Webinar Replay: The “F” Bomb for Federal Employees – “You’re Fired!”

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Insurance Programs, Pension & Survivor Benefits, Retirement Planning, Social Security & SRS, Thrift Savings Plan

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Written by Chris Kowalik

Delivered on: Tuesday, March 18, 2025

To Watch on YouTube, CLICK HERE

The “F” Bomb for Federal Employees: “You're Fired!”

Preparing yourself for an unexpected exit from federal service.

ADMINISTRATIVE: Getting what you need before you lose access to government systems
BENEFITS: Knowing what you have earned based on your age and length of service
TRANSITION: Accessing money you will need during the transition period

Download Handouts: CLICK HERE

Register for our next short webinar: FedImpact.com/webinar

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Prefer to read instead? A Transcript of this Webinar is Below:

Hello and welcome everyone to the Fed Impact webinar. Today, we are going to be talking about what has been looming over the federal employee workforce for quite some time now, and that is the prospect of being fired, right?

That's the F-bomb that no federal employee wants to get or hear. And so, today's session is going to help you in preparing yourself for an unexpected exit from federal service, so that you know what is going to happen and maybe more importantly, what's not going to happen if you are let go.

You guys know me, I'm Chris Kowalik, the Founder of ProFeds, the developer of the Fed Impact Retirement Workshop, and the host of the Fed Impact podcast. I love being able to help federal employees take really complex things and break them down into normal people language that the government does not write regulations in.

And despite the idea that they're supposed to be writing regulations more in plain language, the reality is, is some of these benefits are so complicated and the way in which the government describes them leaves a lot of people wondering, what am I supposed to do? What am I even looking at?

That's my job and that's our job here at ProFeds, is to help distill down that super complex language and figure out, well, what does it mean to you? We're excited to be able to do that today.

Agenda

Our agenda, we've got three main things we're going to cover. I love that this looks simple, it's not, but let's talk about these three. The first is the benefits. I want you to know what you've earned based on your age and your length of service.

There is so much confusion out there about what happens if you're fired and you're already eligible, or you're kind of eligible, or you're barely eligible, there's all sorts of things, or you're not eligible at all. I want to just cut right through all of that and give you some easy tools to be able to reference so that for sure.

Next we'll talk about some administrative things. The things that you need to do before you lose access to government systems, so that if you're given the banker's box one day and told, “Fill up your stuff, you're out of here. We're either closing your agency, we're closing your office, here's your severance package, here's your discontinued service retirement,” whatever it might be.

If you are given that banker's box and told to fill up your stuff, you'll immediately lose access to those government systems, and so we're going to be talking about several things that every federal employee should do right now in preparation for the idea that they might lose their job.

Next is the transition. Of course, we're focused on the financial aspects of retirement, and so of course money is an important part of that transition period. And so we'll cover just some ideas for different groups of you that are falling in different categories, as far as your eligibility and what you can expect after you leave, so that there are as few surprises as possible.

What this webinar will NOT cover

We are not going to be talking about the voluntary ways that you are going to be leaving federal service. As far as a VERA, which is an early out, the VSIP, which is that cash incentive. Those are voluntary ways that the government can reduce their force, and we've talked about those in other sessions through our podcast, on YouTube, that type of thing.

And we'll show you how to get to all of that training here shortly, but today we're going to really be talking about those involuntary decisions that the government says, “Thank you for your service. It's no longer warranted here.” And I know that this is a terrible message to have to hear, but I want to help you guys just cut right through the nonsense that I think is floating around out there of how these things work, so that you guys are crystal clear.

Some Recent Observations

Some recent observations from my vantage point. There is an abundance of misinformation out there. I see it because they come in the form of posts to our video, like comments on social media posts, where different groups are with these federal employees and they're commenting in all these ways.

And the answers that people are giving to questions that people have are just so wrong, and I really want to just make that stop. There is a lot of panic for those of you who are uncertain about your future. No doubt anytime someone says, “Hey, listen, you no longer have a job,” that's a big deal, and we want to help you to know what to expect.

The other observation is that more federal employees are doing a gut check like, if it's my time to go, what does this mean for me? How do my finances look if I need to go get another job? I'm refreshing my resume, I'm doing all of those other pieces of recognizing the reality of this reduction in force and how significant it is, we have to get real with ourselves and figure out what's next.

