federal employee
A federal employee is a qualified individual who serves the federal government. There are many sectors a specific employee can be serving the government in.
How Are My Benefits Handled If I Transfer Systems
TransFERS
Federal employees under the old civil service system – CSRS and the interim plan CSRS Offset had the option during two open seasons (1987 and 1998) to transfer to the new retirement system – FERS. Another condition was also possible to make the transfer – reemployment. If you were rehired under CSRS or CSRS Offset within 6 you could transfer to FERS; however, making the election would involve doing some administrative housekeeping where the following rules would apply:
Federal Employees: Rules for Transferring to FERS
-All survivor and disability benefits would be paid under the rules governing FERS.
-When you enroll in FERS you will have Social Security coverage.
-The combined service credits for both CSRS and FERS will count towards the years needed to qualify for retirement, disability, survivor benefits and the Thrift Savings Plan benefits under the Federal Employees Retirement System.
-The credit you earned in CSRS will be effectively frozen. Your combined CSRS and FERS annuity will still be based on the average of the highest three consecutive years of earnings.
-Now that you are covered under FERS you will receive Government contributions to your TSP account.
-A full Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) COLA will be received on the CSRS’s portion of your annuity.
-Unused sick leave is credited under CSRS rules based on the accrued amount of sick leave at the date of transfer or at retirement. The lesser number will be used.
-Once you have transferred to FERS from CSRS or CSRS Offset your service will be treated under the FERS plan
In addition, when you transfer to FERS with 5 years or less of non-Offset CSRS service all of your service will be treated under the rules governing FERS.
When you convert from an appointment that is excluded from FERS coverage to an appointment that is covered under FERS you will automatically be covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System. If you are not automatically covered you will have a 6-month window to transfer to the retirement system.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Open Season Articles
Time To Gear Up For Open Season
Postal LiteBlue and Open Season
What Federal Employees Need Prior to Open Season
Will Insurance Premiums Rise For Federal Employees?
Orientation Retirement Training
For years as a human resources professional, I have advocated for Orientation Retirement Training. The Federal Government for a number of years has taken the position of preparing workers for retirement 5 years out from their estimated retirement date. That is simply an accident waiting to happen. The time-frame does not give a workforce who has not been acculturated to prepare for retirement time to do it.
The approach is like putting a band-aid over a wound that is infected; merely covering up the problem to encounter a bigger problem down the road. We need to teach employees how to retire from the moment they are recruited and become members of the organization. The work-life cycle or the horizontal context of managing performance encompasses a comprehensive approach from recruitment to retirement. Organizations not adhering to that approach fail their employees on a number of levels.
Retirement Training for Newly Hired Federal Employees
If organizations and agencies expect to engender a workforce that is both productive and loyal to the enterprise, then organizations and agencies must take care of their most prized asset – the employees. The Architect of the Capitol is doing it – Orientation Retirement Training is a part of the welcoming platform for new employees. That is a strategy worth celebrating. Although, the Architect of the Capitol operates according to Congressional statue, there is concerted effort to adhere to many of the guidelines issued by the Office of Personnel Management.
Orientation Retirement Training can put out a number of fires. Employees have the opportunity to prepare for retirement during the entire tenure of their work career. When federal employees are financially and emotionally prepared to retire, then the push to scramble for incentives and other ways to move them off the rolls would be eliminated.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Recommended Articles
Understanding The Thrift Savings Plan, By Todd Carmack
Social Security for FERS Employees by Todd Carmack
A Little-Know Opportunity Can Increase Your Retirement Income – By Mark Sprague
Unused Sick Leave, What You Need to Know
Unused Sick Leave, What You Need To Know
It is not uncommon for a federal employee to accumulate a sizeable amount of unused sick leave over their career. As sick leave can only be used for
- personal medical needs
- family care or bereavement
- care of a family member with a serious health condition
- adoption-related purposes
It may not be possible for a federal employee to use all their unused sick leave prior to retirement.
Unused sick leave can’t be used to add days to make you eligible to retire. It is only added after you retire to increase your annuity amount. In order to be used in your annuity calculation, you must have a minimum of 174 hours of unused sick leave. 174 hours is the equivalent of one full month.
For the purposes of calculating your retirement annuity, it is based on the years, months and days of total service. Partial months or any days less than 30 are dropped from your annuity calculation unless unused sick leave can be added to make a total of 30 days.
