I Must Work for the Government

A few mornings ago, I read a short post referencing Investopedia’s recent article on How Much You Need to Retire at 56.

As an avid reader and consumer of dozens of personal finance and retirement articles and blog posts per day, the title piqued my interest, having recently celebrated my forty-ninth birthday and being a long-time hard-working worker bee for various local units of government.

Six years from this November, God willing, I will celebrate my own fifty-sixth birthday. My son will be twenty-eight years old and will likely hold at least a master’s degree by that time and will be some combination of professional musician and educator. My daughter will be twenty-three and well on her way to becoming successful in her own right. She is more driven than my son to pursue a career in a STEM field and has been a high achiever since the day she was born.

As for me, I do not know exactly where late 2026 will find me.

In my dream scenario, I would have a healthy and wide-ranging variety of income streams making their way into our bank accounts. Ideally, it would be comparable to or even surpass the income that I currently make by trading many hours for dollars.

As I often do, I scrolled through the comments section, partly in the hope of picking up some valuable nuggets of wisdom including something that I may use in a post, eBook, or investing tactic of my own, but mostly out of curiosity.

I find comment sections fascinating, often more interesting than the articles, themselves. People share personal information, political views, tales of despair and woe and pitch their own products or services. You will read comments ranging from “I have five million saved and travel the world” to “I’ve been foreclosed on, divorced, abused, and live on the streets.”

One of the comments that I read was by a gentleman who wrote that he would be collecting a $3,000 per month pension payment at the age of fifty-six and planned to retire from his current position and perhaps work part-time and/or pursue some hobbies and spend time gardening, traveling, etc.

My own thoughts on his comment were along the lines of “good for him” and that he must live in a very low-cost area and probably has a modest home paid off and is in relatively good health. For myself these days, $3,000 would cover roughly anywhere from one-third to a quarter of my suburban middle-class family’s expenses in any given month.

As I pay about $3,000 per month for our son’s college alone, that amount would not go very far for yours truly here in early 2020. With our children hopefully off the family payroll by 2026, $3,000 may look a lot better to me at that time.

Also, my wife and I may be ready to shift to the withdrawing invested funds mode rather than me Paying Ourselves First between $1,500 and $2,000 every month.

Because of the modest amount, I also assumed that, most likely, he does not work in a particularly high-paying position in administration, finance, information technology, or development. Most likely a position that does not require a master’s degree or maybe not even a college degree.

As I scrolled through the comments, I saw somebody write “must be a government employee” in a tone that suggested something wrong with that. Many others “liked” his comment and added similar remarks.

Which got me thinking.

I am a government employee and have been since early 1993, nearly twenty-seven years ago. At first, I toiled as an Adult Probation Officer for what is likely the worst-run department in the most bureaucratic county in the country for seven long years.

I was right out of college, having graduated into a sluggish-at-best economy in late 1992. My two closest friends both now and then had service industry jobs at the time, earning seven or eight dollars per hour, like I was in my entry-level court clerk job.

Twenty-seven years later, one of the guys is a long-time mid-level computer geek for Blue Cross and the other is an elementary school principal. Both are faring better economically than I am. I am a long-time economic development professional but, at the time, I was borderline desperate to find gainful employment anywhere.

My parents were always supportive, but I had moved back home after college and not a day went by when one or both of them were not urging me to get a job and move out onto my own. Perhaps they were afraid that I would become like one of the many men in my neighborhood who failed to ever launch out on their own.

Funny thing is, I was only twenty-two at the time, younger than most millennials who move out from the comfort of home all these years later, and just slightly older than my son is now.

It just so happened that one of the fathers of a kid on the Pony League baseball team that I was coaching in the summer of 1992 knew of an entry-level job opening in the local court clerk’s office. After interviewing at but not getting hired by several local businesses (I did turn down one super crappy job), I was hired at the office largely based upon the recommendation of the player’s father.

Two valuable lessons learned right there: One, spending many hours giving it my all in coaching without making one dime led me to meet someone who was impressed by my work ethic and competitive spirit and was willing to help me.

Second, despite my strong research, writing, and speaking credentials, and analytical skills along with a newly minted bachelor’s degree from UW-Madison, it took a personal connection for me to land my first post-college job. And it was a job that did not even require a college degree.

