Postal retirement
COLA for Federal Employees
Some updates on COLA:
The Cost of Living Adjustments are based on the changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Many of us don’t pay much attention to the CPI, but as we reach retirement age keeping informed about anything that impacts our financial picture is just smart planning.
Retirees live on a fixed income for the most part and it pays them to know about how their money is being impacted by policy changes, rules and regulations. Retirees must keep their ears open and their eyes peeled because they are no longer in the workforce where information flows consistently whether right or wrong. The Office of Personnel Management will make certain you are kept abreast through information bulletins and other correspondence. However, the real job lies with you to make sure you are keeping up with what is important for your well-being.
Both for the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), the accumulation for the 2015 COLA was 1.4 percent after the release on May 16th of the CPI for April 2014. The COLA for next year will be predicated on the increase in the average CPI of the third quarter of last year and the third quarter of this year.
Knowledge is critical to creating the kind of retirement future you want and deserve.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Related Pages
Postal Employee – STAPLES® Survey
Postal Employee – YOUR OPINION MATTERS
The USPS has opened over 50 ‘Test’ USPS locations inside of STAPLES® locations throughout the Country. Your opinion about this event matters – Our results will be published and we will be forwarding our findings to the USPS for review and consideration.
www.PSRetirement.com is conducting a Survey of USPS employees.
PSRetirement.com, through the ‘Postal Employee – STAPLES®‘ survey is requesting feedback from Postal employees about the USPS’s decision to open USPS locations in over 50 ‘test market’ STAPLES® stores.
If you were selected to participate in this survey please do so –
If you have NOT received your survey and would like to participate please request your survey by submitting your email address in the comment section below – we will promptly send one to you.
Your opinion matters – Make it count.
* To say ‘Thank You’ for the time you spend filling out the survey PSRetirement.com is offering survey participants a Retirement Benefit Analysis free of charge.
Postal and LiteBlue Related Pages
What Is LiteBlue?
PostalEase / LiteBlue
What Postal Employees Should Do On LiteBlue Before Retirement
eRetire for Postal Employees – Retirement Applications on LiteBlue
Use LiteBlue to Manage your FEHB
You can use LiteBlue and PostalEase to manage your Allotments
Requesting Duplicate Postal Employee W-2 Forms Using LiteBlue
Federal Employee – Do You Really Want To Retire?
Do Federal Employees Really Want to Retire?
As a federal employee, the question ‘Do you really want to retire?‘ is a totally different question than can you retire. If you don’t really want to retire because you feel you have a lot more to give and the thought of retirement simply does not appeal to you, is not an usual phenomenon. According to the Blue Zone Report (people who live longer, healthier lives) retirement in the traditional sense might not be a good idea. Studies have certainly shown that being active is of great benefit to humans both physically and mentally, it keeps you in the game.
There are a number of opportunities available to persons who don’t want to retire. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is exploring the idea of Phased Retirement which will keep many in the federal workforce on their jobs for a longer period of time. Those employees who want to stay in the federal workforce may have options via proposed Phased Retirement or the option of working as Contractors.
The other side of the coin is, can you afford to retire as a federal employee. After examining your options, performing a benefit analysis and finding that the estimated money that will be coming in after you retire, just won’t cover your expenses is reason to pause and evaluate options. What to do? If you are within 3 to 5 years of retirement, it might not be a whole lot that can be done in terms of a salary increase. But you can tap into doing more through your Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). It is always a good idea to maximize participation in TSP to the greatest extent possible. Exercise all of your options to leverage your ability to secure your retirement future.
It is never too late to begin planning for your retirement future as a federal employee. Plan now, look at your options realistically, and take care to stack up your expenses against the estimated revenue you will receive in retirement. It is important to realize that wanting to work and needing to work are a dynamic that should be prioritized early so that working or not working is voluntary and not mandatory.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Related Articles
Changing Your LiteBlue / PostalEase Password
Changing Your PostalEase Password
By now, you will almost certainly have received your new LiteBlue / PostalEase password and have thought about visiting ssp.usps.gov to make the change (ssp www.usps.gov).
The letter you have received contains a temporary password in the upper right hand corner of the letter. You may have to search for the password as it is not clearly identified, but it is there if you look.
To effect the change, you will need to visit https://ssp.usps.gov/ssp-web/login.xhtml. As you go to the website you will need to enter your LiteBlue (employee) ID and the temporary LiteBlue password.
