Monthly Providence Journal contributor Colleen Kelly Mellor uses mainly biographical detail while laying out her grievance against the pension reform that General Treasurer Gina Raimondo ushered through the General Assembly a few years back.  Mellor really wants to vote for Raimondo, because they have like reproductive organs, but she needs some crumb of a concession to ignore the loss of cost of living adjustments to her pension payments.

The career-related biographical details are the interesting part, though:

Following my 30-year teaching career, I retired at 51, at a salary of $43,000. …

Two years following my retirement from teaching, I became a real-estate agent, and within three years, I began making a six-figure salary, enjoying the perks and benefits that go along with that job. I bought a Lexus to replace my 17-year-old Honda; I wrote off business luncheons and events. I learned of the benefits of private-sector employment.

But, at the top of my game, in my eighth year, I left real estate, for it never gave me the satisfaction teaching had. I determined to live on my pension and pursue the career I’d always wanted, as a writer.

Consider the benefit that Ms. Mellor’s pension represents!  She was able to “retire” much more than a decade before the age that people typically think about doing so, and then she was able to add her pension to a six-figure salary for the better part of a decade.  She then had the freedom, still before a typical retirement age, to decide that she was fine with moving forward with a lower-paying career that she’d always wanted to do.

(Mellor’s story reinforces a key point of my recent video blog, too, namely that being a teacher comes with inherent compensation of meaning, satisfaction, and purpose [for the teachers we want, anyway] that ought to be considered when people talk about their pay relative to other occupations.)

RIOpenGov’s state pension module allows us to put some numbers on the matter.  An email to Ms. Mellor to confirm that it’s her received no response, but there’s a Colleen E. Mellor retired from Cranston Schools that has details that match or are close to her recollection.  (In our context, the difference is minimal even if this is a different Colleen Mellor.)

According to the site, Ms. Mellor retired in 1997, at 52, after 30 years of teaching.  Over the course of her 30-year career, she contributed $62,448 to her pension.  In the years since, she has already received $460,519, with her FY12 payment being $40,524.  In other words, every two years, she receives 30% more than she paid in total over 30 years.

Even if she never receives another cost of living adjustment, the site projects that she’ll wind up collecting $1.15 million in pension payments throughout her retirement.  That’s 18.4 times her contribution.

This is a person who wants to tell struggling Rhode Islanders what a bad deal she’s gotten from pension reform?  Frankly, Rhode Islanders ought to start taking the ballot box as an opportunity to give the state’s entitlement-minded activists a better sense of perspective.