Delivered on: Thursday, August 12, 2021

Maximizing Annual & Sick Leave

How to strategize the accrual and carryover of your leave to get top dollar

• Review rules for accruing annual and sick leave while still working
• Differentiate maximum payout strategies between annual leave and sick leave
• Explore which kind of leave is more valuable as you step into retirement

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

Welcome to our webinar today on maximizing annual and sick leave. There’s a question that we get just a ton of activity around. It’s “What do I do with my leave? How’s it going to be paid out in retirement? Which one should I use first if I have a choice?” I knew that this was going to be a topic that was going to be really interesting for Feds to listen in on. So I’m glad that you’re here with us.

Our audience today, of course, we’ve got lots of different types of Feds, and there will be different rules for each of you in some instances. So today’s webinar is really going to be covering the basics of how this all works, we’re going to give you some real golden nuggets. Even if you’re pretty dialed in on annual leave and sick leave, be listening, because we’ve got quite a bit to share with you today.

For Q&A, I’m going to stay focused on delivering the material, but our support team is standing by to be able to answer questions. Right next to the handout and that area in the webinar platform, you’ll be able to see the Q&A area, and that’s where you can type in any of the questions. All that I ask is that you keep these questions relevant to today’s topic. We only have a short period of time to talk today, as far as the session, and I want to make sure that all the questions that the support team is addressing are on the topic that we’re covering today.

I know all of you are coming here with loads of questions that you have in your brain and you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, now that I’ve got these guys here, can I just ask it?” But there are so many of you on the session that we want to be careful where we’re dividing the time here. As far as the handouts, our handouts are available for download, you can either click the handout section, which is right next to the Q&A area that we just pointed to. Or, way down at the bottom of this screen, there’s a special section that you’ll see the link to the handouts as well.

Like all of our sessions, we are recording today, and so you will get the replay. Of course, anybody who registered will get the link to the replay, and that will be sent out a little bit later today. Do stay until the end. I know I say this every time, but there’s always some golden nugget of the “Aha” moments that I want to share with you, and today’s session is no exception. So, stay until the end, we’ve got some juicy stuff.

Of course, my name is Chris Kowalik. I’m the founder of ProFeds, if you’ve been listening to these webinars for a while, you know me, we do the Fed Impact Workshop, a podcast, all these articles. Like I said, our support team is standing by for your questions. So I’m going to stay really focused on delivering great content today, that hopefully is very useful to you, and the team will answer the individual questions. Today’s session is all about maximizing your annual leave and your sick leave. How to strategize the accrual and carryover of your leave so that you can get top dollar. That’s what all of this is about. It’s not about making the math perfect on your leave, it’s how do we get the very most out of it, when it’s time to finally leave federal service.

A quick agenda for today: we’re going to review the rules for accruing that annual leave and sick leave while you’re working. We want to be very clear on the maximum payout strategies between the annual leave and the sick leave, like how does it work? How does the math work for each one? They’re very, very different, so you want to make sure to keep these straight. Next up on the agenda, exploring this question, well, which leave should I use if I have a choice, as I step into retirement? Like which one is more valuable to me that I should preserve, and what is the other one that I should use? So we’re going to give some great examples, and can’t wait to share that with you.

Then, of course, let’s talk about what this webinar will not cover. I am not going into all of the nitty gritty nooks and crannies of leave. I don’t wish to redo the OPM website. We’re going to stay a little bit higher level so that you can see the effect of the decisions that you’re making around leave, but not the rules as far as how you request leave and all of that. I’ll leave that up to your agency to take care of. We’re just going to talk broader on the strategies of the accrual and the carryover so that you can get that top dollar that we talked about before.

So let’s talk about accruing leave while you’re working. We haven’t retired yet, you’re just accruing leave. For annual leave accrual, it’s different based on the number of years that you’ve worked for the government. For most of you, if you’re near retirement, have probably served at least 15 years, you’re earning eight hours a pay period, if you’ve served less than 15 years, of course, it will be less. The hours of annual leave are only earned if you complete a pay period. That will come in handy a bit later in the material. When you go to finally leave federal service, if you don’t complete a pay period, you simply don’t earn your hours of annual leave for that particular pay period.