For some of you that might be true retirement. For others, it's like opening into the next great adventure of whatever the next thing is with another job in the private sector, a contractor job, whatever it might be. But very, very important that we get that gut check right.

I mentioned a few minutes ago that we've done a lot of training on the broader RIF topics. Thinking of the preparation for RIF. RIF, which is things like the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority, the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment, those pieces.

And so we talk about all of that and a slew of other topics in our RIF training series. You can get to it by going to FedImpact.com/RIF-training-series. You'll be able to see all the 22 parts that we put together for you, and I hope that that helps answer a lot of your questions.

Benefits

Next up, let's get into some of the meat and potatoes here and talk about benefits, specifically what you have earned. And in here I'm going to talk more about at the pension level, because that will dictate how all the benefits come to you after that. Thinking of benefits like health insurance, life insurance, TSP, all of those different pieces will be largely determined by the way in which you retire.

I love being able to put together resources that are easy for federal employees to reference and sometimes those resources fit beautifully on slides and other times they don't. And so I had to get really creative in the way I was going to present this next slide because there's a lot going on here. I made it as large as possible so that in your handouts it's legible, but no doubt it's small. I apologize, this is the best I could do with the space that we have.

I put this chart together because I need federal employees to understand if and when they are eligible for a pension. And here we're talking specifically about the first pension, for all of our CSRS employees the vast majority of you have been fully eligible for quite some time, and so I'm not going to cover that today. My apologies in advance, but we're going to really focus on FERS employees. Again, there's a lot going on this slide, so follow along with me as we navigate to the different colors.

We're going to start with the red on the left-hand side. If you have less than five years of service, you are not vested for a pension, no matter how old you are. If you leave, whether voluntarily or you're fired, there is no pension waiting for you, ever. That's the easiest part that I get to teach today.

Fully Eligible to Retire

Let's go to the gold section, this is kind of the other end of the spectrum which is being fully eligible to retire. Most of you have heard these full eligibility rules. I'm going to repeat them and you'll see them demonstrated here on the slide. But if you are 62 with five years, 60 with 20 years, or your minimum retirement age, which for the vast majority of you would be 57 with 30 years of service, you will be fully eligible to retire.

I made a little note at the bottom because most of you know minimum retirement age spans somewhere between age 55 and 57, depending on the year you were born. But based on how old someone is now, in the year in which they were born, we're already inching up on 57.

There may be a few of you who are 56 and eight months, 56 and 10 months, but the majority of you are going to be age 57 for your minimum retirement age. I just tried to simplify this chart knowing that there may be some of you who could be eligible just a smidge sooner than what you're seeing on this chart.

Again, fully eligible, you've got to meet one of those three gates, either 62 with five, 60 with 20, or minimum retirement age with 30. That's the gold section that you see here.

MRA + 10

But then I want to talk about the blue section, and that is MRA+10. Many of you have heard this thrown around and you might not be really sure what it means, so I want to just cover this with you. We know minimum retirement age is that same thing we talked about with full eligibility, it's somewhere between 55 and 57, depending on the year that you were born.

Just like I did with full eligibility, we're going to call that 57 for purposes of this chart. If you are at least 57 with at least 10 years of service, you qualify for an MRA+10 retirement, and it essentially is an immediate retirement, you will get a pension right away, but it will be penalized, and we'll talk a little bit more about that penalty later.

It's not quite the same as full eligibility, but it's similar in many ways, and like I said, I'll get into that in a future slide, but MRA+10 is a way for someone who has met that age requirement of MRA, but they haven't met the 30 years of required service to get there.

It allows them to almost create a little bit of an early out for themselves. And I don't want to confuse that with a true early out, but it does allow them to circumvent some of the full eligibility rules in the event that they meet those two qualifications, MRA with 10 years.

Deferred Retirement

Let's move to the gray area, that upper left area where it just says deferred. For a deferred retirement, this is kind of an interesting little piece of federal benefits, because a deferred retirement implies that you cannot get it right away. Just by the virtue of how it's named, and that's true.

A deferred pension is one that you have qualified for because you're vested, meaning you have at least five years of federal service, but you do not meet any of the age requirements to be able to get it based on your age. And so someone who has five years of service and is even under 50, there's a pension waiting for you, it's just going to be paid to you a long time from now, and we'll get into that timeline here in a bit.

But that deferred pension, it's important you're going to see five years of service as an important factor in what we're going to be talking about today, because it's what unlocks a pension for you in the future if you don't otherwise qualify for one now.

