Your job sucks but it sounds like your benefits are good I would love to be able to get basically 2 months of vacation.. your vacation time is 21 days/5 work days (hopefully) a week is 4 weeks and a day your 120 sick hours is 15 days/5 work days a week is 3 weeks. and 12-13 holidays? granted I have only been with my company 2 years I get 10 days vacation (wont get any more till ive worked here 10 years) 0 sick days (any sick days Is automatically taken from your vacation) and only 7 holidays (set in stone) and 1 floating holiday (for use for religious holidays like Christmas.. yeah that's right I don't even get Christmas off) my companys retirement plan is crap but the pay is good $18 an hour but with 0 opportunity for advancement in my company unless I go back to school for business. Im an engineer btw
The time you can accumulate off is pretty decent. But from what I had when I started working in the DOC till now? It just keeps getting worse. Healthcare including dental and vision went from basically no monthly contribution to paying out the wazoo. Copays have shot up and they stopped matching a percentage of your 401K. People hired after 2005 now fall under a new "85 and out" plan for retirement and are not vested in a retirement at all until they have been an active employee for 10 years, whereas I fall under 5 five years. Pay raises are non-existent to 1% for the last five years and we are the lowest paid corrections employees in the country, cost of living be damned.
As for the 80 and 85 and out plans, this is how that works. When your age and years of service combined equal 80 (or 85 for those hired after 2005), you are eligible to retire with full benefits. So if you look at my case, I'm now 41 years old with 19 active years of service/working. That equals 60. For each year that goes by, I am a year older and have a year more service time in. So in 10 years, I will reach the 80. At the present, they have a program called back-drop where you can work past your retirement date and collect a lump-sum payment for up to five years worth of backdrop max. So say I continue to work here until I am 56, I will have completed five years of backdrop. I will be paid normally, and then collect a lump sum payment at the end when I actually retire.
I doubt I will actually retire at 51 or 56, because that's still pretty young and what am I going to do? Be a door greeter at Walmart? I will probably keep working at least a few years past that as I don't plan on social security being around by the time I get to that age where I can draw. I've always had a dream of opening my own used games store and a good buddy of mine has been trying to talk me into it for a while now. Who knows what the future holds.
