Delivered on: Friday, March 31, 2023

Maximizing Annual Leave & Sick Leave

Highlighting the differences between annual leave and sick leave when it comes time to retire and how to maximize each type of leave

• DIFFERENCES: main differences in sick leave and annual leave
• AT RETIREMENT: how sick leave and annual leave are paid out at the time of retirement
• PAYOUT: when you can expect to receive leave payments and how they are calculated
• TAXES: the tax implications of both sick leave and annual leave payouts
• ADVANTAGES: which type of leave should federal employees take at the end of their career?

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Prefer to read instead? Below is a transcript of the video:

Hello, and welcome everybody to the FedImpact Webinar. Today we are going to talk all about two pieces of your federal benefits that on the surface appear pretty simple, but get complex pretty quickly. Real quick, our audience today, as everyone’s kind of getting settled, our audience today… Boy, you guys love talking about leave. This is our record number of registrations for today’s webinar, and so I thank you for spreading the word to your colleagues about these types of sessions. We’d love to be able to give great information out to federal employees so that you all can make better decisions as you’re approaching that retirement timeline.

Now, the Q&A, we do have our support team standing by to answer questions, so if you do have questions throughout today’s session, please drop them in the Q&A area and we will get you taken care of. Again, all that I ask is that the questions that you submit have to do with today’s material, just because we have so many of you registered for today’s class. Handouts are available for download. You can either do that right in the handout section, or the link at the bottom of the webinar will take you to the handouts as well.

Now, as we always do, these sessions are being recorded. You will get the link to the replay following today’s session, and stay till the end, because I have two big questions that federal employees ask us an awful lot surrounding annual leave and sick leave that you might have as well.

You guys know me. I’m Chris Kowalik, the founder of ProFeds. I’m really excited to be here with you today to be able to talk about this topic that we just get loads of questions on, and so let’s jump in.

Our session, Maximizing Annual and Sick Leave, highlighting the differences between annual leave and sick leave when it comes time to retire, and how to maximize each type of leave. Now in order to know how to maximize a particular type of leave you have to know how it’s calculated. We’re going to get into some of those nitty gritty calculations, and then hopefully you’ll be able to plug in some of your numbers here to see how it works for you.

On our agenda today, we’re going to talk about the main differences between sick leave and annual leave. There are some substantial differences between the two, and it’s worth it to know what those differences are so that you can understand how the two programs are quite different in how they’re going to pay you for this leave. Now at the time of retirement, you need to know how each leave type is paid out, when you can expect to receive those payments and how they’re calculated, the tax implications of each type of leave payout, and some of the advantages, like which type of leave should federal employees take at the end of their career.

Now I always feel compelled to have a slide in here that talks about what we’re not going to cover. Of course, we’re going to use some examples today. Every one of you are with different agencies and each of your agencies have the ability to modify some of these rules, so while generally speaking this is how annual leave and sick leave work, consult your HR department to make certain that this is how it works for your particular agency and that they haven’t made a customization to these rules.

Annual Leave – While Working

Let’s start with annual leave while you are working. Now of course you’re accruing leave while you’re working for the federal government. I’ve put some hours here just so that you have a familiarity with how you’re accruing leave. I’m not going to go into great detail here. Most of the time, by the time an employee is set to retire, they have at least 15 years of service, so they’re typically earning eight hours of annual leave each pay period.

It is important to realize that hours of annual leave are only earned for a complete pay period, so if you happen to retire in the middle of a pay period, you’re not going to get your eight hours of leave for that particular pay period. Again, we’re going to split hairs here a little bit as far as how granular we get in these calculations, but from a technical standpoint. Of course annual leave hours can be used for any purpose that you wish. You don’t have to justify your time. You could take leave and do absolutely nothing if you choose, which is always a fan favorite, right?