If we move to the right-hand side, you'll see it's still gray, that's still deferred territory over there, but all those little stars that you see in those areas that span that gray part and into the blue, are the age and service combinations where you would be eligible for either an early out or a VERA, or a discontinued service retirement, which is the involuntary version of an early out, where you're told you're leaving.

I wanted to share this with you because I think there's a lot of confusion over what the eligibility looks like for this.

With VERA or a discontinued service retirement, we are either looking at age 50 with 20 years of service, or any age with at least 25 years of service. And if you meet that and you are offered an early out by your agency, must be offered, or you are given a discontinued service retirement, meaning it's not an offer, it's an order, you are done working for the federal government but you meet these requirements that you see in the starred areas, you will be eligible for a pension and it will be paid right away.

More Details

Again, we're going to talk a little bit more in detail about each of these, but I wanted to use this chart to help give you a construct to be looking at, instead of all these individual tables and trying to figure out what it all means, just putting it all together. I hope that this is helpful to you as you're kind of sorting through your situation.

Let's get into some of the details. Again, this is wave tops that we're getting to here, but with respect to the pension, we know that red area was no pension, so there's no pension payable, ever. Not now, not later, nothing.

A deferred pension is a pension that's payable in the future, and here's where we get into some of the details. So this is an involuntary wait that you have to have. It is not possible for you to draw this pension right away, even if you're willing to take a penalty. You must wait until you're age 62 if you have somewhere between five and 19 years of service.

You could draw this at 60 if you have between 20 and 29 years of service when you leave, or you can draw it at your minimum retirement age, again, probably 57 for most of you, if you have at least 30 years of service when you leave the government. This is an involuntary wait. You do not have a choice to draw this right now.

Next up is the Vera and DSR. If you qualify for an early out and you're offered one by your agency, or your agency has made the decision that you're going to take a discontinued service retirement, then you will have a pension payable right away with no penalties. But just remember, this has to be granted to you, you can't just decide to take this. It has to be offered by your agency.

I want to talk briefly about this pension. There are no penalties assigned to this pension, but it stands to reason that if you're 50 years old and you weren't planning to retire for another seven or 10 years, your pension is not going to be as high as it would have been had you kept working, right?

You'd have all those extra years in your calculation, you'd have a higher high-3, presumably. It's not that the pension will be the same as if you were fully eligible. It is the formula that's being used is the same, it's just the outcome will be different.

There's no penalties assigned to it. It might feel like a penalty by not having all those years included that you otherwise would have received had you kept working, but in the grand scheme of things, this is not a penalty and something that unfortunately causes a lot of confusion among federal employees.

The next area is MRA+10. This is that blue area where there is a pension payable now with penalties. There's kind of two different ways you can get this. If you take it right away, you are going to suffer a penalty and it's calculated roughly 5% for every year you're under the age of 62. If you're 57 and you go, you are going to have a 25% penalty to your pension.

This actually gets broken down into the monthly version, I'm not going to go into the details of that, but generally 5% per year for every year you are under 62. And it does not matter how many years of service you have, that is how the penalty is calculated. I've heard all sorts of nonsense about if you have at least 20 it's less of a penalty, and that's not true.

If you wish to avoid the penalty, you can voluntarily choose to start your pension at a later age, and that later age is determined by how many years of service that you have. You can start your pension at age 62 if you had between 10 and 19 years of service, you can start it at 60 if you had between 20 and 29 years of service, or you can start it at your minimum retirement age if you had at least 30 years of service at that time.

How far you have to wait is largely determined by the number of years of service that you had when you exited federal service. There's always the choice to go ahead and take the pension now, but you need to understand that penalty of 5% per year for every year you're under 62 is a permanent penalty to your pension. Forever you will have that penalty. It might not be worth it, especially if you're going to go out and get another job.

The last area that everybody wants to find themselves in is being fully eligible. This is when you are in the driver's seat and you have the ability to walk out the door when you want. Being fully eligible allows you to submit your retirement papers and begin a pension right away with no penalties assigned.

Of course, just because you're fully eligible doesn't mean you've maxed out your pension, if you kept working longer than that, your pension would continue to rise and all that good stuff. But this allows you on your own accord without any offer from your agency, without any approval for anyone, to walk out the door.

You are in the driver's seat when you're in this gold, fully eligible area. This whole thing seems to make sense with respect to a pension, but there's more complexity that goes into being terminated from federal service than what we see here on this screen.