· Example: You retire with 24 years, 6 months and 24 days. The 24 days would be dropped unless you had a minimum of 35 hours of unused sick leave which equates to 6 days. This would make your total service for the purposes of calculating your annuity 24 years, 7 months.
Unused sick leave can also be used to increase a CSRS annuity above the 80% maximum. If a CSRS retiree has accumulated 2087 hours of unused sick leave this could add an additional 2% to their retirement annuity for a total of 82% of their average Hi-3 salary.
Unused sick leave has no cash value but it can be used to increase your total service for the purposes of increasing your retirement annuity.
Phased Retirement Implementation
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is pushing hard to implement the new Phased Retirement program. Information has not yet been released concerning the number of employees who have expressed an interest in participating in the Phased Retirement program. OPM is trying desperately to bring younger workers to the service. By retaining some of the older more experienced workers, training of the new employees and getting them up to speed might help with retention through Phased Retirement is both rational and a good potential solution.
It will be very interesting to find out if the phased retirement program offers enough of an incentive to make older workers stay in the Federal service a while longer. For those of us who are Federal watchers the buzz has not been much of a buzz. The Federal workforce does not seem to be too excited about the impending new venture to keep the Federal Government relevant and attractive to a new generation of workers.
The Office of Personnel Management perhaps has not kept up with the changes in the world of work. I can recall when I got my first real job, HR offices were called personnel offices tasked with pushing papers, processing papers without much interaction with people. You went to personnel and filled out your paper work and some woman would ask you about your eye color and your hair color. If she did agree with your eye color she would say something like – who told you your eyes were such and such a color. As personnel evolved, the lady in charge of eye and hair color faded into the woodwork.
After personnel took a back seat, then human resources surfaced. Human resources housed specialists (Classification and Compensation Specialists, Employee Relations Specialists, etc). Then the field found that specialists needed to broaden their base back to be being generalists. The new title became Personnel Management Specialists meaning at least two fields of human resources should be apparent for each management specialist. Human Resources was slowly becoming more involved with people and not just paper behind a glass partition.
After a number of years, personnel evolved into Human Capital Management certainly suggesting a greater involvement with people. Human capital was to hold equal status to financial capital. Given titles and responsibilities have changed, it might be time for the Office of Personnel Management to put on an entirely new face if they expect to attract the millenniums. Perhaps OPM could start by changing its name to the Office of Human Capital Management (OHCM). We stopped using the word Personnel about 10 stop lights back.
I don’t know if phased retirement will do a whole lot for leveraging OPM’s goal of protecting institutional knowledge and passing it on to a new generation. I do know that young people are driven and called to automation almost to the extreme. If we want their knowledge, skills and commitment to public service then leadership had better learn how to drive an Aston Martin wearing skinny jeans and a Mickey Mouse sweat shirt.
P.S. Always Remember to Share What You Know,
OTHER PHASED RETIREMENT RELATED ARTICLES
Explanation of Phased Retirement
What Happened – Young People Don’t Want The Feds
What Happened is a question put to the former telecom giant Nortel. Nortel went from being the ninth-largest company in 2000 to filing for bankruptcy in 2009. The question was more like – What The Hell Happened? This well-respected telecom giant agreed to participate in a study conducted by the University of Ottawa. As a matter of fact, they were the case study.
Nortel agreed to have nearly half of its top executives interviewed, as well as customers, partners and competitors in an attempt to answer the question. Professors conducted an extensive case study of Nortel. Some very interesting findings surfaced quite to the surprise of Nortel executives. The researchers found that Nortel had bred a culture of arrogance due to prior successes that proved to be lethal.
The researchers further found that arrogance had also led to lax financial discipline among the executives escalating to a kind of excessive pride that put customers on the back burner. The executives were only interested in themselves and not what customers wanted. The very component, good customer care, that had elevated Nortel to the top of the telecom game, was lost in the rise to the top and therefore sent the telecom giant plummeting into an abyss.
All organizations must understand the needs of their customers if they want continued success. It might serve the Federal Government well to begin looking at the behavior of top executives and their impact of recruitment and retention. I know the top executives at Nortel were amazed to hear that it was not losing their competitive edge and it was not that they no longer understood the technical market and advancements in technology. It was and is pure and simple that they got too big for their breeches.
