Merry Christmas to me!

[rivka]

Many years ago, when I first graduated from college, I worked as a research assistant at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. I was paid the princely sum of $15,000 a year, which I'll admit seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. For the year that I held that job prior to going away to grad school, I was officially an Oregon state employee. Then I moved away.

Today I received in the mail a packet from the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System. They were writing to let me know that my membership in PERS is being terminated because it's been ten years since five years after I stopped being an employee of the state of Oregon. If I send in a form, they'll send me my accumulated PERS retirement benefits: $1511.61.

They have to take out 20% in federal taxes, so the actual check I get will be more like $1200. But that's $1200 of money I had absolutely no idea was coming to me. Merry Christmas a day early!

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Yay! What a nice windfall!

[ailbhe]

Oh yay! I'm glad you're getting some wholly unexpected good luck. Happy Christmas!

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yay!

That's quite some retirement benefit for a single year at a $15K job. Nice.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Oh, very cool! And the timing is wonderful, too!

[timill]

Excellent news!

Also, congratulations are probably in order to OPERS for finding you after all this time...

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Whee!

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

HOORAY! Happy Christmas indeed.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com/2009/12/another-leak-worst-so-far.html

B

[laurent-atl.livejournal.com]

It is pretty remarkable that they made the effort to locate you and were able to find you fifteen years later. It must be a nice job to track down people to send them money they were not asking for or even expecting.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I don't know about US tax, but in Canada or the UK if you transferred it straight into your present pension plan you wouldn't have to pay the tax, and you'd be glad when you were 65. It seems worth checking.

[lyrical1.livejournal.com]

You will also have to pay a 10% penalty as well. If you roll it into an IRA or pay the tax and put it in a Roth IRA you won't take that hit. Just a tip from your friendly financial professional. =)