VERY IMPORTANT – Are you already eligible to voluntarily retire?

I want to talk about what it looks like if you are involuntarily terminated from the federal workforce. There is one super important question that you must start with to figure out what happens to you. The question is, are you already eligible to voluntarily retire? Are you already eligible to voluntarily retire? The answer's either going to be yes or no.

That will determine the next questions that need to be asked. If the answer to this question is yes, that you are already eligible to voluntarily retire, then the next question is, well, what kind of eligibility are we talking about? Are you fully eligible, or are you MRA+10 eligible?

If you're fully eligible, you know that you had to be at least 62 with five, or at least 60 with 20 years, or at least your minimum retirement age with at least 30 years, right? We already covered that in the previous chart. As long as you meet those rules, you will not receive a severance if you're fired, because you're going to receive a pension with no penalties.

Severance is intended for people who are involuntarily let go and don't receive an immediate pension. In the event that you meet the MRA+10 eligibility, of course, minimum retirement age with at least 10 years of service, you will not receive severance pay and you will receive a pension.

But remember, it's going to be the penalized version if you take it right away. There's always that option to voluntarily wait to receive your pension after you've left federal service, that we talked about in the previous slide.

The answer is ‘yes'

If the answer to the question, are you eligible to voluntarily retire already? If that is yes, this part is really easy, you just go. You just start your pension. You don't lose anything, nobody can take this away from you, you have earned this. The only way to lose a federal pension is to do something really, really crazy.

We're talking about crimes against the United States like espionage and treason, right? And I didn't put that on the flowchart because I don't think I need to put it on the flowchart for this group, but I think it's important that we recognize that once you have met these gates, this is something you have earned.

You can just leave, and who cares if they called it firing you? You're going to leave, draw your pension, and be on your way.

The answer is “no”

But what happens if the answer to this question, are you already eligible to voluntarily retire, is no? Well, we can't just move to eligibility at that point, we have to ask another question. Are you being removed for misconduct or performance?

If you're part of this RIF cycle and your agency's like, “All right, listen, we had to cut our force and unfortunately you didn't make the cut,” then that's not you being removed for misconduct or performance. That's a reduction in force and that will carry some other rules.

But if you are being removed from misconduct or performance, so the answer to that is yes, then the question is, well, how many years of service do you have at that moment in time? If you have less than five years of service, then you will receive no severance and no pension. There's nothing. You get the notice, you're done.

That's it, there's nothing payable to you at that time. If the answer to that question of the number of years is that you have five or more, you are also not going to get a severance, but you will receive a pension.

Remember, this is a deferred pension, the one that as long as you have at least five years of service, there is something waiting for you in the future. Again, these scenarios only apply if you're being removed for misconduct or performance.

How many years of service do you have?

If you are not being removed for misconduct or performance, then the question is, how many years of service do you have? That will dictate what happens. If you have less than one year of service, there will be no severance and no pension payable to you. Right?

You're likely in your probation year, there is no severance, no pension. If you have between one and four years of service, you are going to receive a severance but no pension. Right? Remember, because you don't have at least five years, there's no pension waiting for you.

If you have five or more years of service, there is a severance pay package that will be paid to you and you will receive a pension, although it will be deferred. You'll have to receive it later, but at least it's there.

In the event that you meet the discontinued service retirement rules, so this is age 50 with 20 or any age with 25, you will not receive a severance package, you will receive your pension. And remember, that discontinued service retirement, if you take that, it is a pension that's payable to you right away with no penalties.

It's not quite as good as a full pension had you worked long enough to be able to be eligible for a full pension, but there are technically no penalties assigned to this benefit.

Hopefully this just breaks it down really simple for everybody. Believe me, this chart didn't start to look like this. It was a big jumbled mess and I thought, how do I just simplify this as much as I can so everyone can know exactly where they fall and what they're going to receive?

With respect to severance in these pension calculations, I want to walk through what these are so that you can have a sense of what you would be entitled to based on the scenario that you find yourself in.

Pension

Starting with the pension, the regular FERS pension formula is here on the left-hand side. It essentially says if you're retiring under the age of 62 or at least 62, but with less than 20 years of service, this is the formula you will use. You're going to take your high-3 times 1%, times the number of years of service that you had.

Months are included in there too, along with sick leave and all of that but this gives you an of that basic formula. High-3 times 1% times the number of years, and that will equal your pension. If you reach the age of 62 with at least 20 years of service, that 1% gets replaced with 1.1%.

