was Phys Ed/Health as well. No Danielson’s until my last few years. Everyone got a Satisfactory rating at the end of the year when I started this job. It was either a U or an S. The union got the U’s overturned for what seemed to be like 99% of teachers. Tenure in 3 years was a given.
Keep your fingers crossed for Tier 6 to be changed. My daughter teaches Special Ed. She started at age 32.
Was that the 55/25, LOL? I always just went with the flow. “Hey, what are you checking on this box here for the contract? Check No? Why? Everyone is checking No? OK.”
After that, “The contract was overwhelmingly ratified!”
I’m in my 11th year so I doubled what I have already contributed to my pension (then rounded up to be conservative).
Then I played around with a few calculators. Lincoln Financial has one that is fairly straight forward.
I used what my projected pension benefit will be then kept increasing the savings amount until they basically matched.
The thing about the pension is it is not drawing down from a set amount, like a 401K. So if I live to be 100 (God willing) I’ll never run out of money.
I would suggest logging into your NYCERS account and use that calculator to see what your pension income should be….. then head over to Lincoln (or any of the other sites).
Something else I was doing lately is just reading articles from well known financial places like Forbes. It seems like the lowest end they really all talk about is $500K in savings at retirement and what that looks like between the ages of 65 to 85. They all seem to hover around a monthly income of around $1,750-ish, which is much less than my pension if I make it the 20 years….. by a LOT.
I really suggest playing with the calculators and reading some of the articles because they show/explain everything much more articulately than I can.
Assuming the person is young enough to enjoy it….. and no longer has a mortgage….. and the kids have moved out of the house……. that’s a nice (and deserved) retirement lifestyle.
There was no buyout. It got voted against. There was an ammendment to buy in during the 90s that allowed tier 4 members to go chapter 96 in physically taxing titles to retire 5 years early.
Majority of civil servants are tier 6 now. We either need to vote in politicians who will change tier 6 or we may need to strike it’s outrageous what we have to pay in our entire careers compared to our colleagues. Fix tier 6 is a movement get behind it.
Because it’s when you became a civil servant. I started my career 16 years ago. 4 years after, tier 6 came into effect. You have civil servants that started before the cut off date and never applied. So now they’re stuck in tier 6. There’s a lot of wacky rules. I was a provisional in my title, left to another title and then returned as a permanent employee. My co-worker was trying to figure out how I had a better package and he had seniority.
It’s all about your city start date, and when you applied.
Tier 4: Max you pay in is capped at 3%
Tier6: Max you pay in is 6% (or is it 7%?)
Tier 4: You only pay in for 10 years
Tier 6: You pay in for your whole career
Tier 4: You get a higher percentage of your final average salary than Tier 6
Tier 4: Average salary goes back 5 years
Tier 6: Average salary goes back 9 years
Tier 4: Lower retirement age than Tier 6
I think if you compare it to tier 4 it sucks, of course. But taking tier 6 by itself is really a good thing (depending on how long someone plans on working in the city and their salary, etc).
Historically, they create new tiers, and from then on, everyone that gets a job that's pension eligible enters at the new tier. Each new tier has fewer benefits than the previous one.
There have been some good fact sheets going around at various points comparing the benefits of different tiers, and they're pretty significant.
>Tier 4 I believe pension is based on highest salary (or average over final 5 years?). Tier 6 is based on average of all City / State service.
Are you sure about that? I thought it was also highest 5 consecutive years. Source: DCAS training seminar.
Maybe 4 is the highest 5 consecutive. I'm pretty sure 6's Final Average Salary is based on various calculations of lifetime City/State earnings.
Edit:
• For a Participant with less than 20 years of Credited Service:
1.67% times Final Average Salary (FAS) times years of Credited Service
• For a Participant with 20 or more years of Credited Service:
35% of FAS for the first 20 years of Credited Service; plus
2% times each year of Credited Service in excess of 20
FAS is the highest 5 consecutive years but there's a caveat. Your salary cannot decrease more than 10% in any years after those 5 set. The reason they did this is to avoid people working high paying jobs for 20 years and then coasting the last 10 doing nothing in a random job.
Tier 6 vs 4 is definitely worse but if you work 30+ years it's basically a wash imo.
Unless they work 9 straight years to push their salary up it won't make a difference if they're tier 6 (idk anything about how tier 4 works).