Of course, annual leave can be used for any purpose. It does not matter, you don’t have to justify your annual leave. Of course, you still have to request it, but you don’t have to provide any justification of why you are going on annual leave. It’s your vacation time, it’s your prerogative in how you use it. Let’s talk about carryover of annual leave. That term “carryover” really refers to the number of hours that an employee is allowed to carry over into the next leave year. Most employees have a carryover limit of 240 hours. That’s what the vast majority of you have.

There are exceptions of course, if we have someone who has overseas service, the post office, RSCS guys, they all are able to carry over a little bit more. It doesn’t mean they earn more, it means they can carry over more from year to year. Something important that I want to clarify on this 240, oftentimes, we hear employees say that they can only cash out 240 hours when they retire, and that is not true. This number, 240, is simply the mark in time when you transition from one year leave to the next of how many can carry with you.

Of course, excess hours are forfeited once that new year begins, the new leave year, so very important. You are probably acutely aware of use or lose time, under the annual leave rules, and you know that you don’t want to lose any leave unnecessarily. So what does the timeline look like? I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on this, you’re probably pretty familiar with when the leave year ends, and that you need to schedule your use or lose by a certain date.

But I want to look specifically to the year 2021, of course, this year and next year. So the end of the leave year is right at the end of the year. Right? This year, it happens to be January 1st, but that’s nothing crazy, and then next year, it happens to fall right on December 31st. But look at the next two years. In 2023 and 2024, we’re two weeks into January when this thing closes. So you want to be careful that you’re thinking of this when you’re planning retirement dates, and thinking of what that carryover actually looks like. Then we went ahead and threw in the date that you need to schedule your use or lose by simply because we don’t want you to lose leave unnecessarily by simply not knowing what these dates are. But again, not going to spend a lot of time on that.

When it comes to accrual, annual leave is certainly the more complicated of the two. For sick leave, we have one slide, it’s not terribly difficult. So for the sick leave accrual, full time employees earn four hours of pay period, and there is no limit to the amount of sick leave that you can accumulate and carry over from year to year. Now, hours of sick leave are only earned for a complete pay period. Just like annual leave, you don’t get those four hours unless you get all the way to the end of the pay period. And, of course, sick leave has to be justified, it can be used for a wide variety of medical or care purposes, if you’re caring for a family member, a bereavement, those types of things, sick leave, of course, can be used for that.

At this point, we’ve covered just how to accrue the leave. Now the question becomes, how are these paid out in retirement? So we’re going to start with annual leave and break it down for you. There’s quite a bit to cover here. For the payout of annual leave and retirement, the first question that we have to ask is, what can be paid out? Well, any earned annual leave hours, including your regular normal annual leave, any restored leave, unexpired comp time and credit hours, all of that can be paid out under the annual leave payout program.

I capitalize the word “earned” because it is important to realize that if you were to retire, say, towards the beginning of the year, don’t believe that you can assume that you get credit for all of the leave hours that you would have earned through the end of the year. If you’re not going to work all the way until the end of the year, you don’t get those hours. That was kind of a surprise to me that that seemed to be a surprise to employees. So, I wanted to point that out. It’s especially important for our postal workers, because they get advanced leave at the beginning of the year, and so they’re able to use it in advance of earning it. So you always want to make sure that you’re looking at your earned balance, not your available balance, if you’ve had any leave forwarded to you. Like advanced.

As far as how annual leave is calculated, when it comes to paying out the annual leave, it’s calculated based on the hourly rate, as if you had continued working. It’s your hourly rate, not necessarily your final hourly rate, but your hourly rate as if you had continued working. So, if you retire at the end of the year, but your leave … Had you just stayed on the payroll and took your leave, you would have naturally had a January pay raise, those types of things. But, of course, retention allowances aren’t included in that. But the annual pay raise that you would have received had you kept working would be included in this calculation.

