Delivered on: Thursday, February 26, 2026

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Retiring Under the FERS MRA+10 Rules

What you gain, what you lose, and what you'll never get back

• ELIGIBILITY: Qualifying to retire under the special MRA+10 rules
• CANDIDATES: Reviewing case studies and how employees are affected (now and later)
• PENSION: Calculating penalties with a life-long effect on your federal pension
• OTHER BENEFITS: Understanding how benefits like SRS, SS, FEHB, FEGLI, and TSP are impacted

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

Welcome, everyone, to the Fed Impact webinar on retiring under the first MRA+10 rules. If you've been following our webinar for lots of years, you might remember that many years ago we did a session on MRA+10 to try to get out to the masses of federal employees a better understanding of how this program works.

But no doubt the eyes get wide as dinner plates in our retirement workshops when we talk about MRA+10 because there's a lot of misconceptions.

And so I felt compelled to revisit this topic, teach it in a little bit different of a way this time and try to get the baseline understanding of what MRA+10 is and what it's not, so that if it's something that you're considering, that you're going into it with your eyes wide open. You guys know me.

I'm Chris Kowalik, the founder of ProFeds and the developer of the Fed Impact Retirement Workshop. We've got a podcast, we've got all sorts of fun stuff that we do over here, but I love being able to help federal employees dissect the crazy government language that all of their benefits are written in so that they have an opportunity to really understand how the benefits work, how they behave, how they don't work sometimes maybe the way that they were expecting and be able to make proactive decisions to have the retirement that you want and not the one that the government has planned for you necessarily.

Retiring Under the FERS MRA+10 Rules

And so there's going to be lots of choices. Of course, today's topic is all about the choice on retiring under these special MRA+10 rules that we're going to talk about.

These MRA+10 rules, we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of it here in just a moment, but generally today I want to talk about what you gain, what you get by going out under an MRA+10 retirement.

Also what you lose and what you never get back. Because remember, one of our planning principles is you are free to choose, but you are not free from consequence.

There are lots of consequences that come with MRA+10 retirements just like they are with every other type of retirement from federal service, and I want to make sure that you are super clear on what those are.

Agenda

For our agenda today, we are going to talk about the rules themselves, who qualifies, what's the catch, all that good stuff. And to help try to bring this home, we're going to review a case study and be able to assess some of the outcomes for our case so that you can see from both the income standpoint, so that's all your sources of income, like your pension, social security, the FERS Supplement, the Thrift Savings Plan, all those different buckets as well as the benefits that you have, survivor benefits, the life insurance program, the health insurance program that you have.

And we're going to get into all of those details, but I feel ultra compelled to talk about what this webinar will not cover today, and I'm going to share this with you because I looked back at the Q&A from the webinar that we did about five years ago on this topic as well as all the normal questions that we get in our retirement workshop, and there is simply a lot of confusion about this set of rules for MRA+10 and some other programs that you might find out there with respect to retiring from federal service. I want to debunk this early because I don't want anyone confused.

MRA+10 is NOT an “Early Out” or “Deferred Retirement”

This thing we're talking about today, MRA+10 is not an early out or a deferred retirement. It is not an early out or a deferred retirement. An early out, many of you are much more familiar with the early outs right now given what you've just gone through last year.

But an early out is a voluntary decision to retire earlier than you usually would qualify for. You'll have no penalties, but the catch is that has to be offered to you by your agency. You can't just decide to take an early out, it has to be offered to you first.

And one of the beauties of an early out is you get to keep your things like health insurance, life insurance, the supplement. There might be a little bit of a delay and when you're going to receive the supplement based on your age and all that good stuff, but there is still a benefit waiting for you there.

In the alternative, a deferred retirement is still a voluntary decision to retire with at least five years of service but without meeting the normal age requirement.

We'll talk about what it means to be fully eligible here in a moment, but a deferred retirement typically is someone, let's say they've got five years of service but they're 35.

Well, they're far from meeting the age requirement to retire, but they are technically vested and could draw a pension later, in this case at 62.

There is a pension, albeit maybe a small one waiting for you later. But all of the other benefits like your health insurance, your life insurance and the supplement are all immediately lost when you take a deferred retirement.

This session that we're going to be covering today is not about these two topics. We have other webinars that we've done here recently on early outs and deferred retirements and all that. Today's session is going to strictly cover MRA+10.

Full Eligibility to Retire

In order for me to properly describe the MRA+10 program, I first have to talk about what it means to be fully eligible to retire. On the left-hand side you're going to see the basic table.

You've seen this in some way, shape or form, I'm sure many times throughout your career. You will need to meet both the age and the service years requirements to be able to retire and draw an immediate pension.

To be fully eligible, you'll need to be at least age 62 with at least five years of service, at least age 60 with at least 20 years of service or have reached your minimum retirement age, which is somewhere between 55 and 57 depending on the year you were born, with at least 30 years of service. Again, this is full eligibility.