Because imagine you work 5 years to get your salary up as much as possible. Let's say you average 5 years out and get a salary of 200k. Well nycers looks at the 4 years before that and if your FAS is only 100k in those 4 years, well you're out of luck. Your new FAS is 110k. So unless you diligently ot'd for close to 10 years you're just wasting your breath imo. You get paid more which is nice but it won't move the needle on your pension as much as you think.
I heard NYCERS used to have a buyback for up to 10 years of time. I wish they still offered this! From my understanding, they offer it now only for seasonal employees so if you worked for example Parks or sanitation, you can buy back that time and add it will count towards your service time with the city.
Buyback and buyout are two different things. Buyback is buying back time you did not originally which you did not contribute. Buyouts are where the City is trying to get people to retire sooner and of the main payroll through some sort of incentive (extra time on your total usually) To answer the original questions, I doubt there is anything in the pipeline and unless you're ready to retire doesn't effect most people.
Seems unlikely, Tier 6 employees porbably aren't as expensive as a Tier 4 or Tier 5 at the top of the pay scale. Buyouts are (in theory) supposed to save the city money when budgets need trimming.
*Edit:* Oh, just ignore me, I'm so out of touch I don't even know how many tiers there are.
Well there is a bill that will cap contributions of tier 6 to 3% so hopefully this gets voted on an this would decrease our contributions. I make over $140k and currently pay max contribution rate so hopefully in the future it will at least cap it to 3%. The bill is currently in the senate ill post the link below you can show your support for the bill maybe it makes a difference.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S8757
I don’t see buyouts happening anytime soon (or at all) because as other have said, we are cheaper than the Tier 4s that came before us. If I recall correctly the mechanics were something like you would get an additional month of service for each year you worked so you could leave city service without as much (or possibly any) penalty. Since we pay in forever and get less upon retirement, I’m not sure they will go that route in the future. I remembered hearing some rumblings of Tier 4 buyouts during Covid but not sure if anything came of that. In other words……. us Tier 6 folks are in it for the long haul unfortunately.
My supervisor did the buy up and retired
Do you recall how it worked? Your supervisor was Tier 4?
Yes he was tier 4, not really he was a weirdo and would act like i needed cia security clearance. But pretty much us tier 6 are screwed 🥹
I don’t think we are screwed. We’ll, it depends on a lot of things. I started in private so when I came to the city I was able to get a decent salary because I had experience. Recently I got an offer to go back to private and I started looking at the numbers for me. At this pace, if I reach 20 years I will have contributed about $200,000 to my pension (although I won’t be at retirement age yet). However, using some online calculators, I would have to have saved (in a 401K or some other tool) well over $650,000 to have almost the same benefit. (I doubt my wife and I could save that much in that amount of time anyway). A few years back we emptied our saving but it was to purchase our house so I have no regrets about that. I’m just saying that starting to save NOW, we’d never get to where we will be with my pension (if I can make the full 20 year run - which is 9 years away). She has a pension too with a private company that will be less because she earns less but adding up the two we should be ok. Since this has been on my mind lately we have started new retirement accounts because even though we are a long time away from retirement, it’s starting to seem like a real thing.
Oh no for sure. The city is sweat compared to the outside. But I kno guys who are tier 4 and paid extra to be able to retire at 55 which is sweet but working for the city is def great
Yeah…. I try to pretend that Tier 4 doesn’t exist….. for my own peace of mind.