And so, any regular annual leave or restored annual leave would be counted under that formula. And we’re going to show you an example of all this here in just a moment. The next kind of category of leave is the type that is counted based on the hourly rate of your final salary. So that’s unexpired comp time, and any credit hours that you have. Again, we’re going to show the differentiation between these two calculations in an example here in just a moment. So how’s annual leave paid out? Annual leave is paid out in lump-sum, and it’s paid by your agency. It’s not paid by OPM, it’s paid directly from your agency, and typically arrives within a few weeks of retirement.

Sometimes this will be paid in two payments. I’ll show you why, here in just a moment. But it is important to realize that this payment does come to you rather quickly. There’s no guarantee that there’s not some hiccup with your agency, but most of the time, we’re seeing just a couple of weeks for employees to receive this payment, which is great. Now, how it’s taxed. Another very important question, of course. This money, this annual leave lump-sum payout is taxed as ordinary income.

Agencies can use two different methods to determine how they’re going to tax it: either as a flat tax, or they’re going to treat it as a bi-weekly check. Let’s talk about the differences between these two, and then you need to go ask your agency which method they use so that you’re prepared. A flat tax would be like a 20% mandatory withholding. So, this big kind of bonus that it looks like that you’re getting, would be taxed at 20%. If they treat it as a bi-weekly check, their system is going to look at this as if your pay went up this astronomical amount, because most of the time annual leave payouts are many thousands of dollars, several thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, and so the system is going to try to tax you at the highest tax bracket for a withholding standpoint, and that is typically not very advantageous for the employee.

It will all come out in the wash when you go to file your taxes if you over contributed, but you really want the money in your hand. We hope that your agency uses a flat tax, but check with them to make sure. Now, I do want to distinguish between ordinary income versus earned income. Ordinary income is money that you did not have to work for, like go to a job. So, ordinary income, some examples of that would be your Social Security check, money that you take from the Thrift Savings Plan, or your pension.

It’s not to say that you didn’t earn those things because you’ve worked your whole career for these benefits, but you did not go and show up to a job to receive that specific dollar. So this becomes important when we think about things like the earnings test on the Special Retirement Supplement or Social Security. Looking at this as ordinary income is important because this payout will not affect the Special Retirement Supplement or your Social Security benefit that’s paid to you. So there won’t be a reduction or anything like that as if you had this job.

When we’re thinking about how things are taxed, we naturally have to ask ourselves, what are the things that are withheld from the money before it actually hits my bank account? Of course, we’re going to have regular federal, state and local taxes that are withheld and any FICA taxes. So this would be your Social Security withholdings and your Medicare withholdings. So, 6.2% for Social Security, 1.45% for Medicare, those would naturally be withheld from that pay. But I do want to distinguish that there are no withholdings for things like your normal contributions to your retirement system. That’s the money you put into CSRS or FERS every paycheck, your TSP contributions are not taken out of this money, and any insurance premiums.

If you have federal employees, Group Life Insurance, FEHB, long-term care, those premiums are not withheld from this extra money that you are receiving. So, it’s time to look at an example. Sometimes we can say lots of words, but until you see it with real numbers, it’s hard to imagine what this looks like. Here’s our scenario where we have an employee retiring December 31st of this year. When we look at their leave hours, they have two different types of leave, they have their regular annual leave, they have 300 hours, and they have comp time of 35 hours, and they’re going to be treated differently. We’ll show you how.

There are two important figures that we’re going to need to know. The first is, what’s the 2021 salary? That’s their final salary when they’re leaving service, and in this case, in our example, we’re showing $95,000 per year. In the 2022 salary, we’re looking at $96,000. These figures will come in handy in the next step of the calculation. So let’s see what this really looks like in an example. On the right hand side, you’ll see that we’ve got a couple of steps in this formula. Step number one, we have to determine what your hourly rate of pay is. For this employee, their final pay is $95,000 per year, but we have to get the hourly version of that. So we’re going to take that $95,000 divided by 2,087 hours, and that gives us $45.52 per hour.

