Just need to vent...

For the benefit of young'uns more used to thinking in 2024 dollars, that'd be $11.24 an hour.

 

Always about the entitlement of the worker, never about the owner or company. A team of advertisers with blank checks to change the narrative works. It’s fascinating it’s always about the workers pay is the issue. The well paid worker going out to buy things is the driver of the economy. Buying more things results in demand and hiring.
My dad’s retirement check from Lockheed was $135/ month in 1977, social security about $275. Maybe less he died in 1981. That’s what they had as income. After he died my mother lived on $135. No stock windfalls etc. She never learned to drive. I had to step in to help.
So I guess if she were alive today it would be welfare.
I worked for $1 per hour many places, hard work, and stood in employment lines to get a job in the summer. They sent you all kinds of places and you had to have a car to get there.
Everyone has a story too.

 

On free soil, that's just about where a fast food worker will start today......

 

As the surviving spouse, didn't she get his social security check too?

"Widow benefits have been a part of the Social Security program since the 1939 Amendments to the Social Security Act (widower benefits were added later). For many years, the Social Security law called for paying a widow(er) a fraction of the deceased worker's primary insurance amount (PIA). However, the worker—while alive—may have received the full PIA as his or her retirement benefit. Over time, arguments were made that a widow(er) should be treated as generously as his or her spouse was.

The 1972 Amendments to the Social Security Act allowed for a widow(er) to receive a full PIA, ..."
Research: The Widow(er)'s Limit Provision of Social Security

 

Expressed in 2024 dollars again, those would be $694 and $1415, respectively.

If he were still living and collecting SS today, that's about what the check would now be, because SS gets a COLA every year. For all I know, the Lockheed check might still be $135, unless they had some kind of COLA provisions in their retirement plan.

I'm not sure she gets his too; I think it may be that she gets his instead of hers if his would be bigger.

 

I thought about that as I wrote it. When he died they retrieved the last payment out of the checking account, about $275. I remember that very well. I don’t remember her getting any, pretty certain I would remember. We didn’t have so much information like now. It must be it had to be applied for. She died in 1988.
About 2005 I helped a neighbor 87 who was living on about $375 from her own social security. She was entitled to over $1000 from her husbands account which I helped her get. They got divorced but married a long time. He took all the records. All she had was his name. No retroactive payment. She didn’t live that long after but it was a huge difference.

 

I receive a retirement check monthly from a private company where I worked for 25 years and then they froze the pension plan. That was another 30 years ago so imagine how little that check is. Fortunately it isn't the only check we receive and the 3 others are somewhat COLA indexed.

Just got our Part-B health insurance increase. Another $100 a month and that doesn't include Medicare increases.

 

THIS ^^^^^
The various craft unions (electrical, aerospace, pictoral artists, welders, scientific systems, sound, animation etc) bargaining together via "newcomer" collective bargaining chose to worry more about cost of living rather than increasing retirement funds. So it no longer increased above $800+ per month - even if you worked for Disney over 40-50 years. That's fine, If you hired in around 1950, but If you hired in by the mid 80s it meant in So Cal - you would probably only have enough retirement money coming in Via retirement, to use that pittance to pay for your property tax living in many areas within 30 minutes of work. Not even enough to pay property tax after you deduct date and fed tax on the pittance.
No complaints. Getting sold down the river meant it encouraged some folks like yours truly to pursue a graduate degree, & a differen state license, & move into another trade.
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Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value From 1913-2024

CPI Inflation Calculator
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

I didn't post this to argue or cause any riffs. I was just thinking it could be useful to those wondering how to figure things out.

 

Vanvandenburg described that $175 check as a private corporate pension, not Social Security. If he had taken a joint-life pension, then that continues, though at whatever rate (typically 100 or 75 or 50%) the retiree selected. Though in that era, it was still possible for a retiree to chose a single-life pension without the spouse's consent or even knowledge. This has since been changed, after too many men didn't tell their wives that they selected the single-life option instead of joint-life, boosting their pension checks while they lived but leaving their widows with no income. Which the widows discovered only after their husbands expired.

When Social Security began in 1935 (first retirement checks issued in 1940), the monthly retirement check was meant only for the retired worker, not any surviving spouse. A 1939 law provided for a reduced check for widows. Widowers were included later. A 1972 law boosted the survivor's benefit to the same as the larger of their separate benefits.

Something is wrong there. I hope it is your memory now, not an oversight or error or bureaucratic bungle on her benefits back then.

When this was corrected, she should have received 6 months worth of retroactive makeup payments.