The Federal Government would be wise to invest in an Innovation Summit targeting recent college and university graduates, young people under age 50 not employed by the Federal Service to explore why this population is running away from being a part of the public sector. I can assure you that it is not salary. The unemployment rate both nationally and internationally is highest among young adults under the age of 50. Foreign graduates are leaving their home countries looking for jobs in the United States. For many, once in the United States, they simply join the ranks of their peers looking for jobs that are not there. If the Federal Government has a number of vacancies, there are applicants qualified to fill them. But the mystery remains – What happened that young people don’t want to be employed by the Federal Government.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Recommended Articles
Understanding The Thrift Savings Plan, By Todd Carmack
Social Security for FERS Employees by Todd Carmack
A Little-Know Opportunity Can Increase Your Retirement Income – By Mark Sprague
Is Living Longer a Good Thing
I suppose the question is answered best by who is answering it. I have one friend who is 85 and counting and that gentleman who mentored me many years ago in the Federal service is just as mentally alert as he was when I first met him. By the time I met Mr. Brown he had already retired twice and was heading towards his third federal retirement. He was quite a savvy fellow who knew the mysteries of the stock market. I often sat as a very attentive student during lunch breaks to learn everything I could from him. He not only introduced me to the stock market and how money and resources really worked, he introduced me to something called -humanity in the workplace. As he gave me the benefit of his wisdom, I knew our meeting was meant to be because he was further underscoring the lessons that had been passed on to me from my mother.
Mr. Brown and I now make appointments to have our phone visits. They are long, engaging, informative, spiritual and funny. He lost his wife some 17 years ago and I hope my friendship helped him to weather that most difficult storm. The Browns were married for more than 4 decades. Mr. Brown visited his wife’s resting place at Arlington National Cemetery everyday for one year and then the visits never stopped but became less frequent as he knew life had to continue. The Browns had one wonderful daughter. I never stop thanking her for sharing her Dad with me.
Mr. Brown comes from a family of long livers on his maternal side. His mother was 98 when she passed away. His father died young of TB not reaching the age of 40. Mr. Brown has been my personal teacher through the Korean War and World War II. I am a history buff and absolutely cherish hearing history from a man who lived it. Mr. Brown is up on all the local and world news. He has no signs of his mental acumen failing him. Yet, I continue to read more and more about younger people who are being stricken by the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a form of Dementia and generally strikes persons age 65 and older. As the nation gets older and older and is living some 30 years beyond retirement, more and more individuals are facing the disease. Quite recently, we heard about the young restaurateur and former model, Bea Smith, at age 63 now with advanced Alzheimer’s. Rushern Baker’s, (County Executive for Prince George’s County Maryland) wife has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mrs. Baker is only 53 years old.
As federal retirees look forward to living longer in retirement, they also face the illnesses that often come with growing older. Staying active, eating right, being engaged with a zest for learning new things is often regarded as steps to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s or even avoid it. Research is being done to study Alzheimer’s everyday. Genetics may have a lot to do with what happens in our lives, but Dr. Oz believes that lifestyle outweighs genetics. By the way, Mr. Brown still walks 3-4 miles a day on his walker and he still drives to his appointments and outings. His back and legs are not as strong as they once were, when I was forced to break into a trot to keep pace with this disciplined Air Force gentleman.
May we all have the staying power of Mr. Brown.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know
Recommended Articles
For Postal Employees – LiteBlue and the TSP
Federal Retirement Benefit Analysis
Is The Pension Survivor Benefit Best For You? by Todd Carmack
A Little-Known Opportunity Can Increase Your Retirement Income. by Mark Sprague
Phased Retirement
On one hand OPM Director Archuleta talks about pumping new blood into the Federal Government and then there is the potential roll-out of phased retirement. Phased retirement will keep older workers in the workforce to train younger workers to take over their positions. A strategy as I previously stated that should be an ongoing part of the Government’s strategic operations. It is not forward preparation to allow one or two employees to own all of the information and know-how to perform a task exclusively. That kind of information and how-to strategy must be shared across the division or section.