The second step is to calculate the initial payment. I’ll explain what the second payment is here in a moment. But the initial payment, we’re going to take all of the annual leave hours that are available for this lump-sum payout, in this case, 335 hours, we’re going to multiply that times the hourly rate of $45.52, and we come up with a payout of $15,249. Again, that’s paid lump-sum shortly after someone leaves service. Now, most of the time when we’re estimating annual leave payouts for an employee, we stop at step two, because this gives us a pretty good idea of what that annual leave payout is. For most employees, or for a good majority of employees, that’s simply going to be the number.

But for step three, this extra step is done when we have someone retiring at the end of the year. And had they stayed on the payroll and just burned their leave, they would have been at a higher pay level, because there’s a January pay raise that normally happens and they would have been paid their normal paycheck based on that higher dollar amount. So, step three is only used for regular annual leave and restored annual leave that would have been used the next year had someone stayed on the payroll. So, in this case, we need to figure out the difference between the hourly pay levels and then determine how many hours should have received that higher payout.

So if the 2022 salary would have been $96,000, as an example, we need to figure out the hourly difference between $95,000 and $96,000, and then multiply those original 300 hours times that difference. So, for the 300 hours, we multiply that times 48 cents. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot. We’re obviously using some conservative numbers here, but that ends up being $144, that would be added to the $15,249. If you remember earlier, I mentioned that sometimes your agency has to pay this out in two checks. This is why. They may be able to know exactly what the $15,249 is. But let’s say we’re in a situation where the new pay raise hasn’t been announced yet, which happens often, that it’s not announced at the start of the first pay period. So, eventually, they’re going to figure out what that number is, and be able to do that secondary calculation.

Hopefully that makes sense. Again, most of the time, when we’re estimating someone’s annual leave, we’re just going to go to step two, and do a straight calculation, but know that there’s a little bit of a bonus for those retiring at the end of the year, and that’s illustrated with this $144 example. But what happens if we were to have somebody retire January 31st of the following year? For whatever reason, they heard that, maybe they should wait, they should go to January 31st. Well, that’s great, you’re going to have a higher final salary, which might work in your favor, but I want to direct your attention to the number of hours of annual leave, that you’re now going to have.

So, originally, you had 300 hours, but because you’re under the 240 max carryover, you could only carry over 240 hours into the following year. Then, of course, there are two pay periods between January 1st and January 31st. So you would have really accrued another 16 hours. So we have 256 hours of leave now that you can cash out, plus the 35 hours of comp time that are still there. So, if we had a final salary of $96,000, what do the numbers look like? You think they’d be better, right? Well, let’s take a look.

For the first step, again, we have to determine the hourly rate, we go through the same steps as we did before and come up with $46, even. Next, we’re going to calculate that initial payment, and now we have 291 hours to calculate, because we have the 256 plus the 35. At $46 an hour, gives us a payment of $13,386. That’s almost $2,000 difference than had we retired in December of the previous year, because we had more hours to cash out and not be subject to that carryover.

Now, step three is not a factor in this particular annual leave calculation. Because even if the employee had stayed working beyond January 31st, they would not have entered a new pay level as far as January pay raises and all that, they already got the January pay raise with the $96,000. So, step three is a moot point for this particular example. But I want to draw your attention to the importance of thinking through these calculations, because it very well may influence the decisions that you’re making on when you’re retiring. Naturally, someone would think the longer I work, the better off I am. But in this case, just working an extra month, going from one year to the next, ends up not being in this employee’s favor.

That’s not to say that you won’t be in better favor here. If you’re not at the max carryover limit, and you can work another month then earn some extra leave, sure, your payout’s going to be higher, but in this example, we’re seeing a $2,000 difference that that employee might have been counting on. So that wraps it up for annual leave. For sick leave. Now, this is paid out very, very differently upon retirement, so let’s jump in. So as far as what can be paid out, of course, only earned sick leave hours. There’s nobody that gets advanced sick leave hours regularly, like postal workers only get the advanced annual leave not sick leave.