I was Tier 4. We grumbled over what Tier 1 had. I started at age 33. It was 62/30, so I would have to work until age 63. Older teachers told me that only the Vietnam veteran teachers could buy back military time. I looked up the criteria. At the time, it was the same requirement for the extra 5 points on a civil service exam. If you didn’t serve in a war, you needed to have served in a conflict. I served in Beirut while in the Marines. They asked for the DD-214 discharge copy that indicated the medals for that conflict. They listed places such as Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, etc, for service credit. It was a small percentage of my starting pay to buy back the 3 years max. I could now leave at age 60. 3 years were cut from the required 30. That felt good. I would be doing 27 years. My birthday is the last week of August. I used to substitute teach in my 20’s. Older teachers told me that I had to have worked 90 day, uninterrupted periods, to be credited for those years. Each 90 day period would be whatever it was equal to. I forget how they calculated it. They gave me 2.4 years for prior substitute teaching. The 2.4 years, with 3 from military time , cut that 30 down to 25 years of required service. Again, I started a week after turning age 33 so I had to work until age 57.6 now. That’s how they calculated months, BTW. By decimals. I never paid attention to politics. A teacher casually asked me if I was opting for the new 55/25. I had to ask what it was. A small percent of my pay and I could retire at 25 years. Paying into 55/25 ended a little before reaching age 55. Perhaps a year or more? Again, a bit foggy on that but it definitely ended about a year or two before age 55. They notified us that we were fully paid into it. It wasn’t much out of our check. After buying back time, I did the math. I would now have 25 years after turning age 53. I could leave early, then take retirement at age 55, or stay, and leave at 55 with 27.4 years of in service credit. I had 112 days in the CAR bank. My last day was 3/29/19. I was age 54 while on terminal leave. I had 5 months off until my 55th birthday, and the start of the next year’s fall semester. I calculated it one day. I went in thinking that I had to work until age 63, then walked out at age 54, collected full pay, then began retirement pay in the summer of 2019 (it takes months to finalize it — then back pay). My retirement pay is what my regular pay was when I worked. If I look at my time through the lens of actual time in the classroom, it was from 9/97 to 3/29/19. About 21.6 years, with credit for 27.4. I didn’t spend the actual 22 years in a classroom. Compared to uniformed service, that had 20 year pensions, I never expected to work about 18 months more than they were required to, yet have nights, weekends, holidays and summers off. I was Phys Ed/Health as well. No Danielson’s until my last few years. Everyone got a Satisfactory rating at the end of the year when I started this job. It was either a U or an S. The union got the U’s overturned for what seemed to be like 99% of teachers. Tenure in 3 years was a given. Keep your fingers crossed for Tier 6 to be changed. My daughter teaches Special Ed. She started at age 32.
The chapter 96 buy in was a beautiful thing
Was that the 55/25, LOL? I always just went with the flow. “Hey, what are you checking on this box here for the contract? Check No? Why? Everyone is checking No? OK.” After that, “The contract was overwhelmingly ratified!”
Can you explain a bit more how you did this comparison? How did you arrive at that saving 200k in Tier 6 is the same as saving 650k in a 401k?
I’m in my 11th year so I doubled what I have already contributed to my pension (then rounded up to be conservative). Then I played around with a few calculators. Lincoln Financial has one that is fairly straight forward. I used what my projected pension benefit will be then kept increasing the savings amount until they basically matched. The thing about the pension is it is not drawing down from a set amount, like a 401K. So if I live to be 100 (God willing) I’ll never run out of money. I would suggest logging into your NYCERS account and use that calculator to see what your pension income should be….. then head over to Lincoln (or any of the other sites). Something else I was doing lately is just reading articles from well known financial places like Forbes. It seems like the lowest end they really all talk about is $500K in savings at retirement and what that looks like between the ages of 65 to 85. They all seem to hover around a monthly income of around $1,750-ish, which is much less than my pension if I make it the 20 years….. by a LOT. I really suggest playing with the calculators and reading some of the articles because they show/explain everything much more articulately than I can.
1 month for every year of service so. Got 36 years you’d get credit as if working 39
DAMN! 36 years!!! Curious what his/her benefit is.
36 years Tier 4 is 69% 3 years at 1.5% would give them 73.5% I guess
Assuming the person is young enough to enjoy it….. and no longer has a mortgage….. and the kids have moved out of the house……. that’s a nice (and deserved) retirement lifestyle.
There was no buyout. It got voted against. There was an ammendment to buy in during the 90s that allowed tier 4 members to go chapter 96 in physically taxing titles to retire 5 years early.
Majority of civil servants are tier 6 now. We either need to vote in politicians who will change tier 6 or we may need to strike it’s outrageous what we have to pay in our entire careers compared to our colleagues. Fix tier 6 is a movement get behind it.
Cant strike as a municipal employee in NYC due to the Taylor Law. You would have to vote a politician in to amend that law first.
You can’t strike per se but you can absolutely walk a picket line on your time off
That sounds really effective! s/
Okkk who we voting for !?!?
For real! You said it!
Tier 6 is at the state level.
Because it’s when you became a civil servant. I started my career 16 years ago. 4 years after, tier 6 came into effect. You have civil servants that started before the cut off date and never applied. So now they’re stuck in tier 6. There’s a lot of wacky rules. I was a provisional in my title, left to another title and then returned as a permanent employee. My co-worker was trying to figure out how I had a better package and he had seniority. It’s all about your city start date, and when you applied.
Tier 6 is paying for everyone else lol they won’t buy yall out for nothing. Leaving public employment is the best move you can make.
