Q: I will be eligible for retirement in 2011 with 35 years of service under the Civil Service Retirement System. I have just heard that I will need to work 40 years to get 80 percent of my salary. What percentage will I receive if I retire with 35 years of service. A: To receive an annuity that equals 80 percent of your highest three years of average salary, you would have to have 41 years and 11 months of service and owe no deposits or redeposits. To figure out how much your annuity would be, use the following formula,…
Browsing: high-3
Q: What will my high-3 be if I retire at the age of 55 with 34 years of civil service? My computation date is Nov. 10,1980. My retirement date is planned for Nov. 10, 2014. A: I’ll give you the formula. You’ll have to do the arithmetic. 0.015 x your high-3 x 5 years of service, plus 0.0175 x your high-3 x 5 years of service, plus 0.02 x your high-3 x all remaining years and full months of service. Additional months are created if you have any unused sick leave. You can find out how many you have by dividing your total…
Q. 1) Suppose one retires under the Civil Service Retirement System on Sunday, Oct. 31. I like to ask whether that is an especially poor date because I heard: a) in computing the high-3, only 30 days are used and thus Day 31 is not used; b) if one retires any other day except for the 31st, an extra day is added in computing high-3; c) two days of annuity is lost since salaries are not paid/prorated on weekends while annuity is paid/prorated. Yet, Human Resources said that the above is untrue because by some complicated formula, Day 31 is considered…
Q: I became fully eligible for Social Security at 66. I am now 67 and will work until I am 68. For each year, limited to five years, Social Security will increase the benefit by 8 percent a year if drawing Social Security is deferred. Is there a similar provision for Federal Employees Retirement System retirement? A: No. However, a FERS employee who attains age 62 and retires with at least 20 years of service will have the first number in his annuity formula increased from 0.01 to 0.011. The new formula would then be 0.011 x high-3 x years and full months of…
Q: I am trying to figure out how Federal Employees Retirement System contributions deducted from my pay work. Are they included in retirement pay? I know about the high-3, the 1 percent or the 1.1 percent, and the total years of service and months used for computing retirement annuity. I just don’t understand the FERS subtraction and how it fits, or if it does, into the retirement annuity equation process. A: The retirement contributions that are deducted from your pay have no direct bearing on what you will receive in your annuity. It will be based on a formula that…
Q: I retired from active duty military as of Sept. 25, 1993, and entered the Defense Department federal civil service Jan. 10, 1994. As of Jan. 10, 2011, I will have 17 years in federal civil service and will be 59 years old. My high-3 grade is GS-11. Is there any way I could buy back my military time, 20 years, to add to my federal civil service time to gain 20 years? For 17 years of civil service time, what would the percentage of retirement pay be? I am under the Federal Employees Retirement System. A: If you make…
Q: I work in the San Francisco Bay Area where the general service pay is at its highest. I plan to work through my 42nd year to achieve my goal of 80 percent of my high-three. I have more than one year of sick leave on the books. My question is, if I decided to transfer from the Bay Area (say back to Phoenix or Savannah, Ga.), would I still be able to claim my last high-three (Bay Area), and if so at what point would I need to retire to claim my high three? A: Your highest three consecutive…
Q: I read somewhere that if you had enough quarters of Social Security, like 28 or 30, you could qualify for your Social Security pay based on that and I would get both my Federal Employees Retirement System and Social Security disability retirement money, without there being an offset. Is that correct? A: The criteria for receiving a Social Security disability benefits are much higher than those for a FERS disability benefit. To receive such a benefit with fewer than 40 credits, you would have had to be covered under Social Security from the time you turned age 22. Under…
Q: I am a 58-year-old physician with 16 years of military service from 1978 to 1994. I am taking a job with the Veterans Affairs Department. In the benefits booklet I received, there is a note as follows: “Physicians and dentists covered under Title 38 provisions must complete 15 years of creditable service in order to use Physicians/Dentists Special Pay as basic pay in determining the high-3 average salary used in the computation of a [Federal Employees Retirement System] annuity. If I buy into FERS for my 16 years of military service, does this count toward “creditable service,” or is…
Q: I saw this question on your website regarding overseas locality pay. I am assigned to a foreign post for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Will my locality pay go toward my high-3? A: Locality pay is always considered to be part of base pay when computing a high-3.