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RE:Best Medical Plans, Best Retirement Plans

Posted by Postal Grunt (A) on March 10, 2016 at 21:22:21

In Reply to: "extremely low pay".... posted by rwiley on March 9, 2016 at 22:02:01:

I have to wonder who fed you that line of BS and how gullible you have to be to believe that. It's obvious you never bothered to investigate either.

The costs and coverage provided by USPS medical plans are available on the internet. The plans available to your letter carrier are the same plans available to any other Federal employee. They aren't free. They don't cover dental or vision care either. There are supplemental plans offered but the mail man pays for that, not the USPS.

Since 1984, all USPS employees have been automatically enrolled in the FERS program, which is a Federal employee 401K program. The government chips in just 5% of your pay into the program and then the employee can set aside up 15% of his or her paycheck to go into the program. Being a 401K program, your retirement fund goes up or down depending on the health or woes of the stock market. After the recent roller coaster ride market performance, I'll bet that a lot of USPS and other government employees won't be retiring as soon as they had been planning.

There are benefits but before you any ideas about being jealous of your mailman or the window clerk at your local station, consider that the carrier that rides in the truck has no air conditioning in the summer or an effective heater in the winter. When he or she started, they most likely had the poorest routes in the station, whether they were walking or in the dodgiest of neighborhoods. Right now, every route is set up so that the carrier spends about seven hours a day on the route. That really does mean rain, sleet, snow, dark of night, -40F wind chill or 115F heat index. Carriers get frost bite, heat stroke, bitten by dogs, mugged by thieves, and a few have been shot dead. BTW, every carrier has to use a piece of equipment with a built in GPS function so that management can track them by a computer every minute they're on the street. No more of that fabled mail man that stopped a the corner tap room for a few beers before clocking out.

The window clerk probably had to work graveyard shifts or at best, start at 3AM for several years in a dusty, noisy environment being supervised by jokers that weren't capable or more likely willing, to do the same work. There are very few assignments that have 8-5 Mon-Fri hours.

If your kids are growing up or parents' health is declining, the pay isn't always that attractive if your family sees you as the absentee parent, sibling, spouse, or child. You might want to investigate just how many employees go through divorces or other forms of marital stress because of the jobs.

When you meet a retired Postal employee, ask them how retirement is going. Ask them if they have any regrets about leaving the job or if they wish they were still back at the Old PO. I seriously doubt that you'll find many that would like to go back under the harness again.

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