Well, if you're going to have your pension in retirement and you're going to have health insurance in retirement, what happens if you don't want to start both of them at the same time? If everyone wanted a question like that, then stay tuned for this FERS Federal Fact Check. Hi, I'm
Micah Shilanski with Plan Your Federal Retirement. There's a really good question that came in, and one of the things that I love about being a financial planner for federal employees, I've been an advisor for going on 25 years now, is I keep getting really great questions about your benefits, looking at it from a slightly different angle, and why is that so important? Because these are your benefits that you've earned. I want to make sure you're getting every benefit
that you deserve when you retire. You spend a career with the federal government, how do you make sure you're getting the maximum amount of your benefits, and that's why I love answering these FERS Federal Fact Checks. So we got a question from Nancy, and she says, thank you for your wonderful videos and helpful information on Postponed retirement, Nancy, you're very
welcome. I'm glad that was helpful for you. The one question I have remaining is I understand that if I retire at MRA in 10 I cannot take my annuity, I'm gonna call it a pension, without a penalty until I'm 62 that is correct. Is there an option to continue with my health benefits at the time of resignation and not collect the annuity, the pension until age 62 or do you have to start both at the same time? That is an excellent question. Nancy, so keep in mind how your benefits
are designed, right? They're designed as an entire benefits package, they're not really designed in retirement as an a la carte system where you get a pick and choose how things come up. So in order to be eligible for your FEHB you have to be eligible to receive an immediate pension into retirement, and you must be receiving that pension in order for your benefits to be turned on. So the short answer is no, in the long term, you
cannot do that. Now they do have TCC, Temporary Continuation of Coverage, think of this, like COBRA, after you separate for about 18 months, you can buy that insurance directly. I'm going to have some caution about that. Maybe you need it for medical reasons, it makes sense, but it's going to be really, really expensive, It's 102% of the total premium. Keep in mind, you're only paying about 28% of the premium, 72% of the premium, the majority of it is being paid by your employer, so you pay
roughly, you know, a third of that premium. So all of a sudden, your premiums are going to triple plus 2% if you'd go aside to go into the Temporary Continuation of of coverage. So, yes, you can do that. It's only for 18 months. It is expensive. This is where sometimes, looking on the private marketplace, and I know a lot of federal employees get a little concerned about, want to start talking about that, and is it as good as coverage as you have? Nope, it's definitely not. Is it still
health insurance coverage? Yes, it absolutely is. So sometimes we need to balance those out a little bit and say, hey, I could do COBRA, but it's really expensive, should I be looking at the private market, or, should say, the Health Insurance Marketplace, and to see if there's a good option that's going to fit me until I turn these benefits on. So Nancy,
thank you so much for submitting that question. Your retirement is so complicated because you have all of these moving parts that are coming together, so getting good information about your benefits is really why we're trying to do these videos, why we want to help another 1 million federal employees with
retirement. Is what it gets you great information. So make sure you click that like button, hit that share button, send this out to a couple coworkers, do us a favor, I want to get this information out to as many people as we possibly can, so when you go to retire, you get the most out of your retirement. Till next time, Happy Planning!