403b disbursements before Social Security?

[ohyes]

Anybody have time to share information or a place to find it?

DH (58) retiring 6/30/11
me (55) retiring 6/30/12


Both will have teaching pensions, but not that much. We both plan to take the 100% survivorship plan so our spouse will get the same amount when either goes to greener pastures.

We just found out today that our health insurance (after I have retired) will be $527.00 more each month than we had been told. (long story, but we had been told by the AR Employee Benefits Division that we could take the state employee insurance rates because we once worked for the state. Found out today that there is "new clarification" and we cannot take advantage of that because we did not work as state employees for 5 years).

Anyway, the more i figure, the more I think we will want to take out our 403b
accounts as disbursements before starting Social Security when we each hit 62yo.

We hope to meet with a financial guy next Wed while we are in Little Rock to wrap up DH's retirement paperwork. He is the guy with whom we opened our 403b accounts decades ago. I hope he will be helpful and not try to sell us more products, but won't know until we talk to him.

Thanks.
P.S. I need explanations in simple language. Googling this has not enlightened me at all.

[73ss454]

Get ready for the annuities speech.

[Independent]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ohyes P.S. I need explanations in simple language. Googling this has not enlightened me at all.

I'm not sure what explanations you were trying to find by Googling. Your post seems to have facts but no questions.

[Tadpole]

Well, there is really not enough information. I had a TIAA-CREF account from the 1981-1983 time period. This account was worth about 15x what I put in. I took a 10-year payout annuity after transferring the balance to TIAA at retirement in December. The payout is a bit less than my SS at age 62 and not cola-ed but sufficient. Theoretically, subject to inflation, I could delay SS to age 70 with 2 years overlap.

But, and this is a big but, the account was not a substantial percent of my savings. Also, I did this to maximize my husband's SS should something happen to me. My husbands SS is far less than my own.

The suggestion to Google is the best one. There are numerous discussions of how to time a couple's SS benefits for the best results.

[ohyes]

Fair enough.

I had not planned to use much of what is in our tax-sheltered annuities--hoped to leave it in there as long as possible. However, it is apparent we will need to....to supplement our pensions.

I have lots of questions, but not sure I know enough to ask the right ones.

We will want to take out the money in disbursements to last five years. I am pretty sure we have to do that. Since we will both be 55 or over upon retirement, but not yet 59 1/2.

I am guessing that, after we each retire, we make arrangements with our first and primary account place and transfer the money from our other annuities so that we each have all our money in one account for each of us.

...and then we set it up the disbursements.

I was hoping to hear from other folks who had done something similar who could walk me through the process.

Our hearts are set on retiring. Now, we have to tweak it to get our post-retirement income up a bit.

Thanks for the input. We do have a meeting with the "financial advisor" for our oldest accounts this next Wednesday at 2PM. I am trying to learn more about how this disbursement process works before we sit down with him.

It may be pretty cut & dried.

Thanks for your input. Appreciate it.