If you're curious exactly what your MRA is, you can go to the table on the right-hand side, you'll find the year in which you were born and go to the right-hand side and you're going to see an age, typically it's a year and a month for your MRA.

We're quickly approaching the timeline that those of you who are anticipating retiring are naturally going to be in that age 57 mark as far as your minimum retirement age just because we're getting to that point in the timeline where that's naturally where you all are going to fall.

For today's purposes, we're going to use 57 as the minimum retirement age, knowing that yours might be a few months before that if you're like most of the employees who are coming to these sessions.

Full eligibility that we see here on the screen allows you to decide for yourself when you're going to retire, draw an immediate pension, you get to keep all of your benefits, all of those good things that you've heard about probably throughout your whole career.

MRA+10 Retirement

MRA+10 is a little bit different. This applies only to FERS employees who have not met the requirement to be fully eligible.

Those requirements that we talked about on the previous slide, 62 with five, 60 with 20 and MRA with 30, if you've met one of those requirements, then this webinar is not for you.

MRA+10 is no longer something you're going to need to worry about. You're fully eligible and that's better than an MRA+10.

With MRA+10, if you've not met the full eligibility requirements, but you've reached your minimum retirement age, again somewhere 55 and 57 depending on the year you were born and you have at least 10 years of creditable service, five of those years must be federal, but the rest of them could be military service or any other type of federal service.

There is a little bit of a nuanced requirement there about five years vested on the federal side and then another five years of either military service that you've bought back or other federal service. Once you have met both of those requirements, MRA and 10 years of service, you qualify to be able to leave government service and draw a pension right away.

The catch is there's going to be a penalty if you decide to do that. We're going to do a deep dive into what those penalties are and how you might be able to avoid it if it's going to happen to you.

But in order to fully understand MRA+10, I think we need to dive into the various options that someone is going to have if they decide to take this type of retirement.

Two Options for Starting the Pension

Option number one is to start the pension right away. You have the right to be able to do that. I want you to know that this pension under an MRA+10, this pension is permanently penalized by 5% for every year you are under age 62, and it's determined when you leave federal service.

Not when you take the pension, when you leave federal service. In this example, we're obviously talking about taking the pension right away, but very important that we understand that this penalty is forever.

It's not until you reach 62 or anything like that, it is for the remainder of your lifetime. And it's easy for us to talk about years because we get to use nice round numbers, but months are prorated as well. Each full month that you are under the age of 62 will add an extra 0.42% to the penalty.

For instance, on the right-hand side, you will see the whole year hacks. At 57 you'd have a 25% penalty. At 58 you'd have a 20% penalty and so on. But let's say that you're 57 and 11 months, so you're one month prior to 58, we're going to take that 20%, we're going to add another 0.42% to give that extra month increment to the penalty.

It'd be 20.42%. We're going to kind of operate in those big numbers, the full year numbers for purposes of today's webinar, but I often do get questions like how are months handled and it is only full months that you are under 62 that OPM looks at.

Option number two is to postpone the pension. Don't confuse this with deferred that we talked about a few minutes ago. That's a totally different type of retirement with other consequences.

Here, the postponed pension is where you are voluntarily deciding to wait to get your pension to try to avoid or at least mitigate the penalty.

Let me describe how this works and then we're going to show you an example. In order to avoid the penalty altogether, to completely wipe out the penalty, you have to wait until you either reach age 60 or 62 depending on the number of years of service that you have when you leave federal service.

Employees who have between 10 and 19 years of service have to wait until they reach 62 to be able to start drawing their pension without penalty. But those with 20 to 29 years of service only have to wait until they're 60.

But the penalty itself is always calculated off of the age 62 marker, meaning how much younger than 62 are you when you leave federal service?

There's a lot of misconception. Is it counting backwards from 62 or is it 60? It's always 62 with respect to the penalty calculation, but as far as postponing the receipt of that pension, it's either 60 or 62 depending on how many years of service that you have.

To mitigate the penalty, you might not get all the way to 60 or 62 to completely avoid the penalty, but the closer and closer you get to 60 or 62, depending on the years of service that you have, you are continuing to chip away at that penalty and making it smaller and smaller as you get closer and closer to those big gates.

And again, don't use the word defer when you are thinking about MRA+10, just strike that from your language altogether. You always want to use the word postpone.

And that's not just a matter of semantics here, this really matters. If you leave this webinar and you start to Google MRA+10 or what happens if I defer my pension, you are going to start to see the wrong information.

Deferred retirements have different consequences. Make sure that you're always using the word postpone with respect to MRA+10.

Avoiding or Mitigating the MRA+10 Penalty

I wanted to put this in a little bit different of a format than we've ever done before. You guys are seeing this for the first time and I want to kind of walk you through what we're looking at here on this slide.

This is how to avoid or mitigate the MRA+10 penalty if you have between 10 and 19 years of service when you leave. Let's say you're 57.

If you draw the pension at 57, so look at age 57, we're going to follow it to the right. If you go ahead and draw it at 57, you are going to have a 25% penalty.