But, of course, agencies do have the ability to advance sick leave to employees. So when it comes to what can be cashed out, it’s only the actual earned sick leave that you have. Remember, there’s no limit to the number of sick leave hours that you can save throughout your whole career. So, just keep banking those bad boys, and you’d be surprised at what it can do. It all adds up. So years and years ago, FERS employees were under a use it or lose it basis with sick leave. You were not permitted to use those sick leave hours in the form that they are today, which is to be added to your pension calculation.

Instead, you were truly use it or lose it, and so we said that you guys suffered from the FERS flu. You guys all got really sick at the end of your career, because you needed to burn a bunch of leave. And that was not efficient for the government, it was not efficient for you. Finally, they changed the rules several years ago, and so now both CSRS and FERS are treated exactly the same. So, as far as how sick leave is paid out, sick leave hours are converted to years, months and days using OPM’s 2087 Chart. That 2087 Chart is the way that the government converts hours into years, months and days. 2087 hours in a work year, so the 2087 Chart is aptly named.

That length of service, whatever that conversion comes out to, is added to the actual creditable service that an employee had for retirement purposes. So, years, months, and days are added to years, months and days, and we come up with a final number. We’re going to see an example here in just a moment. I do want to make a special note here, because we get some confusion from employees pretty often on this. I want you to know that unused sick leave only counts to increase your pension. It never ever, ever counts towards eligibility to retire. So it will never help you to retire sooner. It only sweetens the pot on the actual pension calculation that you have.

So as far as how this is calculated, for sick leave in retirement, you’re going to take that 2087 Chart, we’re going to show you an example here in a moment, you’re going to locate the number of sick leave hours that you have. If you happen to be in between numbers, you’re going to round up. I want to take this time, before we jump into a real example, I want to dispel a very common myth that we hear about sick leave. The comment that floats around out there is that only full months of sick leave count, and that’s not true. It’s not true at all.

Here is really the way this goes. First, you have to add the sick leave years, months and days to the creditable service years, months and days, and then the days that don’t equal a full month after the two of them are added together, those extra days that don’t equal at least 30 days to give you another month, those are discarded. So don’t be chopping off days of sick leave that don’t equal a whole month before you’ve added it to your creditable service. Again, we’ll see a perfect example here in just a moment to make sure that you’re not doing something silly and costing yourself a month of service.

As far as how sick leave is taxed, this is going to be taxed as ordinary income, because it’s simply part of your pension check, and that’s how pensions are taxed, as ordinary income. As far as withholdings go, federal, state and local taxes are withheld from your pension checks. You have a lot of say in what is withheld and what level that is. Again, putting numbers to things and actually seeing it come to life is oftentimes helpful. So, let’s say we have an employee who’s retiring December 31st of this year. When they look at their last pay stub, they see that they have 1,203 hours of sick leave.

When we do the conversion using this 2087 Chart, that comes out to six months and 28 days. If you’ll look to the lower right hand corner, you’ll see that we have 1,206 there, that’s because 1,203 isn’t on the table. So we’re going to round up to the next number which is 1,206. We go up and over to the left to determine six months, 28 days, and that’s how much we can add into the years, months and days column. Again, this is right from the 2087 Chart. We’ll link to it in the handout so that you have a direct link to that. So save it. Once the webinar closes, of course, you won’t be able to access this. So, make sure to save the link that we’re going to send you.

Let’s take a look at an example of how this all comes together with an employee’s regular service as well. Here’s our example. We actually use this example in our workshop to illustrate this very point. In this example, we have an employee that has 30 years and 20 days of creditable service. This is their regular CSRS or FERS time. They have four years of military service that they bought back that they’re going to get credit for, and they have 1,203 hours of sick leave, which equals six months and 28 days.