Once you are logged in, you will need to set up and then save your new LiteBlue password. Please remember, however, that LiteBlue / PostalEase will be accepting your new (ssp www.usps.gov) passwords after April 28th, 2014.
Other LiteBlue Related Pages
What Postal Employees Should Do On LiteBlue Before Retirement
eRetire for Postal Employees – Retirement Applications on LiteBlue
Use LiteBlue to Manage your FEHB
You can use LiteBlue and PostalEase to manage your Allotments
Requesting Duplicate Postal Employee W-2 Forms Using LiteBlue
Contact us for more information
*Using this form will add you to the Psretirement newsletter.
Buyback Leave – Postal Employees
Buyback Leave: Postal Employees
Buying back leave is a topic we want to discuss briefly because it can be incredibly important to both Federal and Postal employees. I think it is a very good topic to shed some additional light on. However, as always, everything that a Federal or Postal employee needs to know about their benefits can be found on the organization’s website or by contacting their Human Resource office, and buying back leave is not different (in the case of Postal employees – using LiteBlue and working with Shared Services).
That being said, it is our great pleasure to discuss buying back leave and how it can be used as ‘Gap’ money or how Annual Leave can be shared through the Postal ALS program. As a past Federal HR Executive, one of my key responsibilities was to make certain our customers understood their benefits and how they worked in the most crystallized manner possible. Let’s see if we can do that again about a topic that does not come up as much as the more popular topics such as the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), The Federal Employees Health Benefits plan (FEHB), the Federal Employees Group Life Insurance plan (FEGLI). These subjects generally always get top-billing.
Let’s give Buying Back Leave top billing in this post. Buying Back Leave or what is commonly called Leave Buy-Back comes under the provisions of the Injury Compensation Program. When an employee is injured on the job they may be compelled to use their annual and sick leave while they are waiting for a decision from the Office of Workers’ Compensation Program (OWCP). When there is a traumatic injury employees are only permitted to buy back the leave they used after the end of the statutory 45-day continuation of pay period.
When an employee buys back annual leave for a prior year that exceeds the prescribed maximum, the leave over the maximum is automatically forfeited. Employees can only buy back the amount of leave that is eligible to be carried over. Often times an employee may lose leave when the time they are away from their duty station is changed to Leave Without Pay (LWOP) as a result of the leave buy-back. When this happens adjustments are made to rectify both the annual and sick leave.
I hope this explanation will make the situation of leave-buy back clear. If not, let us know and we will try again. There are a number of ways to make a great pot of soup.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know
Related LiteBlue Articles
How To Bid Assignments / Routes On LiteBlue
What Postal employees need to do on LiteBlue before retirement
What Postal Employees Should Do On LiteBlue Before Retirement
Changing Your LiteBlue / PostalEase Password Through ssp.USPS.gov
eRetire for Postal Employees – Retirement Applications on LiteBlue
Use LiteBlue to Manage your FEHB
You can use LiteBlue and PostalEase to manage your Allotments
Requesting Duplicate Postal Employee W-2 Forms Using LiteBlue
Postal Retirement and Benefits – Postal Employees
Postal Retirement
There are some slight differences between the benefits of Postal employees and Federal employees. We would like to explain a few of them here and potentially give you reason to seek out additional informtion from a qualified benefit expert to help you with your own specific circumstance and questions about postal retirement. Employees in the federal service, not including the Senior Executive Services (SES), earn about 26 days of annual leave per year after 15 years. After the same period Postal Workers, earn a maximum of 20 days.
The leave structure is 10 days per year up to 5 years of service for the Postal Service as compared to 13 days for the first 3 years of service as a regular federal employee. From 4-14 years of service, regular federal employees receive 19 days of annual leave while postal workers receive 15 days after 5 years.
Federal employees also earn 4 hours of sick leave per pay period, while postal employees earn 3 hours per pay period to safeguard against illness and accidents. Because of the structure and the mission of the Postal Service the compensation profile is different from the regular federal service.
Postal employees regularly get pay raises and are compensated for overtime, night shift differential and Sunday premium pay. There are also minor differences in how FEGLI is paid. Therefore, when postal employees work on their own financial plan and postal retirement future, it is valuable to understand the structure of the postal employees’ total compensation and benefits plan.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
For Postal employees; learn about LiteBlue
Learn about your FEGLI benefits and how you are covered.
Plan Building: How Do I Get Started?
~~HOW DO I GET STARTED WITH A PLAN?
By now you are probably asking – How do I get started setting goals that are SMART and putting a plan into action? You get started by first simply writing down what you desire your retirement picture to reflect. Write down your goals, evaluate and analyze them so they fit your circumstances and values.