Anytime we talk about annual leave the natural topic we have to talk about is how much you can carry over from one year to the next. So the term ‘carryover ‘ refers to the hours of leave that you, as the employee, are allowed to carry over into the next leave year. The vast majority of federal workers have a carryover limit of 240 hours. There are some notable exceptions to that 240 carryover limit. We have Overseas Service that will take you to 360. We have the Postal Service, most of them are at 440 hours, and the SES Service at 720. There are other exceptions. These are perhaps the most widely used exceptions that we see.

Now any excess hours that you have above and beyond your particular carryover limit, those are going to be forfeited once the new leave year begins. In order to know how to work all of this we have to know when the leave year ends. For this particular year, in 2023, the end of the leave year will be January 13th of 2024. So we’re going to go almost two weeks into the next year in this current pay year.

Now of course you guys know you have to schedule your use or lose leave by a certain time each year, and so we just put a frame of reference here. I’m not going to go into great detail on those particular dates, but I want you to keep that January 13th number in mind, because we’re going to reflect back on that here in a little bit.  Again, here we’ve got annual leave while you are working.

Sick Leave – While Working

Next let’s talk about sick leave while you’re working. Now sick leave is accrued at four hours a pay period for a full-time employee. There are some exceptions of course if we’re part-time on uncommon tours and all of that. I’ve put some of those notes at the very bottom, but most employees are earning four hours of sick leave each and every pay period.

And remember there is no limit to the amount of sick leave that you can accumulate. You can carry over thousands of hours of sick leave from one year to the next. Sick leave does not have the same limitation that annual leave does as far as how much you can carry over.

Now the hours that you earn for sick leave, just like for annual leave, are only earned if you complete a pay period. So again, if you retire in the middle of a pay period, you’re not going to earn those four hours for that particular pay. Again, not a huge deal, but from a technical standpoint we want you to know that. Of course sick leave can be used for a variety of medical purposes. Perhaps you’re caring for a sick child or a parent or a spouse. You’re able to use sick leave for that. Again, not going to go into the rules of how you can use sick leave, but we know generally how that works.

That covers what these two programs look like while you’re working, and hopefully there’ve not been a whole lot of surprises just yet.

Annual Leave – In Retirement

I want to switch gears and talk about annual leave in retirement, and it’s really at that transition point from being an employee to stepping into retirement. So let’s talk about how annual leave can be paid out.

First we have to know what can be paid out. So any earned annual leave hours that you have at the end of your career can be paid out to you as long as they fall in one of these four categories. We have our normal, regular annual leave. We have restored annual leave. If you have any comp time that has not expired or any credit hours, all of that can be paid out in the form of cash once you step into retirement.

Thinking about how annual leave is calculated, this is where things get a little bit hairy. There’s one category of annual leave, this is regular annual leave and restored annual leave, that would be calculated at an hourly rate as if you had continued working. It would include annual pay raises, but nothing like retention allowances or any of those special allowances. So you’re going to get a little bit of a boost in the event that had you kept working you would’ve put yourself into a new pay year with an annual pay raise. You’re going to see some of this reflected in an example, so give me a second and I promise I’ll get there.

There are two other types of leave that are calculated quite differently, unexpired comp time, credit hours. That is simply based on the hourly rate on your final salary. Not your high-3, not the salary that you would have received had you kept working, but your final salary at the time that you retire. So there are minor differences between the two, but you’ll see where there may be a little bit of a boost if you have more annual leave or restored leave here in just a second.

How’s this money paid out? Well, annual leave is paid out in lump sum by your agency. Most agencies are able to get this out within a few weeks of retirement. Sometimes this will be two payments, and you’ll see why here in a second, because your agency might not know how to pay you just yet if you’re close to a new pay year and there is an expected pay raise.

How is this money taxed? We always have to think about the tax implications of these things. So this money that you’re going to receive for your annual leave is taxed as ordinary income. Now agencies have two different methods. Why they have two different methods I don’t know, but they do. It can either be treated as a flat tax or it can be treated as a biweekly check. So you need to ask your agency which method they use. Are they going to treat it like a normal check or are they going to treat it with a 20% mandatory withholding on it?