For those guys who heard the lie out there that only full months of sick leave count, they may want to discard those 28 days, which is nonsense, you don’t need to do that. Here’s how it really works. We’re going to add up the years, months and days column, and we come up with 34 years, six months and 48 days of total service. For those 48 days, we’re going to take 30 of those and give you credit for another month. So you now have 34 years and seven months. And what is circled here are 18 days that you either served or you earned, like through sick leave, that you will not be paid for. That will not be included in your pension calculation, because only years and full months are included in the pension formulas.

This tells you if you’re doing this math based on being close to retirement, you’ve got these numbers dialed in, that you can go out and use many days of your sick leave, as long as you don’t exceed that 18, and don’t push it, give yourself a little bit of wiggle room. But as long as you don’t push that 18, you know that you can freely use that leave and not jeopardize any calculation in your pension. Which is great. But if we said to ourselves, that only full months count for both the regular creditable service, the CSRS and FERS time, and the unused sick leave, we would have chopped off the 20 days and the 28 days, and we would simply be left with 34 years and six months.

A month of a difference in the pension is not astronomical. We’ll show you that here in a second. But I know Feds, you guys want to get every last hour of leave that you can, you either want to use it or you want to be paid for it, and this is the way to know for sure what that’s really going to look like. Just remember, when you’re calculating the hours of leave that you’re going to be accruing, make sure on that final paycheck, or that final pay period, that if you’re not planning to go all the way to the end of that pay period, don’t count those hours because you will not get them if you did not complete that pay period.

Here we’re talking about projecting forward what leave we’re going to get so that we can get these numbers right, it can get a little bit confusing, but just make sure that you’re using good math here. Let’s now talk about the question that we get all the time, which is, what’s the strategy I should use when I’m close to retirement? Should I take annual leave? Should I take sick leave? Does it really matter? And then I have a really important question that we get all the time that we have to address.

So if you have the choice, as you get closer and closer to retirement, use sick leave whenever possible. You want to preserve that annual leave to the very best of your ability, because that annual leave is way more valuable to you, because you’re paid all of it upfront when you retire, and that lump-sum payment can be very, very valuable. Most of you are curious to see the math. I get pushback from some employees when we make these comments in the workshops and we wanted to show you what it looks like. So, let’s use a really easy example. We’re going to compare 174 hours of annual leave hours versus 174 hours of sick leave hours.

The reason I chose 174 is because that is one month. So, for the number of hours of annual leave, if we had 174, remember this is paid lump-sum to you shortly after you retire. If you retire with that final salary of about $95,000, like we used in our example, that payout would be about $7,920. So it’s a good deal of money. But look at the sick leave column, we have the same 174 hours, it’s going to be paid by converting to years, months and days, which would just be one month, we add that to the pension calculation, and it would be paid out over your lifetime.

I’m going to use some assumptions here, that we have a regular FERS employee, so not law enforcement, anything like that, just a regular FERS employee, who’s retiring under the age of 62, and has a high-3 average salary of about $93,000. The payout for them for those 174 hours would be $77 per year for the rest of their life. It’s going to take you a whole bunch of years to ever break even, you won’t be around long enough to break even on this. It’ll take you over 100 years to break even on this calculation. So, whenever possible, use sick leave and preserve that annual leave. Of course, if we’re in a carryover situation, and you have use or lose that you’ve got to account for, of course, take care of that. But try your best to max out that annual leave payout, because that initial lump-sum payment to you is pretty amazing.

Here’s the question we get all the time. Wouldn’t it be better if I just stayed employed, I stay on the books and burn through my leave, and still draw a full check? I like where your head’s at, but I need you to understand a couple of real world things. In theory, this sounds great. You’ve got a year of sick leave, wouldn’t it be better if I just stayed employed, but was on leave for a year and draw my full check? Yeah, that sounds beautiful. But your agency won’t let you do that. Again, math wise, if we can make that happen, sure, that would be better. But in reality, your agency needs somebody there working, and they’re not going to allow an extended amount of sick leave like that to happen.

