Let's Talk Retiring from a University - How, What, When and More!

[GuyRien]

Considerations:
1. you are rather young.   (good for you!)   
Is the pension adjusted for inflation, or just a regular annuity.
I ask because while your retirement money may be sufficient now, will it be in 10 years? 
  If it is not adjusted/indexed, then you may be too young to retire, unless you have substantial resources already saved in retirement other than the pension. 
2.  Is your wife dependent on any of your benefits?

Pension is COLA adjusted but it's not 100% CPI adjusted. First 4% is 100% then above 4% it's only 75% adjusted.

We can transition to our existing health care plan (for a premium) as soon as I retire.

[Kron3007]

Here, we also have the phased retirement, and most profs seem to take it.  I believe they make this option attractive (full pay for half work for a year) to ensure we have notice and can plan accordingly.  I am not retiring any time soon, so haven't been paying too close attention.

Most profs here keep their lab for a while and often still have grad students.  Once they retire, they have to find a non-retired co-advisor to step in.  I recently just stepped in as a co-advisor for such a student.  On paper, I am the co-advisor, but the retired prof will still act as the full advisor (and pay the them etc).

I guess this all depends on departmental/school culture etc.

I am in Canada, might matter....

[GuyRien]

Maybe it is a Canadian thing or maybe a union thing?

I can't imagine a US university paying you if you weren't working 100%. The question would be why?

Here, we also have the phased retirement, and most profs seem to take it.  I believe they make this option attractive (full pay for half work for a year) to ensure we have notice and can plan accordingly.  I am not retiring any time soon, so haven't been paying too close attention.

Most profs here keep their lab for a while and often still have grad students.  Once they retire, they have to find a non-retired co-advisor to step in.  I recently just stepped in as a co-advisor for such a student.  On paper, I am the co-advisor, but the retired prof will still act as the full advisor (and pay the them etc).

I guess this all depends on departmental/school culture etc.

I am in Canada, might matter....

[jerseyjay]

Maybe it is a Canadian thing or maybe a union thing?

I can't imagine a US university paying you if you weren't working 100%. The question would be why?

It very well be a union thing. My public university (really a glorified teachers college) has a similar plan, where somebody teaches something less than a full load for a year or so and then retires.

Why do they do that? For the same reason that they have offered rather nice early retirement plans to long-time faculty: because a full professor who has been teaching 20 to 30 years is making significantly more money than a newly hired assistant professor (not to speak of two adjunct professors). Also, it is very difficult to lay off a full professor without shutting down the program they teach in, so from a bean-counter perspective, this may be the only way to trim this part of the budget. Further, at least in my state, a professor's salary comes out of the school's budget, but a retired worker's pension comes from another budget, so there is always an incentive to get people to retire if they are making enough money.

Private industry often "solves" this issue by making the most senior workers redundant, even though this is illegal. However, given union protection and tenure rules, public universities cannot do this.

[Kron3007]

Maybe it is a Canadian thing or maybe a union thing?

I can't imagine a US university paying you if you weren't working 100%. The question would be why?

Here, we also have the phased retirement, and most profs seem to take it.  I believe they make this option attractive (full pay for half work for a year) to ensure we have notice and can plan accordingly.  I am not retiring any time soon, so haven't been paying too close attention.

Most profs here keep their lab for a while and often still have grad students.  Once they retire, they have to find a non-retired co-advisor to step in.  I recently just stepped in as a co-advisor for such a student.  On paper, I am the co-advisor, but the retired prof will still act as the full advisor (and pay the them etc).

I guess this all depends on departmental/school culture etc.

I am in Canada, might matter....

Could be a Canada or union thing, I am both.  However, part of it is to promote people to retire, so it is a buy out package of sorts.  This is actually for cost savings, so that is one reason.

The other is for planning.  For example, I am taking over as program coordinator for one of our programs from a professor doing this.  Because we knew, the transition has been planned and will go much more smoothly.  Senior faculty often have important service roles, so it makes a lot of sense, but I also recognize that some people may not see it that way.

[Morden]

Our place (Canadian union) has phased retirement.  For up to three years, you can work half-time for half wages (with no service obligations) but still collect your pension.

[Puget]

Thanks. That's interesting, I never heard of this stepped retirement scheme. But won't it get awkward and potentially combative? Wouldn't the person who is going to retire get allocated all the awful classes, get their labs/grants poached etc?

