Do you have a pension and need to decide if you should take a lump sum or lifetime monthly payments?

Well, that's a hard decision. There's a lot that goes into it, but I'm going to help walk through

the pros and cons and give you a framework for how to best make that decision. And this,

the third episode of the Retirement Planning Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast, where you can learn all about IRAs and Roth IRAs, employer retirement plans, taxes, Social Security, Medicare, portfolio withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning, and much more.

And now here's your host, Andy Panko.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for listening

to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast. We got a good one today. Today's topic is about

taking a pension as a lump sum versus a lifetime stream of payments, you know, an annuity,

if you will. Now, throughout this conversation, I'm going to use

the word pension to refer to the lifetime payment option. Now, it's a bit of a misnomer because

pension is really just the plan in general. Whether you choose to take as a lump sum or take

his lifetime payments, they're both a pension. But I'm going to use the word pension to refer to

the opting to take the lifetime payments as opposed to the loan sum. So for those of you who do

work at a place that has a traditional what's called defined benefit pension, meaning you work for a

certain amount of years and there's some formula that says based on

your years of service and top three years of earnings and some percentage and whatever

the your employer will give you a lifetime payment of X amount of dollars per month

for the rest of your life if you have one of that that's again a defined benefit pension

if you have one of those well good's, again, a defined benefit pension. If you have one of

those, well, good for you, first of all, because they're increasingly hard to come by. People who

have been at the same place for decades may potentially have it, especially federal employees,

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