The Wyoming Retirement System (WRS) pension is an impressive retirement plan, offering guaranteed income to thousands of Wyoming employees across hundreds of employers.
Among its many features, a cost of living adjustment, or COLA, is available at varying amounts. This feature helps your benefit keep pace with inflation, but it reduces your payment initially. When does opting for COLA make sense, at what levels, and what is the financial impact?
The financial shock of soaring inflation in 2022 caught everyone off guard. Within a matter of months, the price of rent, fuel, and countless consumer goods went through the roof. Having been in a period of relatively low, calm inflation for decades led us not to worry about this financial expense, until things went really wrong.
While inflation is now trending downward, inflation is historically always present, and there’s still a threat that unusually high inflation can rear its ugly head once again, especially given that most retirees expect to live another 20 to 30 years once they leave the workforce.
The WRS Public Employee Pension Plan serves more than 450 employers across the state “including state agencies, school districts, counties, cities and towns and other government organizations.” By Wyoming standards, it’s a big pension.
I’ve had the pleasure of helping several employees navigate some of the ins and outs of this pension plan, so it felt timely to do an overview of how the plan works, giving detailed focus to the benefit areas that have carried the most importance for my clients. The complete WRS pension handbook can be found at retirement.wyo.gov in the “Pension Handbooks” subsection under “Members.”
We’re more than half way through the year! Can you believe it? Tax return season is still a long way off, but families should always have taxes on the mind when making financial decisions.
I’d like to write a short post today reminding readers of some of the most fundamentally simple ways to save on taxes. Most Americans want to pay a bit less and the IRS has several practical ways allowing you to do so. Here are several that can make the biggest impact on your tax bill, and also benefit you and others in the future.