The latest update is....no update. Rumors still abound to what the final offerings will be. My DB has spoken to the CAO's office regarding the group that I fall under. The current proposal for my group offers a severely reduced retirement. He spoke to a "brilliant" person with the CAO and pointed out that if they want my group to retire that such a penalty would not be offered. So, Mr. Brilliant is looking into what the original intent of the proposal is and seeing if there could be a change. I asked DB if the city councilfolk actually knew about the impact of "my" proposal. He did not know, but thought at least one would not care. One interesting tidboit I found out is that one of the councilmen is currently collecting a pension from prior service of over $10K per month (the $ is actually much higher) plus his council salary. Seems he probably does not care about those who could possibly retire early and collect nowhere near that amount. So, as they say, time will tell. The longer the wait the better for my anyway. But meanwhile, I did a tentative analysis of gross versus net pay. Seems I have been living on less than 40% of my gross pay. Deductions includes taxes (about 18%), 457b, savings, pension contribution, childcare, medical savings plan, etc. So it appears that I probably could easily live on a pension with the penalty. I still would like to save a minimum of 20% of the pensioned salary if possible. I did get a 3% raise on July 1st (go figure). But this will be the last raise for years.

Stay tuned........