Pastor salaries, as are teacher salaries, are not keeping up with others with professional degrees, with a minimum of a Bachelorâs degree. According to the National Association of Church Business Administration, the average pastor in 2012 received an annual salary of $28,000.
Several people have e-mailed us recently for information on average retirement plan balances. Those balances are often released by many of the larger plan providers.and we've included those studies on our website. The federal government equivalent of the 401k, the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) recently released some balances: As of June 30, the average TSP account balance was $61,221 for participants covered by FERS, a spokesman said. The average account balance was $52,356 for employees covered by the older CSRS.
If youâre a subscriber to FEDweekâs TSP Report, you have; it appeared in an article I recently wrote about contributing as much as you can to the TSP. That article had examples of how much a person would have at retirement using different scenarios. To refresh your memory, Iâve included those scenarios in the next few paragraphs. The assumptions are that we have three new hires that start out making $45,000 per year and receive annual raises of 1%. They work for the federal government for a period of 30 years. One of them contributes the default 3% of their salary; another contributes 5% and the third contributes 10%. They never increase their contribution rate. The growth of their account averages 5% per year (all of the TSPâs basic funds, save the I fund, have beaten that return since their inception). I used the TSP calculator How Much Will My Savings Grow to come up with the figures below. The employee who contributed 3% of their salary had $42,269.98 at the end of 10 years; $115,546.26 at the end of 20 years; and $239,790.53 at the end of 30 years.