I'm not going to include that other chart, but you get the idea that it certainly could be higher if you're fully eligible, 62 with 20. Penalties or delays in receiving this pension can happen based on those different categories that you saw yourself in before, right? Are you fully eligible? Are you MRA+10 eligible? What does that look like? And that will determine how this pension may be altered once it's been calculated.

Severance Pay

Let's move into the severance pay conversation. You'd think the severance pay would be a really easy calculation, and unfortunately the government just doesn't make it simple. I want to walk through what this calculation looks like.

There's a couple of different components and it's largely based on how many years of service that you have, and so then we have an age component and all of that.

10 Full Years or Less

Let's talk about the basic severance pay allowance. If you have 10 full years of service or less, this is the formula that you are going to use. You're going to get one week of severance pay for each full year of service that you had, plus a quarter of a week for each full quarter beyond the full year calculation.

Let's take a look at an example. If you have eight years and four months of service, those four months of service, that equals one quarter. Right? If we had had six months, it would be two quarters and so on. You'll receive eight and a quarter weeks of severance pay.

11 Full Years or More

But that is only if you have 10 full years or less. If you have 11 full years or more, you will receive an amount equal to this. You have one week for each full year of service for the first 10 years like we previously calculated. Plus, you're going to have two weeks for each full year of service above the 10 we already calculated.

For a year 11 and beyond, you're going to have that extra time. Those years become more valuable to you as far as your severance pay, because you're getting double the amount of severance pay for that period of time.

On top of that, for every full quarter that you have beyond what we've already calculated in the previous two steps, you're going to have a half a week of severance pay.

If we look at an example, if you have 12 years and four months of service, you're going to receive 14 and a half weeks of severance pay. You can kind of plug in your numbers and see with pretty great certainty what yours is going to look like.

Age Adjustment

The age adjustment, this is kind a bizarre part of severance pay. For each full three-month period or quarter that you are over the age of 40, you are going to receive a boost to your severance pay. This will make more sense when I give an example. This is kind of a weird way to describe this, but you're basically going to add two and 2.5% to the previous calculation that we just did to be able to account for your age.

Examples

If you are 45 years old and eight months, you're going to have 22 full quarters beyond the age of 40, and those 22 quarters are going to be multiplied by 2.5%, which means you get an extra 55% added to your severance pay. I feel compelled to show a bigger example so that we can put some real numbers to this.

For those of you who have been out to the OPM website on the severance pay page, this is the example that they give. And so if you want to go peek into some more of the details, please visit that page.

If at the time you separate, you have reached the age of 45 years at eight months, let's say you have 20 years and four months of creditable service, and you have a weekly rate of pay of $1,500. Yours maybe higher or lower, that's kind of beside the point here, but that'll give you an idea of what goes into this calculation.

This is how the severance pay is going to be calculated. Step one is the basic severance pay allowance. For the first 10 years of service that you had, you get one week per year, times the number of weekly pay that you are receiving, the 1,500. For those years above the original 10 we calculated, you get two weeks per year times $1,500 of your weekly rate, that's 30,000.

Then we look at the four months of creditable service. We say we have a quarter of a year, times two weeks, times 1,500, your weekly rate, and that gives us $750. If we add all of those together, your initial severance pay is $45,750.

For the age adjustment, here's what we're going to look at. We're going to be looking squarely at how old you are. In this example, 45 years and eight months old, looking towards the bottom of this slide, you're going to see that you have five years over the age of 40, right? Because 45 years old.

That's 20 full quarters that you have just for those five years. But because you are 45 and eight months old, that equals two full quarters. Right? That would be six months but we only count full quarters in this calculation, so you're going to get credit for two of those.

You have a total of 22 quarters that you are going to receive this extra boost. You're going to take 22 times 2.5%, times $45,750, and because that was the previous calculation, that is going to yield $25,162.50 of extra pay because of your age.

Looking at all of that together, the initial calculation and then the age adjustment, your total severance pay will be $70,912.50. That equals 47.275 weeks, and so you're essentially going to continue to receive your paycheck in the same interval as you're getting right now while you're still employed.

For most of you it's biweekly, you're going to continue to receive that for 47.275 weeks. That's the way severance pay is paid out. It's not lump sum like annual leave or anything like that, it is simply a continuation of pay for a set number of weeks.

