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~Why your Social Security statement is way off~

 

Last spring I wrote about the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO).  These are two punitive federal laws that reduce Social Security benefits to certain workers.  This email explains another problem associated with the WEP.

 

Faculty, Ed Techs, and administrators are all part of the Maine Public Employees Retirement System (MEPERS) and so we don't pay into Social Security.  If that's you, this means you are subject to the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), which is just a fancy way of saying that you will not get all of the Social Security benefits that you deserve.  It doesn't mean you won't get anything.  As long as you have worked 40 quarters (the equivalent of 10 years) in a Social Security covered job, you will get something.  

 

However, the mistake school employees often make is that when they look at their Social Security statement and see, for example, a projected monthly benefit of $1000, they assume that this figure accounts for the reduction due to WEP, but it doesn't.  In order to determine what your actual Social Security benefit will be, you must contact the Social Security Administration.  This is because the Social Security Administration doesn't know how much your state pension from MEPERS will be, and once you start collecting your state pension, any Social Security benefits you're receiving will be drastically reduced, perhaps by more than half.

So when you're planning for retirement and trying to determine how much income you will have from various sources, contact the Social Security Administration to have them calculate your penalty due to the WEP.

 

Also, there is a bipartisan effort to get a vote on a bill in Congress this week that would repeal both the WEP and the GPO.  You can tell your representatives to support this effort by using this link:  https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/action-center/take-action/fully-repeal-unfair-social-security-penalties

 

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September 8, 2024