Now the withholdings on this money, there are certain things that are still going to be withheld from this payment that you receive for your annual leave. You will still pay federal, state and local taxes and your contributions into Medicare and Social Security called FICA. Those are things you need to expect that will come out of your annual leave payment.

But I do think it’s also worth noting the things that are not going to be taken out, and that is you are not going to be contributing to the CSRS/FERS system from that money, so whatever the percentage is for you that you contribute each pay period towards your pension program, it will not come out of this bucket of money. That’s good news for you.

Likewise, the TSP – if you’re currently contributing 20% of your pay to TSP, or 10%, or whatever your number is, this annual leave payment that you received, the TSP contributions will not come out of that amount. Neither will any of your insurance premiums or anything like that that you’re paying for as an employee. That is not going to come out of your annual leave payment. Good or bad, it’s just not going to come out. I want to talk about a scenario, because oftentimes when we talk about a lot of rules it doesn’t click, it doesn’t make sense until we start to see some numbers with it.

In our example I want to show an employee who’s debating whether they should retire on December 31st of this year or January 31st of next year. They currently have 300 hours of annual leave and they have 35 hours of comp time, just to give some numbers for this. Right now, their salary is $95,000 here in 2023, and they anticipate their pay to change to $96,000. And I’m just using some easy numbers here. This is not indicative of what we believe the pay raise will be. I just want to put some numbers to this so we can show an example.

Here’s the scenario. If they retire on December 31st of 2023, at that time they will be able to cash out their annual leave hours, which again, 300 hours and their comp time, which is 35 hours. Now we have to remember what those salary numbers are because that’s going to play into our calculations. So, let’s see how it goes.

So on the right hand side, the payout of the annual leave at the time of retirement, there’s kind of a 3-step process. Step number one is we have to know what the hourly rate of pay is at the time that an employee retires. We know if they retire December 31st of 2023 their salary is $95,000, We need to divide that by 2,087 hours. I love government math, the way that works, but essentially OPM has determined there’s 2087 hours in a work year, and so to get the hourly rate we take that $95,000 divided by 2,087, and we get $45.52 an hour.

In step two we’re going to take the total number of hours that are eligible to be cashed out and multiply it by the hourly rate of pay. So we have a total of 335 hours at $45.52 per hour. You’re looking at an annual leave payout of $15,249 hours. But remember I talked about certain types of leave that would be calculated as if you had kept working? Well, this is one of those steps that we have to take.

So step number three is we calculate the second payment. This is only for regular annual leave and restored leave that would have been used the next year had you kept working and just burned your annual leave. How much of that would have occurred in the next pay year? And that number is going to be determined by next year’s pay raise. This is why your agency doesn’t always know exactly how much to pay you and why it might come out in two parts.

So for your annual leave hours we have 300 hours total, and had those annual leave hours been paid out in the following year, we have to look at the difference, the hourly difference in your pay between 2023 and 2024. When we look at that difference, it is a $.48 difference per hour. So if we take those 300 hours of annual leave that could be calculated this way, times the difference, that $.48 cents per hour, we’re showing an extra payment of $144 that’s coming to you. This is not a huge change or a huge difference that you can expect, but from a technical standpoint I want you to know how that works.

This does not play a lot into a person’s decision, mostly because most employees don’t know that this second step happens, or really the third step in our example here, but the second payment, and it’s not providing a huge reward even if we know that this happens. But remember, this employee is debating do I go December 31st or do I wait until January 31st? Maybe they feel like that pay raise is just worth it to stick around.

If they plan to January 31st of 2024 we need to look at what the numbers are at that point. By virtue of the fact that they have moved into the new leave year, they now have 256 hours of annual leave. They have the 240 that they carried from last year, plus they earned eight hours of annual leave because they worked two more pay periods in January, so a total of 256. Not the 300 anymore, because we moved into a new leave year and that carryover limit kicked in.