If you return back to federal service while you're receiving your severance pay, it will stop. But if you return to federal service after your severance pay has already been paid to you in full, you will not need to repay any of that money.

That's different than the VSIP, the voluntary separation incentive payment, the cash incentive to leave. This one is very different. As long as it's already been fully paid to you, you're good to go, you could return back to the government.

I should also let you know that you should apply for unemployment benefits in the state where you live. Every state runs their own unemployment plan. And so how you qualify and for how long and what the benefits are, that is something you're going to have to get from your state.

But make sure that you're looking in the state in which you live, not necessarily the state in which you work. Where you live is where you are paying your unemployment tax.

And it's worthwhile to also mention that severance pay that you receive may have an effect on some of those unemployment benefits, but again, you're going to know that once you coordinate with your state to figure out what things look like for you.

The 12 Things Every Federal Employee Should Do Right NOW

For those of you who have listened to the entire 22-part RIF series, you know that we talked about the 12 things that we want every federal employee to do right now.

We just don't know who's on the chopping block and so by default, everybody's on the chop and block. And we should make sure that we're thinking about what to do to protect ourselves in the event that you get the cardboard box handed to you to fill up and walk out the door.

#1 Download your entire eOPF

There's an electronic version. This is the record of your service, right? This is what your agency has, and so they're going to be looking to this with respect to preparing your retirement package for OPM, and very important that you have a copy because you will lose access to this once you leave service.

Your agency has probably granted you access to your eOPF, there's lots of different ways that they can do that, but whatever the way is that they have allowed you to access this, it is important that you go in and download the entire file.

It's not all that intuitive of what you're supposed to do, but we've made it really easy by putting some instructions on our website. You can go to FedImpact.com/eOPF, and you will see the step-by-step process of what you need to do to be able to download the entire document.

And have a thumb drive handy or be able to email it to yourself. You're going to password protect it because it's got PII in it, but that way you have that as a record and there's no question at all what happened during your service history because you have a copy of it.

#2 Download your last three years of pay stubs

You definitely want to have the pay stubs. I mean, if you could have all of them, I suppose that would be awesome, but at some point you're like, what do I do with this? Well, it's helpful when you have your last three years of pay stubs because presumably, that's where your highest three years of earnings were.

And so if there's any question as to when pay raises happened, when promotions or step increases happened, when you're tallying that up, if you don't think OPM's right, you can look back at least to your pay stubs and know for sure. Otherwise, you're just going to be beholden to whatever they calculate.

Some people have even suggested, hey, go back and get five years because then you're going to see FEHB and FEGLI on there that you're paying for, as justification for meeting the five-year rule.

And so by all means, if you want to go back five years, great. Some payroll processors don't let you go back quite that far. Log in, see what you can access, and get everything that you can in some easy clicks.

#3 Download your training record

Throughout your federal career, you've gone through plenty of training, so courses and you've received certifications for things. And if you're going out and looking for another job, that record of the training that you've received could be really helpful.

Otherwise, you're going to have to recall from memory what those are. And certainly, if your new position requires a copy of a certificate that you completed some training, if you don't have that already, you're not going to be able to provide it to them.

It's better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. Download that training record, make it easy on yourself.

#4 Update your login information to your payroll processor

If you use your government email to log into your payroll system, so if you have myPay or any of these other systems that your agency may let you have access to, you want to make sure to put your personal email in there as well.

Some systems allow you to have two different emails associated, others are just going to have one, but you want to make sure that if there's any kind of two-factor authentication that needs to happen, maybe it recognizes you're logging in from a different location and they need to verify that it's you.

If you only have your government email on there, you are not going to have access to that system. You're not going to be able to access any of those documents.

Why this is helpful here kind of at the end of your career, is you want to make sure that you're able to go in and get your final pay stub that has your annual leave payout. Your accountant is probably going to want a copy of your latest pay stub or your last pay stub, and you being able to log in will be the easiest way for you to do that.

#5 Update email on file with TSP

Same kind of concept with TSP. You want to update that email on file with the TSP. You must update your email with the TSP to be a personal email, please go do that now. You will not be able to satisfy your two-factor authentication without it. We know this for certain.

This is happening right now for feds who have left perhaps abruptly from federal service, and they're the ones on the phone trying to call the TSP to get this updated. And is it possible to update this? Of course it is, but it's going to take a long time for you to do it.