Team building really does mean that information is shared, analyzed, adjusted and supported by all the stakeholders. When one individual leaves the team, the leaving should have absolutely nothing to do with continuity of services. Life does not work that way and neither does work, but is intended to keep going. The idea of the golden boy or girl is a recipe for failure. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the acumen of individuals at whatever level they happen to be at. But to simply have only one person you can call on to perform a task is ridiculous. You may call on one person to teach so that others can learn and know how to perform the tasks, but it must never be only one person who knows how to do anything. Mercy on us if that person suddenly becomes unavailable and we can only respond by saying – We cannot do it because ABC is no longer available to us.
I see some merit in phased-retirement in terms of keeping people who desire to work working. The part about needing to stay or come back to Federal service to train others to do your job is completely beyond my realm of comprehension. That part of the job should have already been fulfilled. I am now going to pay you to do something I should have had you do as part of the normal course of business. The primary duty and responsibility of a supervisor is to train. We see that duty being abrogated virtually over the entire Government because the culture has been and remains, I am not going to teach anybody anything.
Now I am not going to simply pass that sentiment off as irrational. The workforce did use a strategy for many years that called for more seasoned personnel to train new hired personnel and after the training was done, the new hire was made the supervisor over the more experienced worker. That should not have happened and is perhaps why so many workers are reluctant to pass on information. Even though things might not have been handled correctly in prior years, training and passing on information really is what needs to happen to promote the continuity of work and elevate excellence.
While phased-retirement may not be a costly venture for the government and we won’t know that until the program starts and sufficient data is collected to draw a conclusion. What we do know is that if the appropriate protocol of sharing information and truly creating effective teams were used, the cost would have only been the salaries already there and the benefit would have far outweighed the cost by leaps and bounds. It is never too late to start something that will benefit the nation ad infinitum.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
OTHER PHASED RETIREMENT RELATED ARTICLES
Explanation of Phased Retirement
Phased Retirement – Closing the Knowledge Gap
Phased Retirement – Participation
Federal Retirees Are Leaving the U.S. for Central America
The American economy is not improving for many citizens, including federal retirees. Because affordability is a key phenomenon for many retirees, they choose different paths to living out their retirement years. Many retirees are looking towards Central America for homes and lifestyles they can afford. They are finding living expenses are just too high to maintain the kind of lifestyle they desire to live in their retirement years.
Central American countries, like Ecuador still place them within reach of their families back in America within a day’s flight. Retirees who have moved to Ecuador report paying on average $400 for a 3 bedroom apartment that might cost them $900 or more per month in some parts of the United States. They also report spending much less for health care expenses and can spend the equivalent of $2.00 per person on a high-end lunch. These attractive economic features have many retirees looking to other shores to enjoy their fixed-income status in retirement.
Retirees report missing their friends and families when living abroad, but are comforted knowing an airplane reservation will help them make that connection relatively easy. With retirees leaving the United States, will that be yet another drain on the American economy? Dollars that could be spent in the USA are being spent other places not benefiting the U.S. economy at all. It is time that the USA started looking into ways to not only retain workers in the workforce but retain its citizens in the country after retirement.
The statement alone that retirees are leaving the U.S. for other shores that offer a more affordable lifestyle on a fixed income is more than food for thought. The US should be strategizing and finding solution-driven ways to create more home affordability for American citizens. Why should an American citizen have to leave the country of his/her birth to find affordability? If leaving the country is simply a matter of choice, then that it one thing. However, to leave because you cannot afford to live in your own country is an eye-opener and a call to action that something needs to be done without delay.
After spending 30 to 40 years on a job, the expectation should be that one can choose to live out the last years in comfort and relative security. It is terribly disturbing that a move is made because of the inability to afford the basic needs of life – a place to live, food to eat, transportation, medical care and a little something left over to do whatever you will. If that cannot be accomplished, then why spend the majority of your life working only to find out that after retirement you must hitch up your wagon and stake out a new place because your retirement money can’t pay for you stay within U.S.. borders.
We’ve got a lot of work to do to make America work for its people. As you age and have paid your dues by working long and hard, you should not have to bare the burden of looking for a place you can afford to live in. Places in the States designed for senior living are basically for high-income individuals. Let’s not forget about low-medium-high. There are people, retirees in every category. Let’s work towards accommodating them.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Recommended Articles
For Postal Employees – LiteBlue and the TSP
Federal Retirement Benefit Analysis
Is The Pension Survivor Benefit Best For You? by Todd Carmack
A Little-Known Opportunity Can Increase Your Retirement Income. by Mark Sprague