Create a strategy that is doable with short, intermediate and long-term goals with time horizons that are based in reality. Make certain that the plan you create can be put into action without causing undue stress on your emotional and financial well-being. Lastly, make room to monitor and track the movement of your plan, leaving time and space to modify the plan as circumstances and conditions change in your life both for you and your family.
A plan that starts out SMART ends with giving you in retirement the lifestyle you desire and deserve.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Building A Flexible Federal Employee Retirement Plan
Building a Flexible Retirement Plan
In order to make anything work from the simplest to the most complex venture, one must have a plan. One of the most important components of the plan is flexibility. Life changes, people change, and as we know – the world and what makes it run – the economics of supply and demand – impacting the way we live also changes.
Getting ready for retirement requires tremendous personal investment, both financially and emotionally. There is a laundry list of things we need to do in order to move closer to our retirement goals. As we construct our laundry list of things to do, we will compare the list to what we have already done and what we need to do going forward.
Obviously, one of the first things we need to do is develop a plan, a sort of action plan for our lives. Developing an action plan requires no real technical expertise or fancy charts and drawings. It is your own personal plan whose primary criterion is to develop a plan and stay with it. No matter how wonderfully constructed your plan, if you simply toss it aside, it is useless.
We emphasize the need to be flexible in your retirement plan, so that if you have to change some things, rearrange some items or redo it altogether, not to worry. Just don’t abandon your plan. Having a retirement plan is like having a roadmap to your desired destination. You may discover that you can take a number of alternate routes to your destination, but nonetheless, you have a roadmap that you know most emphatically leads you to where you want to go.
When you are building a PLAN for your retirement future, always remember what FLEXIBLE means to help you stay on track. F – Financial literacy is a must. You gain that literacy just as you gain any other body of knowledge – read, inquire and ask questions. L – Liabilities – know what they are and work on eliminating as many of your liabilities as possible before you retire. E – Earnings – know that your earnings will be lower than when you were an active employee, respond accordingly. X- Xceptions – there are none. We don’t get to make Xceptions to the importance of having a plan and say ‘I don’t need one”.
Everybody needs a plan in order to successfully get where they need to be. I – Invest in your future by prioritizing what your goals are and sticking to a plan that will help you reach them. B – Budget – if you have shied away from living on a budget in the past, as you move into retirement, living on a budget is your best bet to making sure your resources outlast you.
If you very temporarily step-off the train, you must immediately make plans to get back on board, it is your future. L – Lower – E- Expenses. Lower your expenses by taking advantage of services offered to seniors – eating out, travel, hotel accommodations, and grocery shopping discount-days for seniors, senior home repair programs, and homestead exemption programs for seniors.
FLEXIBLE might only look like an 8 letter word, but it packs a whole lot of punch for getting ready to retire well.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
For information on your TSP.gov and how it will impact your retirement – Click HERE
FEGLI – The Order of Precendence
FEGLI: Order of Precedence
Now that we have discussed how a death claim will be paid. Let’s discuss to whom the death benefit will be paid. The Federal Government uses what is termed an Order of Precedence. The FEGLI Order of Precedence has no attachment to your Will. The Federal Government does not get involved in Wills and Probate. Instead, if there is no assignment of your FEGLI (Life Insurance) and no valid court order exists then the order is as follows ranging from first to sixth and in that order:
1. Designated FEGLI Beneficiary(s).
2. If no designation – widow or widower
3. If neither 1 nor 2 exists, your FEGLI will pass to the child or children. If any child or children is deceased, then equal shares will be paid to the descendants of the deceased child or children. If minors are involved, then the court will usually appoint a guardian to receive payment for the minor children.
4. If the above situation does not exist, then to the parents in equal shares or the whole to the surviving parent.
5. If none of the conditions above exists, then to the administrator or executor of the estate.
6. If all five of the conditions do not exist, then the next of kin as designated by the State in which the deceased lived – not the state in which the deceased died.
When planning your retirement future, it is important to gather and understand as much information as possible. Discuss the information with family and loved ones you trust. You can also check with your HR office about your current beneficiary designations and possibly with a qualified local FEGLI expert who can help you with your insurance selections and decisions.
P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know.
RELATED TOPICS – More Federal and Postal Insurance Information
Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB)
Federal Flexible Spending Account (FSAFEDS)
Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program (FLTCIP)
Federal Employees and Medicare
Federal Employee Dental and Vision Insurance Program (FEDVIP)