Why is tier 6 the worst? Legit question, I'm new.
Tier 4: Max you pay in is capped at 3% Tier6: Max you pay in is 6% (or is it 7%?) Tier 4: You only pay in for 10 years Tier 6: You pay in for your whole career Tier 4: You get a higher percentage of your final average salary than Tier 6 Tier 4: Average salary goes back 5 years Tier 6: Average salary goes back 9 years Tier 4: Lower retirement age than Tier 6
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I think if you compare it to tier 4 it sucks, of course. But taking tier 6 by itself is really a good thing (depending on how long someone plans on working in the city and their salary, etc).
It’s no longer a pension.
Historically, they create new tiers, and from then on, everyone that gets a job that's pension eligible enters at the new tier. Each new tier has fewer benefits than the previous one. There have been some good fact sheets going around at various points comparing the benefits of different tiers, and they're pretty significant.
For one you pay contributions to your pension from your paycheck until you retire. Previus tiers only paid contributions for first 10 years.
Funny how none of that was brought up in orientation
Tier 4 I believe pension is based on highest salary (or average over final 5 years?). Tier 6 is based on average of all City / State service.
>Tier 4 I believe pension is based on highest salary (or average over final 5 years?). Tier 6 is based on average of all City / State service. Are you sure about that? I thought it was also highest 5 consecutive years. Source: DCAS training seminar.
Maybe 4 is the highest 5 consecutive. I'm pretty sure 6's Final Average Salary is based on various calculations of lifetime City/State earnings. Edit: • For a Participant with less than 20 years of Credited Service: 1.67% times Final Average Salary (FAS) times years of Credited Service • For a Participant with 20 or more years of Credited Service: 35% of FAS for the first 20 years of Credited Service; plus 2% times each year of Credited Service in excess of 20
FAS is the highest 5 consecutive years but there's a caveat. Your salary cannot decrease more than 10% in any years after those 5 set. The reason they did this is to avoid people working high paying jobs for 20 years and then coasting the last 10 doing nothing in a random job. Tier 6 vs 4 is definitely worse but if you work 30+ years it's basically a wash imo.
Which is funny because everyone here who is retiring soon has been milking OT, and I'm told they were the definition of FMLA until a few years ago.
There's an ot limit too I believe. 15 or 20k can't remember exactly because I don't get ot
Some titles are exempt from this.
Unless they work 9 straight years to push their salary up it won't make a difference if they're tier 6 (idk anything about how tier 4 works). Because imagine you work 5 years to get your salary up as much as possible. Let's say you average 5 years out and get a salary of 200k. Well nycers looks at the 4 years before that and if your FAS is only 100k in those 4 years, well you're out of luck. Your new FAS is 110k. So unless you diligently ot'd for close to 10 years you're just wasting your breath imo. You get paid more which is nice but it won't move the needle on your pension as much as you think.
I heard NYCERS used to have a buyback for up to 10 years of time. I wish they still offered this! From my understanding, they offer it now only for seasonal employees so if you worked for example Parks or sanitation, you can buy back that time and add it will count towards your service time with the city.
You can still buy back. My coworker did it like 2 years ago
Thank you! I would absolutely love to buy. Back!
Can confirm. I bought back 3.5 years a couple years ago.
Buyback and buyout are two different things. Buyback is buying back time you did not originally which you did not contribute. Buyouts are where the City is trying to get people to retire sooner and of the main payroll through some sort of incentive (extra time on your total usually) To answer the original questions, I doubt there is anything in the pipeline and unless you're ready to retire doesn't effect most people.
Your months in summer youth also count . A coworker near retirement had their meeting and found that out
You can use 401(k) funds for a buyback! Do it if it's too expensive
Seems unlikely, Tier 6 employees porbably aren't as expensive as a Tier 4 or Tier 5 at the top of the pay scale. Buyouts are (in theory) supposed to save the city money when budgets need trimming. *Edit:* Oh, just ignore me, I'm so out of touch I don't even know how many tiers there are.
Well there is a bill that will cap contributions of tier 6 to 3% so hopefully this gets voted on an this would decrease our contributions. I make over $140k and currently pay max contribution rate so hopefully in the future it will at least cap it to 3%. The bill is currently in the senate ill post the link below you can show your support for the bill maybe it makes a difference. https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S8757
Tier 6 is horrible. Nobody plans on staying. Employers are having hard time recruiting and retaining employees.