Now let’s say they still didn’t use any of their comp times, so they’ve got 35 hours of comp time at that moment in time when they retire in January, and at that point we have to look at their salary in 2024, and we know from the previous slide that that’s $96,000. So how does this work?

On the right-hand side… Let’s look at this calculation. Step number one, again determine the hourly rate. We know this is $46 an hour. At $96,000 a year we’re going to take 291 hours, which is the total number between annual leave and comp time. We’re going to multiply that times $46 per hour, and we have an annual leave payment of $13,386. Now in this case there’s not a third step to take, because even if this employee were to use (burn) all of their annual leave and comp time, it would not take them into a new pay year, and so it would all be calculated at the $96,000 level. Hopefully that’s helpful from a granular standpoint on the calculation to see how this works for annual leave.

Sick Leave – In Retirement

Now we need to switch gears here a little bit and talk about sick leave in retirement, because the rules are quite different than annual leave. So as far as what can be paid out, any earned sick leave hours can be paid out at the time of retirement. They’re not paid out the same as annual leave, so stick around here. I do want to remind you that there is no limit to the number of sick leave hours that you can save throughout your career. We see plenty of employees that retire with a couple thousand hours of sick leave, so that’s not uncommon. I do also want to point out that although this was a long time ago that this rule changed, FERS employees used to be on a use it or lose it basis with sick leave. That is no longer the case. If you are on that mindset that you have to use all of your sick leave by the time you retire, you are operating on rules that are over a decade old. That’s no longer the case. CSRS and FERS are treated exactly the same now. All of your sick leave can be utilized when you go to retire. I’m going to show you how it’s utilized here in a moment.

Next up, how it’s paid out. So in order to know how sick leave is paid out we have to understand some of the pension calculations. Sick leave hours that you have at the time that you retire get converted from hours into years, months and days. We’re going to use OPM’s 2087 chart. I’m going to show an example of that here in a moment. That length of service, so those hours turned into years, months, and days, gets added to the actual creditable service that an employee had, so the time that they spent under FERS, for instance. Perhaps they had some military time that they bought back. All of that is going to give you a tally of the years, months, and days that should be included in the calculation.

Sick leave simply adds to that, so it’s going to make that pension higher by virtue of having more years, months, and days. I do want to point out that unused sick leave only counts to increase your pension. It never, ever, ever counts towards helping you to become eligible to retire. So it does not help you to retire sooner, it simply sweetens your pension.

Let’s take a look at how sick leave is calculated. On the 2087 chart… Again, I’m going to show you this here in a moment, but on the 2087 chart you’re going to locate the number of hours of sick leave that you have. If you can’t find exactly the number of hours that you have you’re going to round it up. You’re going to go to the next higher number. I wanted to dispel a very common myth that we hear out there. It’s rooted in something valid, but the way it’s expressed to people and the way people understand it is off a little bit.

We often hear that “only full months of sick leave count,” and that’s not exactly true. You must first add those sick leave years, months, and days to the creditable service years, months and days, and at the end of that addition we’re only going to use the years and months in the pension calculation. So it’s a combined effort between the sick leave hours that you have and the creditable service, how we get to a full month. So you might not have a full month of sick leave per se, but the extra days that you had in your normal creditable service added to your sick leave hours can give you another month in the calculation. Any extra days that are hanging out there that don’t equal a full month will be discarded in this calculation. Again, we’re going to show you an example of this very thing.

Let’s understand how sick leave is taxed. Sick leave is taxed as ordinary income, and the reason it’s taxed that way is it’s simply part of your monthly pension check. The withholdings that will come out of this amount will be your normal federal, state, or local taxes, depending on your area and what those withholding levels are.

