The Half-Completed Retirement Transition
Warning: this post is more of a rant and a plea for sympathy than it is thoughtful or informative!
So as you know, I retired on July 1. Or did I? I retired from two university systems and was supposed to get one pension check from each starting August 1. On August 1, I got…nothing. And it was my birthday, too!
I already knew I wouldn’t be getting one of the checks that day; my retirement application had been in limbo for a while (not my fault) and is allegedly being processed. But the other one was, I believed, a done deal. I’d received an official letter on May 15: Congratulations on your retirement; your application is complete; here’s how much you’ll get; it will be direct-deposited starting Aug. 1. So while I knew there was a glitch with the second system, I never worried about the first one—until I woke up on my birthday, checked my bank account and saw no pension check.
I got on the phone as soon as the lines opened and explained the situation to the call center rep who answered. She sounded surprised and put me on hold while she checked it out. I was on hold for 15 minutes. “This is not good,” my husband said. She came back and sounded bewildered. Apparently my retirement action had been canceled and completely disappeared from my dashboard like it had never happened. Fortunately for me, the messages from the system, including the May 15 letter, were still all there. “Something isn’t right,” she said. No kidding. She said she’d expedite my case and that someone would call me. I suffered all day, trying not to ruin my fancy birthday lunch with my fretting.
Finally, in the evening, someone did call me. He’d been in meetings all day trying to figure out what had gone wrong. He’s never seen anything like it. He met with two supervisors that afternoon and they reinstated my retirement action and said I’d get paid on August 8. He was really sorry for the stress and confusion. No one understands how this could have happened.
I’m happy to report that the check did, indeed, arrive on schedule, for the correct amount, and that my dashboard says my next one will arrive at the end of this month. So I think I’m OK with that one, at least. But I’m going to keep checking my account every so often. I have trust issues now.
As for the other pension, I pinged them on the messaging system last week, as it had been a month since I last heard from them. A supervisor replied and thanked me “for my patience,” said they were still working on it, and hopefully I’d hear something “in the next two weeks.” I have no idea why it’s taking so long. I filed the application for that system on March 3, the earliest day I could for a July 1 retirement.
I don’t know if there’s a lesson here other than that s**t happens, keep checking your accounts because no one cares as much as you do, and if you think something might have gone awry, it probably has. Yikes!
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