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An Alternative Savings Plan for ASRS Members

In addition to your pension, long-term disability and retiree health insurance benefits, the ASRS offers another program many of our active members find to be of value – the ASRS Supplemental Savings Deferral Plan – or SSDP for short.

A Summary of Recent ASRS Legislation

The 54th Legislature, First Regular Session adjourned sine die on May 28, 2019 and the general effective date for legislation that was passed and signed by the Governor is August 27, 2019. The legislature passed two bills that have a relatively minor impact on members and retirees. Below is a brief summary. You can also find more detailed information about these bills and other retirement-related bills in the 2019 Legislative Summary book at AzASRS.gov, on the Legislation page under the About Us tab.

ASRS Member Tool Kit: A New Web Page

The ASRS website has many helpful resources to assist members on their road to retirement. To help streamline the member experience, we’ve created the one-page Member Tool Kit. The Member Tool Kit puts all of our digital tools, such as calculators and estimators into one place, and organizes them into Member Resources or Retirement Planning tools.

Understanding Your Future Benefit

While the ASRS offers a variety of benefits for members, our primary focus is providing members with a lifetime retirement benefit. Once you're able to retire, you'll need to choose how you'd like to receive your benefit. Your retirement annuity options fall into three distinct categories, each helping to accomplish slightly different retirement goals:

You Submitted Your Retirement Application. Now What?

What happens after you hit “submit” on your retirement application? We input the application information into our system, validate the application for compliance, and place your application in a hold queue (if we require additional information before calculating your benefit) or a processing queue (if no further information is needed to proceed). It’s important to remember that while the ASRS may receive your retirement application in advance of your retirement date, we will not be able to begin any retirement calculations until your retirement date has occurred.

Preparing to Retire: Are you ready? Let's find out!

Getting ready to retire is a big step! It means closing one chapter and beginning another. To make sure you’re as prepared and informed as possible before you hit ‘submit’ on your retirement application, make sure you’ve considered the following questions;

New Contribution Rates take effect July 1

ASRS active members and employers will see a slight increase in the total contribution rate they pay in the upcoming fiscal year beginning July 1.

What Happens if You’re Unable to Work Due to an Illness or Injury?

If you’re actively contributing to the ASRS, you may not realize your membership includes Long Term Disability (LTD). It’s often overlooked by most active members, since less than 2% of them ever need it. As a result, there are also misconceptions about how the program works.

Retiree Tax Reminders

As a reminder, the new federal tax tables and 2019 retiree insurance premiums will be applied to pension checks in February and may affect your net benefit payments.

Need-to-Know Information If You're Retiring This Summer

While the ASRS has a diverse group of members, a very large number of those members are school teachers or faculty. That means, among other things, a large number of people retiring at the same time each year; around May and June. We casually refer to it as Retirement Season here within ASRS offices. With approximately 200K-plus active ASRS members, that can mean a fair number of people wanting to retire at roughly the same time. So, what’s the best way to prepare yourself?