Let’s talk about our example here. We have an employee retiring December 31st of 2023. They have their sick leave hours. Let’s say based on what they have now and how many pay periods they have between now and the end of the year that they’re expecting 1,203 hours. They’re thinking they’re not going to use any of that, and they’re wondering how that affects their pension. When we use the 2087 chart, I’ve shown kind of a snippet here with some highlights because these numbers get really small on these charts. But if someone had 1,203 hours and we’re looking at the chart 1,203 is not on the chart, so we’re going to go to the next higher number, which would be 1,206.

When we find that number on the chart, we’re going to look up to see the number of months and we’re going to look to the left to see the number of days. In this case 1,206 or 1,203 hours equates to 6 months and 28 days. You can see the 2087 chart by OPM… You can go to Fedmpact.com/2087. We just put it really easy for you to find. It’s not a terribly simple chart to find, surprisingly, so we just made that really easy to jump right to it.

Let’s see how this really plays out. Let’s say we have an employee that has 30 years and 20 days of creditable service. Let’s say they’re under FERS, they’ve got their 30 years and 20 days, and they also had 4 years of military service that they made a deposit for, so that time is going to count in their pension calculation. And remember, they had 1,203 hours, which we know converted to 6 months and 28 days of sick leave.

When we tally all of that we come up with 34 years, 7 months, and 18 days. But if you remember, I shared with you that once this tallying has happened any extra days that don’t equal a full month are going to be chopped off. In this case, when it comes time to calculate the pension 34 years and 7 months are going to be used in the calculation, and the 18 days won’t matter. If this were me, I would strategically use about 16 or 17 days of sick leave because I know I’m not going to be paid for it. I might as well go use this, because those 18 days are not valuable to me when I go to retire.

Now you have to anticipate how all of this really plays out in real life, because we have things that are unexpected. We get sick, we end up having to care for a parent where we might take some sick leave, so we need to have a good sense of the use pattern that you have for sick leave and be able to fine tune this a little bit as you get within about the three month window of retiring and you’ll have a pretty good sense of how things are going. Are you in good health? Are you trying to take care of a thousand medical appointments before you leave federal service? You need to know what that’s going to look like to fine tune your numbers.

Reflecting back to our example scenario, remember this employee is planning to retire December 31st of this year, and we have to look at the length of service that they would have without sick leave and then the length of service that they would have with sick leave, because that will tell us… We’re going to basically isolate the sick leave to know how valuable it is.

Now when it comes to pensions, we don’t look at the final salary. We look at the high-3 average salary. So instead of that $95,000 – $96,000 that we were talking about before, now we’re going to look at the high three, so that’s $93,000. And again, just giving some easy numbers for us to work with today.

So, let’s put some numbers to this. When we’re thinking about the payout of sick leave at retirement we have to do this in three steps, just like we did for annual leave, but the calculations are very, very different, so follow along with me.

Step number one, we’re going to assume that this is a FERS employee. We are going to determine the pension without sick leave. So, $93,000 is the high-3. We take that times 1%, this is the normal pension formula, and we multiply that by 34 years. So we come up with a pension of $31,620.

Step number two is to determine that pension with the sick leave. So same $93,000 high-3, same 1% calculation, but now we have 34 years and 7 months. Remember, we didn’t have seven months of sick leave, but the sick leave added to those extra little days that were in the creditable service created a new month for us. So, 34 years, 7 months, that gives us a pension of $32,163. The difference between those two numbers is $543 per year.

So a very different type of calculation than we see for annual leave, and some of you might say, “$543 bucks, big whoop,” and that’s okay. Everybody’s going to have their own perspective of what this means to you, but there is value in your sick leave. The question is: “Is it more valuable for you to take it maybe for some mental health days, some time to be able to take care of medical appointments and that type of thing, or are you going to try to bank as much as you can?”