I promise you that I had no thoughts whatsoever about contributing to a pension fund back then.

I simply wanted to earn some spending money to be with my girlfriend (now my wife of nearly twenty-four years) more, hang out with my two aforementioned friends and several others whom I have since lost touch with, and obtain my own set of wheels.

I was pissed off about all the dollars for various things being taken right out of my paycheck when I was only making around $8 per hour, including contributions toward a pension. Pensions were for old, gray-haired folks like my grandfathers.

That court clerk position was with Cook County government and all these years later, I am employed by a local municipal government in suburban Chicagoland. My first day of employment with the county filing traffic tickets counts as much toward my overall tenure as tomorrow will.

So, a few things about us government employees.

One is that I probably cannot stand a federal or state bureaucrat more than you. In all the years that I have been employed in local government, I have yet to experience more than a handful of positive interactions with a federal employee. They are incredibly difficult to reach by phone. Usually, you press buttons in a menu, get transferred a few times, and then are either cut off abruptly or transferred to a full voicemail box.

I write “more than a handful” because I have found the local employees of the Small Business Administration to be as helpful and responsive as they could possibly be.

If you do not work for a city or an area that is currently in favor with the prevailing regime, do not waste your time.

Also, there are so many obscure administrative roles within the federal bureaucracy that you may never make contact with anyone of significance. The best you may hope for is the deputy assistant to the acting (rarely permanent) undersecretary of B.S.

Seriously!

There are usually at least two “under” or “deputy” or “assistants” in their title and if your local unit of government cannot deliver votes to your party, you won’t speak with us?

Anyhow, dealing with the State of Illinois is not much better.

The difference is that we must work with them on an ongoing basis, so whether the current Illinois regime is heading toward a massive defeat, bankrupting the state, or even prison, I must pretend to love the State, appreciate what they do, and kiss their bureaucratic asses to curry some small amount of favor from them in the future as they dole out taxpayers’ money.

In the local unit of government where I work, we answer the phones every time that you call, respond to your emails every time you email, and will reply to your questions and requests whether they are sent in by social media, via a mobile app created for that purpose or, if you prefer, to walk into City Hall.

If you dial 9–1–1, our (government employee) emergency responders will be there in under two minutes. When the snow is falling, government employees will plow your streets. In our community, government employees will pick up the brush that you bundle in front of your home. You may not love all of them, but there are some fine (government employee) teachers in the schools. Personally, I think that many of them suck, but there are some good ones too.

I am also not the greatest fan of the massive government employee workforce of letter carriers, although they do get most of the deliveries accurate. Less and less every passing year.

I am also a local government employee. My role is to improve and diversify the local economy for the community that employs me. Even though business attraction garners the vast majority of headlines and questions that I get, I spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources working to retain existing businesses.

It is not an easy task whatsoever, nor is it without an immense amount of pressure, political and otherwise.

I am neither asking for nor expecting any sympathy. My salary should be around $120,000 this year, give or take a few, and both my employer and we employees contribute to a well-run, highly-funded pension system called the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF).

Many days, thinking about my IMRF contributions is what helps keep me going. It is also one of, but not the only, things that keep me dedicated to working hard for my employer for at least the next six years.

So, Yes, I am a bit of a lurker on the Yahoo! Finance page when it comes to comments.

I typed in the comment “So you all must be upset that I should collect more than twice that amount in pension at the age of fifty-five and, Yes, I am a government employee,” but I erased it rather than post it.

First of all, I admit to that comment serving no purpose besides further inflaming those who do not have that type of defined benefit plan pension coming their way.

Secondly, I am more than a little bit superstitious and do not want to write anything to jinx myself. There’s nothing like writing about having a pension heading your way and then having something happen to you that impacts your ability to continue working toward one.

Finally, I signed up for Yahoo! so freakin’ long ago that I originally submitted all my true personal information to it, thus I do not care for my name to show when I submit a comment. Mostly I just click the “thumbs up” icon when I like someone else’s comment.

If I were to work through November of 2025, six years from now and upon turning fifty-five, or the age of double nickels as I like to think of it, I would be in line for a plus-or-minus monthly pension payment of about $6,500.

