The Public Service Pension Plan, and the questions it does not answer

Plenty of our clients will retire from the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, a health authority, Nalcor or its successors, a school board, or a municipality. The Public Service Pension Plan, and the sister plans around it, provides a floor many private-sector workers do not have. That floor is real. It is also incomplete.

The pension does not insure your life. It does not replace your income if you cannot work at fifty-four. It does not automatically look after a spouse who is not in the plan, a child with a disability, or the cottage that was never put in a will. Bridging to OAS and CPP, the survivor options at retirement, and the interaction with a spousal RRSP are where households either keep their standard of living or quietly drop it.

We sit with the annual statement and the family, not with a slide deck. Typical work: size term insurance while the children are young; decide whether a TFSA or an RRSP is the better extra savings vehicle once the pension is already generous; look at the house, the cabin, and any corporation on the side; and make a survivor-income sketch so both people can see it.

If you are within ten years of unreduced retirement, or you have just been handed a buy-out package, do not sign the option form on the strength of the lunch-and-learn. Bring it in. We will read it with you.