This is why newly widow(er)ed and divorced people should seek competent financial advice, especially those who were not fully involved in managing household finances. Any decent SSA office should have advised her of eligibility for increased benefit. She didn't need any of his financial records, only proof that they had been married 10 years, and that she hadn't remarried since. SSA already had all the financial records it needed to straighten this out.

 

The neighbor didn’t and they said no. I did help her get the higher amount and that required submitting paper work. She actually had a social worker who wasn’t able to track down the man at all. Social security numbers are apparently available for deceased people, as I found his.
Mother, I am pretty sure we never applied for it. I was very busy working and being a single parent, plus taking care of two households. I had no internet then, and what you don’t know you don’t know. Of course father had been working and getting an income up to retirement. House and all that.
Another one is my mother could have gotten $25000 from Lockheed as a death benefit. We didn’t know about it. I accidentally learned about it 10 years or so later. In calif the state holds unclaimed funds. I still have a few thousand I could work on getting, but never do it. Of course it takes certificates and paper work, plus l have to show I am the heir. It isn’t that easy. Someone told me about them holding unclaimed money, otherwise who thinks of that out of the blue? I think all states do it.
Just put your name and see if you have money or assets sitting at the state.

 

I've been doing that every few years, ever since father-in-law came down with Alzheimer's and had to be put into care more than two decades ago. (He is long gone now.) He had various assets with encumbrances that needed to be cleared, others not previously known to family, and loads of cashiers checks sitting in his house not accumulating interest, back when rates were still quite good. His primary bank was helpful in searching for remaining assets, but others we knew he had previously dealt with, and might not have fully cleared out of, wouldn't talk to us. So I still check occasionally to see if any escheated funds ever appear on state unclaimed fund sites.

Nothing found that way for him or us. But I did discover a cafeteria gift certificate for spouse's cousin, from an area educational institution where he worked as a chef. It was small enough that he had no interest in claiming it, preferring to eat from his own culinary skills. So that 'asset' is still on that state's unclaimed funds list.

 

What's a COLA?
My beloved union caved on those in the 80's.

 

Shoot, I'm old enough to remember something they called "minimum student wage" in Maine in the late-70's. I lived a couple blocks from a little Mom & Pop convenience store, in Maine, and they had a Help Wanted sign out....it was for a part-time stockboy. So I applied and was hired on the spot....made an amazing $1.15 an hour, I'm not kidding.
My weekly paycheck was about $20....and I now earn that in about 15 minutes!!

 

Having driven through a lot of rural roads on the way to rifle ranges, rural postage service is high on the list.

Bob Wilson

 

$80 today may represent only a 40% increase over late 1960s dollars (prior to fiat paper $$) - turning where you live.
Raw income tho - doesn't reveal purchasing power .
Consider that paltry $100 purchasing power how much it varies from one state to another based on both cost of goods as well as how much taxes are in the different states .....



for example - $100 in our nation's homeless central ... ie
Califorinicatia, they have as little or even than 80% of the purchasing power of some other states. That's why we - and hundreds of thousands of others have fled the state over the past few years. Our dollars need to be stretched as far as they can.
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C’mon man. It seems to be a income/wealth map wherever it comes from.

 

I love maps:

• Trump voting states have a whole lotta money, rich beyond their wildest dreams.
• Harris voting state are poor and want a piece of the pie.

So who are the deadbeat states that get more tax benefits than taxes paid:

• Trump voting states are the deadbeats.
• Harris voting states are paying for the deadbeats.

But you knew that already, right?

Bob Wilson

 

If a state has the most criminals, the most deadbeats, the most welfare, the most illegal aliens, the most homeless Etc? duno - seems fair they'd be carrying the heaviest load of tax burden - at least a higher ratio of the burden. Wouldn't they need the most drug rehab centers? The most unemployment centers? The most ½way houses? most prisons? The most homeless shelters?
If you got a ton of safety nets? Someone's got to pay for it.
Heck - up here not too far away from the Canadian border, we just got our 1st homeless/warming shelter only open when it hits 35°f past october - just a couple down medowns the road away. Like the Kevin Costner baseball movie them; if you build it they will come.

It was paid for in most part by the expensive Ski Resort City - maybe 30 miles to the north of us, that sponsored it. You know ... the NIMBY principal?
I suggested we do the same blessing for them - with the very much needed prison - soon to be built in the area. We'll do it quick, before they give us the SAME blessing.

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Not clear the costs of those would be sums such a state "pays into Washington", though.