You're going to be fast friends with the hold music on the TSP phone line while you're waiting for someone to answer to help you update this. Please just go in and do this now, it'll save a lot of headache as you move closer to that window, and certainly stepping into retirement.

And frankly, this is what we advise everyone who is approaching exiting federal service, it just so happens we're talking today about an abrupt departure that you might not be planning for.

#6 Get a retirement estimate

If your agency allows you to access a system where you can run an estimate for retirement, please go in and do it. Use that system. It can probably even have you run a couple of different scenarios, but let's at least have a starting point for what your agency thinks your service record is, with respect to creditable service and all of that.

Grab one of those estimates. You likely don't need any human intervention in this process, meaning you don't have to talk to somebody and then they have to go get a report or an estimate for you. You likely have access to be able to do that yourself. You might as well go in and get their initial estimate so that you have it.

But I do want to give a cautionary tale on auto-generated estimates. It's great when you don't need human intervention because you can just log in and grab it. However, the human intervention catches a lot of things.

For instance, if you run an estimate and it's out of the GRB platform, for instance, if you read the fine print in the report, it will tell you that your military service is automatically included in your pension calculation, assuming you didn't retire from the military.

It's automatically included in there even if you didn't make a deposit, which we know you have to make a deposit if you want credit for your military time. These estimates can overestimate sometimes because they're including service that a human who knows your service history would know to back out of those estimates. They're not perfect, but at least it's a starting point.

#7 Ensure your veterans preferences on your SF-50

When agencies are thinking about who they're going to ask to leave through the RIF cycle and all these various actions that they can take by offering severance packages, discontinued service retirements, that type of thing, they're going to be going through an entire process to rank all of the employees based on, again, lots of factors that go into this, but one of them is veterans preference.

You want to look on your SF-50, you're going to look to box 23, and if you do not see your veterans preference listed or you believe the preference points that has been given to you are wrong, you want to contact your HR department immediately.

Because if this becomes the difference between you making the cut and not making the cut for who gets to stay on with the agency, it's important that this document be correct because this is what agencies are going back to to do that ranking.

#8 This is your last chance to make military deposits and be sure to keep your receipts

Any military deposits that you have that you wish to make, you have to have those completed before you separate from service. This is not a fast process by any stretch, it typically is several months to be able to get this done.

I actually saw a report that the average time that it took to get a military deposit process completed was 200 days. That's crazy to me.

But aside from that, if you have not already started this process, this is a multi-step process. If you've not already started, you're likely not going to have time to complete it between now and when you are RIF'd. It doesn't hurt to try.

If you just hadn't gotten around to it and you needed to be able to maybe scrounge up enough money to be able to make it, whatever that might look like, but if you are terminated quickly, it's not like you can start the deposit process at that time. It's just too late, there are too many steps involved that unfortunately you're not going to have the time to be able to do.

If you have already made your military deposit, please, please, please keep a copy of that receipt. If that receipt was emailed to you, that's great, except if you don't have access to that email anymore, it doesn't do you any good. Make sure that those types of receipts are kept.

A receipt should have hit your eOPF, so look around in there. You might've killed two birds with one stone by downloading your eOPF because it will be in there, but double check and make sure that you see it there.

#9 Save important documents

All the documents that you have easy access to right now because of your government credentials, mainly in your email, but perhaps other documents as well. And we're not talking about the classified kind of documents or ones that you're not supposed to be taking outside of your workspace. But the moment you lose your email and access to your agency's network, your access to those documents is gone. Be sure to either print them out or forward those important emails to yourself before you leave.

#10 Get personal contact information from your coworkers

Chances are you probably want to stay in touch with some people at work, maybe not all of them, but if you want to be able to do that, be sure to grab contact information at a personal level, cell phone numbers, email addresses, so that if you both leave federal service, you're able to contact one another.

That job that you've held has been a way for you to be connected, but if you no longer have that connection, how do you communicate with one another? Just make sure to get that. Some of you no big deal. You've got personal cell phones and all that, no big deal. But for those of you who maybe have just never needed to do that, be sure to grab that.

#11 Update your beneficiaries

Here we're talking about your federal beneficiaries on your federal benefits, but I would argue update all of them if you believe that any of them might be out of date. It will take you about 10 minutes to complete your federal beneficiaries.

There are four different ones that you need to complete. Your agency system might allow you to see who's listed, some of them do, some of them don't. But if you can't find out in a hot second who is the beneficiary by logging into your agency's system, please just go get the new forms and fill them out and refile them.

