58 year old teacher in Alaska, away from the wife for year 2, except for Christmas and summers. Year 3 is almost certainly my last year away from the wife and I will come back to teach special ed in Texas. I am thinking no problem getting a teaching job in Texas, but we will see.
Total of 6 years in Alaska(1st 3 were with the wife) will need to be purchased from Texas TRS.....no problem, because by then I will most likely not be maintained in the Alaska system. The "maintained rule" says I cannot purchase more than 5 years of service while maintained in a retirement system in another state. Alaska does have a bill in the legislature to give all public servants a pension, but this is all very iffy. This governor reminds me of Bill Clements, with his anti-spending stances on just about everything. I will take the retirement acct. from Alaska and roll into an IRA. After the first semester teaching in Texas, I am able to apply to buy the years and the service purchase should be complete by March 1.
Have been very fortunate in my ability to save for retirement the last 2 years. Am trying to figure out how much emergency fund to bring with me to Texas. No housing ready in Texas at the moment. Wife has been staying with relatives, working, and paying off her debt. wife will most likely have an apt. mostly furnished, sometime in the next 4-6 months.
Since I worked for the state of Texas for 6 years, I can choose which retirement system to retire from. I am that guy who calls ERS and TRS about once every 6-9 months and takes about 20 minutes to run down everything I have been told and at this moment I am still looking at being able to choose which system and the obvious choice is to retire from ERS, with the promise of a free health insurance premium for life for me and 1/2 off for the wife. We are both very lucky the legislature has not taken that benefit away.
I still like the traditional, deductible IRA. I plan to contribute $7000 for 22 and $7500 for 23. Doing that reduces my possible emergency fund down to maybe $40k instead of $54k or so. When I land in Texas I will be 59.5 years.
My income tax bracket now is much higher than I plan for it to be in retirement.
One variable is the summer job market. I am looking for a summer job this summer for the first time in a while. In Texas I always worked at least one part-time job and sometimes 2. I don't care what I do, but it would be really cool to teach summer school as well as work another job to stay busy and continue to save money. Any guesses on Texas summer job market? From now to June 2025 is the final push to save as much $ as I can, and the plan is to retire from education June 2025 at age 60.5. Wow! As recently as July 2021 I had age 67 in mind to retire from education.
Will continue to work in retirement, and defer all new income up to the max per year. Retire from everything at age ?
Questions:
1. What holes do you guys see?
2. How bad are the utility bills? I was the guy who had the lowest possible utility bill.
3. Any guesses on job markets-specifically summer jobs this summer?
4. I keep up with inflation wrt grocery prices, so that doesn't scare me. Other areas of severe inflation?