When to Use Annual Leave vs. Sick Leave

We have to talk about the strategy for when to use annual leave versus sick leave. If you have the choice, as you near that retirement window you want to use sick leave whenever possible. That will allow you to preserve your annual leave. And the reason is because annual leave is way more valuable to you, because you’re going to be paid this money upfront when you retire.

If you’re curious to see the math, I want to show you how this works. If we compare the value of leave hours, we’re going to show one month of annual leave versus one month of sick leave. Let’s talk about annual leave first. One month of annual leave is going to be paid to you lump sum shortly after you retire. And if we had an employee who had a final salary of $95,000, the payout for those hours would be nearly $8,000.

Sick leave, on the other hand… If a month of sick leave is added to the length of service in the pension calculation and it’s paid out over your lifetime, that same employee who had a high-3 of $93,000 when they retired, the payout is only going to be $77 a year for the rest of your life. It’s going to take you a long, long time to get to that $8,000 number that you would’ve been paid out in lump sum.

Again, each of these have their value, but they’re paid out so differently that when you get closer to that retirement window you likely want to burn your sick leave rather than taking your annual leave, just because of the way that it’s paid out to you. Now I know that there are rules for using sick leave, so be sure that you’re following those. I don’t want you to get in any hot water for burning leave that isn’t legitimate, but if you have a choice… For instance, you’re taking your parents to their doctor’s appointments, you can use sick leave for that. Even though you’re not sick, it’s not your doctor’s appointment, you can use sick leave versus annual leave to take care of those things, and it will likely be valuable to you to do so.

A very common question that we are asked is I’m thinking of retiring at the end of this year, but if the end of the leave year is January 13th of 2024, shouldn’t I just wait until then so I have more annual leave to cash out? This is a fair question, and again one we’re asked an awful lot, a version of this question, and although your annual leave would be fine as far as moving into January, because we’ve not tripped the leave year, we haven’t lost any use or lose leave or anything like that, so technically January 13th would be a fine day to retire, except we have to understand other rules with respect to how your pension is paid to you.

I’m not that I go into super great detail, but essentially the government says if you retire on any day other than the end of the month your pension will begin accruing the first day of the following month. So in this case the pension is not going to start to accrue until February 1st, and then it would be paid March 1st. If we were to do this, to retire January 13th, because it happens to be the end of the leave year, you are not going to be paid your pension between January 14th and January 31st. You’re going to lose half of your very first pension check. And in this example that we’ve been working with, this person would lose $1,340 in their pension. Their very first pension check, they’re going to give up half of it, and there’s no reason for it. So, you might as well retire December 31st. That way your pension starts right away and you are able to capture all of your initial pension check.

Next question that we get an awful lot of. We hear this a lot. Wouldn’t it be better if I just stayed employed and burned through my leave while still drawing a full check? In theory this sounds amazing, right? I’ve got months of annual leave; I’ve got maybe years of sick leave. Couldn’t I just go on leave and still technically be working and drawing a full paycheck? Wouldn’t that be better? From a technical standpoint the answer would be yes. If you could just go on leave, stay home, go party, hang out at the beach, wherever you’re planning to go, that would be great.

The reality though is sick leave has to be justified, and annual leave… Your agencies are likely not going to approve an extended amount of annual leave at the end of your career in advance of your retirement. They don’t want you to go on annual leave for three months at the end because they need to fill that position and they can’t fill it while you’re still in it, even if you’re not coming to work.

So they want you to go ahead and retire and they say just retire and we’ll pay it to you. It’ll be fine. Just take the money. And from a payment standpoint, whether you draw it in the form of a check or you draw it in the form of your annual leave, that’s a wash. But what would be nice is if you could just stick around and burn your annual leave and gather up another two or three months of creditable service in your pension calculation. It doesn’t do a whole lot for your calculation, but if we were really trying to maximize the pension itself, we could do that.