It will override anything that you've already got on file. If it happens to be the exact same designation, it's no big deal, but that way you're not wondering, did I update this when I got married, right? Those are important questions to ask.

We've made it really easy for you to get your beneficiary documents. You can go to Fedimpact.com/bene, B-E-N-E, that's just short for beneficiaries, if you go to that link, you'll get there too. But this way, you have instant access to exactly where you're supposed to go.

You will ultimately end up on OPM's site using OPM's forms, but this will keep you from having to go look for them, they're all right here with the instructions. Please, get there, get those updated. You will not be sorry that you did.

#12 Have cash on hand for the transition period

You need to appreciate that you are not going to have access to the TSP when you leave government service. You're not going to have instant access. It's going to take at least 30 days, sometimes longer.

And so if you end up needing money within that time period, maybe your pension hasn't started yet or you're not going to get a pension at all, we've got to have something in place. Until OPM sorts everything out, you need to be pulling money from your savings, not TSP.

Here's the thing I'll ask you to consider. You know we love when you're putting money in TSP because that is giving you lots of options for the future, but it shouldn't be in place of a well-funded emergency plan. In this case, it's the transition plan that you need to have leaving government service.

And so, I'm going to ask you to consider lowering your TSP contributions down to the 5% level so you still get your match and all that good stuff, but lowering it down to that level and let more of that money flow to your checking account where your check is being deposited, and just set it aside.

Just beef up that savings account, it's there. If something happens, you are in a much better position. This transition period is going to be important for a lot of things, but having the cash to be able to support yourself during that time, super, super important.

The Transition Period

Those are the 12 things we want every federal employee to do right now. But this transition period is actually part of a broader topic that we want to talk about today, because having that cash that you need to hold you over is important, but not everybody's retiring, right?

If you are leaving government service, you're likely going to experience some of those financial changes, if nothing else, just how you're paid, right? Pension checks are paid monthly, not bi-weekly, those types of things.

And what we don't want to see happen is if you don't have money in the bank in a savings account that's easy to access, what we don't want to see happen is you making those changes feel worse by using the high interest credit cards or taking a loan that's potentially not a very good interest rate.

We've got to have a plan in place, because this isn't going to move quickly. Even though things feel like they've been moving very quickly, when it comes time for you getting your money, we need to have a better plan in place.

If you are drawing a severance pay and getting that package, remember those payments are going to continue for the specified number of weeks. You'll have more of a little bit of a predictable experience if you're drawing severance.

If you will be drawing an immediate pension, it's going to take OPM some time to figure all that out. It normally takes several months before OPM really has that pension correct. And so we always suggest a transition fund, a transition plan to be able to have access to cash.

And if you're going to be drawing a deferred pension, that's going to be many years down the road, and so you're not going to expect any of that soon. This transition period that you need to plan for, the cash is an important component of this.

It was important enough that I put it in the 12 things that I want every employee to do, but I wanted to highlight it here because it's such an important aspect of making that step outside of government service and it not starting out bad for you financially.

Wrap-Up & Next Steps

Aside from webinars like this, you guys know that we do a lot of training for federal employees, and our job is to help you to retire with confidence. That is something that I've seen lacking in the last couple of months as everything has been moving so rapidly and in an unorthodox way.

We do retirement training in the form of a workshop. These are in-person training sessions, there is no cost for you to attend. These are sponsored sessions, and so the fee's already been paid for you to be able to attend these sessions.

These are full day classes and we cover all of the federal benefits topics and the decisions that you're going to be making as you step foot outside of government service.

One of the best parts of this workshop, in my opinion, is that you have some opportunity for some one-on-one help after the workshop to be able to get your specific questions answered.

That comes to every employee who wishes to do so following the workshop, and I hope that you'll take advantage of that. You can see all of the locations and the dates by going to FedImpact.com/attend.

You'll see a map, you can either click on your state, or scroll down a little bit, and you'll see the long list of locations and dates that are currently available.

Well, I want to thank you for joining us today. I know that there's an awful lot going on in the federal space that requires a lot of attention, and we're happy to be able to provide that to you through these webinars and through our workshops.

Remember, to find a workshop you can go to FedImpact.com/attend, and to sign up for the next webinar or see any of the replays that we have available for you of all of our past webinars, please go to FedImpact.com/webinar.

Thank you so much for joining us today. We'll see you next time.