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If the present value of their pension is 3 million and the total value of their government benefits is 5 million, that means that the value of their non-pension government benefits is 2 million. Unless a lot of those benefits are specific to them, that means that every similar retiree has $2 million of present value government benefits, which makes the claim "they have seven figures" useless to communicate information.
I expect the PV of Social Security benefits is actually quite a bit less than $1M, especially for early retirees.
I have to do rough calculations of this exact thing for work and reads economic expert reports that use more sophisticated analyses than I do. The only scenario where this number would matter would be if one of them dies and there's a wrongful death suit and you have to calculate future earnings. Other than that, the pension has no present value beyond the number on the check. Assuming for the sake of argument that the pension is Bill's, if he dies tomorrow it's gone. There may be some kind of survivor benefit but I don't run across these often, and when I do they're usually a lump-sum payment; it can be taken as an annuity in theory, but since it's limited to the widow if she dies the children get nothing, so it's better to just take the cash up front. If you're interested, the way we calculate the lost pension earnings is to simply multiply the benefit amount by life expectancy. Even the pros do this because it's assumed that the beneficiary will be able to get a return on investment similar to the annual adjustment. The upshot of this is that a relatively generous SS benefit of $2500/month taken at age 65 combined with a generous 20 year life expectancy only gets you up to $600,000, so yeah, quite a bit less. Pinging @Jiro and @whatihear.
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