Have you ever wondered when you should start your retirement process? Well, if so, then stay tuned for this FERS federal fact check. Hi, I'm Micah Shilanski with Plan Your Federal Retirement and welcome to this FERS federal fact check. Today we have a question that came in from Angelia, and she's talking about her retirement a little over 10 years of federal service, and she says she's planning on retiring in December of 2025, so when should you start the process? Angela?
That's a great question. Now there's a lot of things that come into the process, and really what that means, and in fact, we have a whole piece we put together on your retirement timeline and being effective with that. But let's start with where we're at today. Number one, this advice is kind of to everyone, regardless when you're going to retire, start by getting all of your SF-50s, your notifications of personal
action. Make sure you're downloading those off of a government device onto your personal device, so that after you separate from service, you have proof of your creditable service. We talked about this a lot. It's one of the biggest errors we continually see - is inaccurate creditable service for retirement. So I'd start with that now. Now, when it comes to retirement application, I like to contact your agency,
and let's find out. Some agencies are allowing retirement applications six months in advance, which is fantastic. Most are still only reading three months, three months or 90 days in advance. So you need to contact your agency and find out what they're going to do. If it's an agency is three months in advance, you're going to retire December 31 that means in September, I like to contact the agency for August and let them know you're going to retire, and ask for the retirement
paperwork. They're going to be able to send that information to you. You're going to be able to fill out their retirement application and then submit it to them 90 days in advance. Now, the normal processes, they're going to get this and they're probably not going to do anything right away. Don't worry, it's because they have other stuff to do. As you get closer to December, they should be following the process, pulling it up and contacting you about your upcoming retirement
date. After that happens and you retire on, let's say, December 31 a couple days later, they ship off your package to OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, and then OPM is going to process your retirement. One of the things, and this is in that one page piece we have together in your retirement timeline, I really like for you to do is make sure you get a copy of everything that goes to OPM. When you get that copy, you can kind of thumb through it and you can see, hey,
is all of my information there? Do they have all my SF-50s? Do they have the spousal form in there for survivor benefits? They have the health insurance election, all these great things. And in case you're missing anything, you kind of get a heads up on what you might be hearing from OPM. So Angelia, the short answer is at least three months in advance, which, if I might clock, is really four months is when I like to start
that process before retirement. Is the latest I would start. If your agency, allows you to do it sooner, and absolutely start that process, sooner. If you have questions like these and go ahead and submit them, and you could be featured in the next FERS Federal fact check. Until then, happy planning.