It was heading higher than that, but my community began paying out a paltry two percent increase every year rather than three several years ago. Let me tell you, the power of that extra one percent, compounded for ten or more years, has a lot of monetary power. Like $500 per month.

The other consideration is that for us government employees who remain at or near the top of our particular specialty typically earns a higher income based on tenure. You may not be as highly productive at the age of fifty-six as you were at thirty-six, but you will likely be earning more than twice as much.

Thus, there are incentives to remain employed in a government job, or most jobs for that matter, into your mid-to late-fifties and even into your sixties.

Health insurance is expensive and difficult to navigate in case you had not heard. It is the subject of much scrutiny and debate among politicians. Currently, your child can remain on your policy through the age of twenty-six, so that alone gives me a strong incentive to continue working for ten more years until our daughter passes that age.

Whatever the case may be, I could theoretically pull the municipal economic development plug in six more years and begin drawing a pension of over $6,000 on the first of every month beginning in January of 2026.

Believe me, not a day goes by that I do not contemplate doing just that while also planning on how to supplement that income by some other means.

My family’s Thanksgiving gathering last November was chock full of successful men. The other five men present were all either far wealthier than I am or well on their way to being so.

Figures, you may think. A Jewish Thanksgiving with a rich finance professional, a highly successful attorney, a rising educational consulting executive, a newly hired consultant with a Big Four firm, and a soon-to-be full-fledged doctor currently completing his residency.

Oh, and me, a middle-aged, middle-income government guy.

Of the other five successful men at this gathering, two are Jewish — my multimillionaire uncle who hosted us at his and my aunt’s home. He is a CPA and has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern and worked for decades in the finance field. The other more recently minted millionaire and future multimillionaire is my younger brother, an up-and-coming litigator.

The other three who are on their way include my sister’s husband, who has parlayed years of being an educator into a sales executive position selling software for a rapidly growing educational tech firm. The Big Four consultant and soon-to-be doctor are the husbands of my recently married younger woman cousins. None of them are Jewish as none of my siblings, cousins or I married within the faith.

But I digress, as always.

Jewish or not, my family tends to strive toward achievement, whether it is my cousins, siblings, or their spouses. My children are headed in that direction.

I am viewed as the hard-working, grind-it-out government guy of the bunch. They all earn more than I do, as do many of my friends, and they all also envy the “must be a government worker” pension fund that I contribute to paycheck after paycheck month after month, year after year, and over the decades.

Incidentally, I am hardly alone. Roughly 22.5 million Americans work for various forms of government, with nearly two-thirds working at the local level as I do per Pew Research. Everyone knows that some of the things people associate with government jobs are stability, typically lower pay than in the private sector, and contributing toward traditional pensions.

It just so happens that Because Reasons as my son would say, I have recently realized that I should work until at least the age of fifty-six rather than hanging up my municipal economic development spurs soon upon reaching the age of fifty-five. Thus my interest in the Investopedia article, although I would read any article or post about retiring in your mid-fifties or younger.

At the age of forty-nine, I have already surpassed the age that many #FIRE bloggers would consider the “E” for “early” in retirement. I have my own retirement hash-tag, #ROT, for retiring on time, although I think that spelling out the whole thing reads better than “rot.”

In closing, Yes, I am one of the 13.7% of Illinois residents who work for the government according to USA Today. Of course, here in the Land of Lincoln, it is often cited that the state has the most units of government in the U.S., a distinction hardly worth being proud of. More than 2,800!

I truly believe in my heart of hearts that many local units of Illinois government should be eliminated, including Townships and the bullshit ones like mosquito abatement districts, TB sanitarium districts and the like, but nobody asked for my opinion. I am sure that the boards that regulate them and the political hacks who staff them feel otherwise.

Someday, perhaps I, too, will make comments on Yahoo! Finance and other boards on the articles pertaining to pensions and the general disappearance of traditional defined benefit plans.

By then, perhaps I will be comfortable enough to share the amount that I collect along with my real name, which I would assume will draw the ire of those without sufficient savings or a pension plan.

And Yes, I will admit to having been a government worker.