First, contact your personnel office and ask to review your Official Personnel Folder (OPF) to make sure that all your periods of federal service are included. Image: Nirat.pix/Shutterstock.com
By: Reg JonesIn this series we’ve looked at steps to decide whether you are ready to retire and how to pick a retirement date when you have made that decision. What do you need to do to assure that you have a smooth transition between employment and retirement?
In a perfect world, you would decide to retire and exactly when, long in advance of actually doing it, giving yourself time to take these steps in a leisurely manner. If that’s you, good for you. If that’s not you, your time frame will be compressed, especially if you are thinking of retiring around the turn of the year—there’s no time like the present to get going.
First, contact your personnel office and ask to review your Official Personnel Folder (OPF) to make sure that all your periods of federal service are included. If your only federal work history is with your current agency, it’s unlikely that anything will be missing. On the other hand, if you’ve moved from agency to agency or had breaks in service, you need to make sure that nothing has been omitted.
If you’ve had periods of civilian service that may or may not be creditable, such as with the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Peace Corps, you need to clear up that uncertainty. The same is true if you’ve served on active duty in the armed forces.
Finally, if you need to make a deposit or redeposit to get credit for any of that time, you’d better do it now. Unless your retirement application is squeaky clean, you risk having it bounced back and forth between you, your agency and OPM until all the uncertainties are resolved, leaving you without income when you most need it.
Second, check your OPF to be sure that you’ve been covered long enough under the Federal Employees Health Benefits program (FEHB) or Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance program (FEGLI) to carry that coverage into retirement. In either case, you must have been enrolled for at least 5 years. Those five years can be continuous or they can be in segments, as long as you were enrolled when you left government, reenrolled immediately on your return, and are still enrolled on the day you retire. (Note: There is no five-year rule for continuing FEDVIP vision-dental insurance or FLTCIP long-term care insurance.)
You also need to check to see who you’ve designated to be the recipient or recipients of your FEGLI policy when you to die. It’s not uncommon to have made a designation when you were first hired and never changed it. A lot has happened since then and that may no longer be your desire.
Once you’ve finished your review and made any corrections (or filled in any omissions), you’ll need to complete an Application for Immediate Retirement (Standard From 3107 for FERS or 2801 for CSRS). Once you’ve done that, you can fill in the date on which you want to retire and submit it to your personnel office. Then you can begin winding down and enjoy the days remaining – hopefully with a retirement party – until you kiss your agency goodbye.
Former head of retirement and insurance policy at the Office of Personnel Management, and longtime FEDweek contributor, Reg Jones is known throughout the federal workforce community as an authority on pay and benefits.
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