I know I’m getting a little bit into the weeds of some of these things, but we can’t look at one benefit by itself without appreciating that there are other complexities that come with this, like how your pension is paid to you or when it’s paid to you, what you give up if you retire in the middle of a month, or if you’re trying to burn your leave. It’s all connected, so we have to appreciate what that looks like.

The Big Rock Theory

Now I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the big rock theory here. You guys have heard me talk about this before, and that is the three levels of decisions. We have the big rocks, which are the big decisions with big consequences, those pebbles that are kind of those medium decisions with medium consequences, and then the sand. Those are small decisions with small consequences.

You guys have heard the analogy that if you put all the sand in the bottle first there’s no room for the big rocks. Ideally, we make big decisions with big consequences first, then we layer on top of that those medium decisions, those pebbles that have those medium consequences, and then we look at the small decisions with small consequences.

In the grand scheme of things, annual leave and sick leave use and the maximization of each of those different types of leave are small decisions. So, while we can talk about leave and how to maximize it, and I think we always should (we should always maximize the decisions that we’re making), I don’t want this to take the place of a much larger decision that you need to make, like do you have the money to retire at this time? Have you done the work to ensure that you have the right level of income and that you’ve managed your expenses properly for that time of your life of retirement?

If the answer to those things is no, if you haven’t figured those big decisions out, your decisions on leave, whether it’s annual leave or sick leave, are kind of inconsequential. You might maximize the leave, but you still don’t have enough money in retirement, and that’s a big problem. So, I encourage you to look at those big rocks.

Attend a FedImpact Workshop

The very best way that I can help you to do that is for you to come to one of our workshops. Now the vast majority of you who attend the FedImpact webinars have already been to our workshops, and so of course I’m glad that you’ve been. I hope that you’ve taken advantage of all the opportunities for that one-on-one help afterwards and all that.

But if you have not been to a workshop, or you might need a little refresher, these are in-person sessions. There is no cost for you to attend. And we’re going to cover all of the federal benefits topics and those big decisions that you’re going to need to make, ones that yield a far bigger consequence than annual leave and sick leave.

We still talk about these things, but we have to look at the bigger problems first and address the retirement math problems that we find so many people have. Following these workshops there is one-on-one help available. We have a network of financial professionals who have specialized their practice to work with federal employees, and there’s some time that you can have with them at no cost to you to help yourself get organized mentally on what you’re looking at, how these benefits apply to you, and what to do next.

You can see all of the details of all of the workshops that we have open for registration at FedImpact.com/attend. So please take the time to get your own future right before you make the decision to retire. This is my passion, to be able to arm federal employees to make good decisions, and the way we make that happen is through our workshop training. We deliver quite a punch in these workshops. They’re fun, surprisingly, because we’re talking about federal benefits, but it’s a fun experience. It is a lively audience. We love the questions and all of that that come from our awesome group. So, take the time to get there, and if you have coworkers in your office who maybe need to hear this message too, I hope that you’ll pass along that information.

Now, real quick, handouts and replays for today’s session, they will be emailed to you. If you’re on here right now and you want to do a quick download of the handouts, you can do so. Otherwise, we’ll send that to you here in the next day or so with the link to the replay.

Now our next webinar on April 28th is going to be on ‘Your 10-Point Retirement Checklist.’ Over the years we found several things that we encourage feds to do before they retire, so these are your must-do action items, timelines, and step-by-step instructions to be prepared. So, join us on April 28th. You can register for that session at FedImpact.com/webinar, just like you did for today’s session, and we’ll see you on April 28th.

Thank you all so much for being with us. Again, to find a workshop you can go to FedImpact.com/attend, and to attend that next webinar on your 10 point retirement checklist, go to FedImpact.com/webinar. Thank you all so much, and we’ll see you next month.

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For an introduction to a financial professional in our network: FedImpact.com/request-to-meet

Register for our next 30-minute webinar: FedImpact.com/webinar

Find a comprehensive retirement workshop for your area: FedImpact.com/attend