I'm decades from retirement myself, but all my colleagues who have retired have done so gradually and with lots of notice. They have pretty much all taken advantage of the 3-year stepped retirement path we have, where they go to 3/4 time, then 1/2 time, then 1/4 time, then retire. That gives them time to wind down their labs gracefully while reducing and then eliminating teaching. They generally stopped taking new grad students when they knew they planned to retire before within 5 years (the length of our PhD program), and stayed long enough to see their last student defend.

 That's for those who have actually retired. Some have officially retired and stopped teaching, but remained very research active as emeritus (heck, some have kept their labs running much the same as before).

No, why would it? This never even occurred to me as a possibility. If your department is like that then I'm very sorry.

Here, what happens is we are all happy for the person retiring although usually a little sad that they are leaving, and try to make sure someone learns all the service tasks they were doing before they go, and that we incorporate the knowledge of their leaving into our requests for new hires. You keep your lab until you retire (sometimes beyond if you are research active emeritus). As for poaching grants, that's not even a thing that is possible-- how would one poach a grant? It is awarded to that research team, someone can't just take it (yes, yes, I know it is technically awarded to the institution, but still not something you can "poach").

[Puget]

Maybe it is a Canadian thing or maybe a union thing?

I can't imagine a US university paying you if you weren't working 100%. The question would be why?

Nope, I'm at a private US R1. I don't think this is very unusual-- as others have mentioned, it improves planning for retirements and can encourage some senior (sometimes very senior!) faculty to eventually make a graceful exit.

[jerseyjay]

Thanks. That's interesting, I never heard of this stepped retirement scheme. But won't it get awkward and potentially combative? Wouldn't the person who is going to retire get allocated all the awful classes, get their labs/grants poached etc?

If this is the situation in in your department, then perhaps you should retire as soon as possible (or at least look for another job). At my school, not only would this be impractical (nobody else could teach the retiree's courses, the courses are scheduled well in advance, it takes awhile to wind down a lab, etc.) but it would be seen as petty and spiteful. Of course there are some people that many colleagues would be happy to see retire, but retirement, like death, is usually seen as a time to rise above pettiness and personal clashes, or at least pretend to do so in public. And of course, if you make retirement as hard as possible, you are less likely to see the people you want to retire to actually retire.

[GuyRien]

I'm at a large public R1 and it's just business.

Someone is bringing in more money than you: your lab space gets taken over, you get the not so great classes to teach.

Maybe it's the way the overhead from the grants is distributed. For us it is a major lifeline to the department so what-ever is done to make the people bringing in lots of grants happy is done.

Thanks. That's interesting, I never heard of this stepped retirement scheme. But won't it get awkward and potentially combative? Wouldn't the person who is going to retire get allocated all the awful classes, get their labs/grants poached etc?

If this is the situation in in your department, then perhaps you should retire as soon as possible (or at least look for another job). At my school, not only would this be impractical (nobody else could teach the retiree's courses, the courses are scheduled well in advance, it takes awhile to wind down a lab, etc.) but it would be seen as petty and spiteful. Of course there are some people that many colleagues would be happy to see retire, but retirement, like death, is usually seen as a time to rise above pettiness and personal clashes, or at least pretend to do so in public. And of course, if you make retirement as hard as possible, you are less likely to see the people you want to retire to actually retire.

[GuyRien]

Interesting. I'm at a big state R1. I've never heard of this happening at any of our campuses. We aren't unionized and our pension scheme is generous and is strictly determined by years of service so maybe that's a factor?

Maybe it is a Canadian thing or maybe a union thing?

I can't imagine a US university paying you if you weren't working 100%. The question would be why?

Nope, I'm at a private US R1. I don't think this is very unusual-- as others have mentioned, it improves planning for retirements and can encourage some senior (sometimes very senior!) faculty to eventually make a graceful exit.

[spork]

Does anyone know of a U.S. website that would allow me to plug in monthly retirement income and estimate state income tax and local property tax by zip code?

[GuyRien]

Does anyone know of a U.S. website that would allow me to plug in monthly retirement income and estimate state income tax and local property tax by zip code?

Smartassets.com. Google the state and retirement taxes and you'll get directly to the calculator.

[waterboy]

Sitting here in a large R1 in the US and I have several colleagues under phased retirement at the moment. Very common here.

[GuyRien]

Sitting here in a large R1 in the US and I have several colleagues under phased retirement at the moment. Very common here.

So does it work the same way others mentioned?

Also, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on reduction of service in these phased retirement. But at my R1, we do little service if we are research active.