It was the biggest reason why they changed the rules that FERS operated under years ago. Because like I said, FERS employees all got really sick at the end of their career so that they could burn all their leave. And meanwhile, your agency can’t hire your replacement until you’re off the payroll. So they had a job there, but nobody’s sitting at the desk to do it. And so it solved this issue that agencies were having, but still employees think that this is a way to game the system. It simply won’t work this way. So don’t get this in your head, that this is the strategy that you’re going to use and then come to find out your agency won’t actually let you do it.

Again, I like where your head’s at, trying to finagle whatever possible extra benefit we can from this, but in reality, this doesn’t happen. Next, I want to talk about something that is a very real challenge for federal employees as they’re thinking about things like leave. It’s this idea of the big rock theory. We introduced this on a webinar that we did very early in the series on picking your perfect day to retire. It’s this idea that if we have a jar, and we have to put big rocks in it, we also have pebbles and we have sand. Each of them represents something different.

The big rocks are the big decisions with big consequences. That’s, what year do I retire? Do I leave federal service early or do I stick around till I’m fully eligible? These are big decisions. The pebbles are some of those more medium decisions that still have an impact but not nearly as great as those big rocks. Then, the sand, these are the small decisions that have small consequences. “Leave” is one of the sands here. I see so many employees so obsessed with annual leave and sick leave that they lose sight of the big decisions that they should be making like, “Is this really the time I should be retiring? Do I have enough saved in my Thrift Savings Plan and other investment vehicles to sustain the life that I want in retirement?”

Instead, we’re focused on these little decisions that really don’t have huge impact, and we kind of miss the forest for the trees. We want to make sure that, even though this is a fun topic to talk about, and to nail down some of the details, in the grand scheme of things, I hope that you’re focused on the big rocks, the really big decisions that will change the trajectory of your retirement and your financial future. Hopefully, today’s session was helpful to you. I don’t mean this last slide to be a damper in any way. But we just see so much focus being placed on leave, based on the kinds of questions that we get through our website or calling to us or certainly at our workshops, that leave is just on the top of everyone’s mind when there are so many huge decisions that really play a much bigger role or should play a much bigger role in the decision to retire.

As I mentioned, we deliver retirement workshops. I hope that if you have not attended one of our workshops, or even if you have, come back, come back through one of our sessions. We’ve got virtual options, we have a lot more live options now. We’re really delighted to be able to get back in the classroom. Feds are thrilled to be back to somewhat normal, and being able to be face to face, ask their questions, get some personalized attention. So I hope that you’ll join us if we have a workshop in your local area. If we happen to still be virtual in your area, of course, we’ll see on the virtual side as well.

For our workshops, there’s no cost to attend. We cover all the federal benefits topics and those decisions that you’re going to be needing to make, as well as offering some one on one help following the session. So that’s always a piece that gets a big rise out of employees of making sure that they know that they can talk with somebody who actually understands how these things work, and can help them dial in their decisions.

For our handouts today, you can either download them here, or we will email them to you along with the link to the replay. For our next webinar, on September 16th, we are going to have a session on the high-3 average salary. This might seem like a bit of an elementary topic to talk about, but you’d be surprised at the silly stuff that Feds do to mess up this calculation. So, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this, help everybody get super clear on the real way that your high-3 is calculated so that you’re estimating what retirement is going to look like for your pension based on accurate numbers.

We’ll do a step by step guide to the real way that your high-3 is calculated, will give you lots of examples, and you’ll be able to pencil with that high-3 with great certainty so that you are using appropriate numbers. You can sign up for that session, it’s live right now, ready to register for it, at fedimpact.com/webinar. We’d love to have you join us and get the scoop on the high-3.

Thank you so much for joining us. These are tough sessions to keep in 30 minutes, I’ve tried my best but there’s always so much to share. If you wish to find a workshop to attend, these are our full day sessions. Again, we have live and virtual sessions available. You can go to fedimpact.com/attend. Again, for our next webinar on the high-3 average salary, you can go to fedimpact.com/webinar. Thank you very much. We’ll catch you next time.

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

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