Civil Service Retirement System

But the US Postal Service is not just having trouble funding the retirements of their current workers.

Here's Postmaster General David Steiner again, and in this clip, he's going to mention the CSRS, which is the Civil Service Retirement System.

That's the pension system that dates back to 1920, and this was how Postal Service workers' retirements were funded until the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 fundamentally changed the nature of the US Postal Service.

This was a pension system, which millennials and younger know nothing about, but this is a pension system that there are people who are still collecting it that worked their whole lives and they were promised this money.

And because they were getting these pensions, they didn't have to contribute to the Social Security system, and therefore, they don't get money from Social Security.

They depend on this for their retirements.

We pay an unfair allocation of CSRS benefits for retirees that were with the Post Office Department before it became the independent Postal Service.

That costs us about three and a half billion dollars a year.

Tommy, did you mention survivor benefits when you were going on the federal part? No, I had the thought, but please throw it in there.

Yeah, it's nice to know that if you elect full survivor benefits on your military pension, your state pension, or your FERS pension, or your CSRS pension, and long-term care event eats up all of your assets and all of your stuff, and you die, and you've spent all your money, at least you know survivor benefits is coming back for your spouse.

So they have their social, their pension, and your SBP benefit.

I think we find this often that people don't really think through the survivor benefit decision.

Uh, are you receiving benefits?" "No, I'm not receiving.

I'm not insured." "Oh, okay, let's see if you're, uh, but you can receive benefits off of her." And then your husband says, "But I'm making $2,000 or $3,000 from my federal pension, CSRS." And essentially, that offsets what he would receive from you.

So at that time, he might have said, "Well, I don't want to go through all this paperwork if I'm not gonna get anything," because that's the, the law.

But now, what, 18 months ago, that law is gone.

Yeah.

And that's actually been happening with the change from the CSRS retirement system to the FERS, or Federal Employee Retirement System.

That's when the TSP, which is a 403(b) came into play, so they started shifting more of the retirement saving burden to the employee, and they've had three, two or three rate increases in FERS since that program was stood up.

The most recent one, I wanna say it's, like, four times what the employees were originally expected to contribute-

And that's actually been happening.

With the change from the CSRS retirement system to the FERS, or Federal Employee Retirement System, that's when the TSP, which is 403B, came into play.

So they start shifting more of the retirement saving burden to the employee.

And they've had two or three rate increases in FERS since that program was stood up.

I'm trying to help a friend.

Is there a way to determine if CSRS offset person retirement amount is more than if she had covered it to FERS? Yeah, that's a long calculation.

It would take me three hours to do, and I ain't going to do it here.

So this is the old CSRS that people that were hired by the federal government for the 1980s and whether they should have switched to FERS or anything.

Yeah.

The midterm vote will determine what happens to Social Security, 100%.