We've already established that on a prior slide. 5% for every year you're under 62, 5% times five years is 25%. If you wait to draw it until 58, your penalty is only 20%.

If you wait until 59, it's 15% and so on until eventually in this case, if you were to wait until 62 to draw your pension, you've already left government service at 57, but if you wait to draw your pension at 62, you'll have no penalty at that point.

The same kind of thing happens if you leave federal service at 58. Of course there's no option to draw it at 57, but if you go ahead and draw it at the same time that you leave, you're going to have a 20% penalty and so forth.

You'll notice that once we get down to 61, you're going to have a 5% penalty if you go ahead and draw it at 61, but if you wait until that following year, there will be no penalty at that point.

This just gives a little bit of a cascading effect to where hopefully it's more obvious to you when you are able to draw the pension with no penalty or at least what the penalty would be if you postponed or waited to receive that pension.

But remember, this chart is showing what it looks like if you have between 10 and 19 years of service when you leave, but if you have 20 to 29 years of service when you leave, the chart looks a little bit different. It's got some of the same elements, but some substantively different pieces here.

Again, if you leave at 57 and draw at 57, you're going to have a 25% penalty. But notice what happens at age 60. Because at this point you have reached the correct age with at least 20 years of service, which was one of those full eligibility requirements, you no longer will have a penalty if you begin to draw the pension at 60. That's a great perk for you.

Of course you went without a pension for three years, but once you reach 60, you are able to draw without penalty. Same thing at 58. If you draw it at 58, you're going to have a 20% penalty, but if you wait until 60, no penalties at that point.

And of course I felt compelled to put age 60 and 61 on here as far as when you leave federal service. If you are already 60 and you have at least 20 years of service, you are already fully eligible to retire, and so there you are not eligible for MRA+10 because you're fully eligible to retire without any special accommodations.

I hope these two charts have helped to dispel any of the confusion about what the penalty is going to be and what you can do to avoid it or at least mitigate it the longer that you wait. Like I said, hot off the presses, we created these charts specifically for this webinar, so I hope that they're helpful.

Direct Consequences on Other Benefits

Let's talk about some very direct consequences that taking an MRA+10 retirement will have on your other benefits. If you take an MRA+10 retirement, you need to know that you are not now or ever going to be eligible for the special retirement supplement. This is the one that kind of looks like social security, but it's paid to FERS employees prior to the age of 62.

Even though you're retiring prior to 62, because you are not fully eligible to retire, you are disqualified from the special retirement supplement.

You'll never ever be able to receive that if you go out under MRA+10. You're also still going to be eligible for your health insurance and your life insurance coverage.

But there's a catch. The catch is FEHB and FEGLI can only be active when your pension is active. Let's say that you voluntarily postpone receiving your pension to avoid the penalty, your FEHB and FEGLI will temporarily be lost and then it can be restored when you start to receive the pension later.

As long as you met the normal enrollment requirements, the five-year rule and all that that you likely know about, as long as you've met all the other requirements to be able to keep FEHB and FEGLI, you would essentially be able to restore it when you start drawing your pension.

A lot of times people ask, “Well, I've heard that for FEHB and FEGLI, you have to be in it for five years immediately prior to the time that you're retiring. If I don't technically retire and draw my pension for three or four years, I'm not really enrolled in the five years immediately prior.”

And that's not at all how OPM looks at it. They are looking at the moment that you leave government service, have you met the five-year rule at that moment in time?

If the answer is yes, then you can do whatever you wish with your pension as far as take it right away with a penalty, postpone it until later to avoid or mitigate the penalty. And when you do so, you are able to restore that FEHB and FEGLI coverage that you originally had.

Indirect Consequences on Other Benefits

We talked about the direct consequences on those benefits, but now we have some indirect consequences. If you take an MRA+10 retirement, you will naturally have a lower pension calculation, and it's true for actually a lot of reasons, in fact.

You're going to have a lower high three average salary typically because most of the time people are earning their highest three years of earnings at the end of their career.

And so if you're not continuing to work and continuing to get those pay raises, promotions, step increases, all of that, you are not continuing to fuel your high three average.

You're also going to have fewer years calculated in the pension itself then had you waited to be fully eligible. If it's going to take you another three, four, five years to be fully eligible, then those would be extra years put into your calculation at that time that you will not get as an MRA+10 retiree because you didn't work them.

And then of course we've talked about penalties. We've not seen that in action just yet, but give us a moment. We're going to show you a good case study that shows you what those penalties really look like in real life, but those penalties of course are going to chip away at your pension as well.

Next we have survivor benefits. This is the way the government allows you to protect a portion of your pension for a surviving spouse in the event that you die first because it is based on the pension itself, the lower your pension is, the lower the benefit is for a surviving spouse in the event that you die.

Next is the smaller Thrift Savings Plan. You have fewer years to contribute, of course, fewer years to get your agency match, all of that and that can certainly add up over time.

And then one that's sometimes a little harder to calculate is that smaller social security benefit. With fewer years that you're contributing, chances are you've already qualified for social security based on just the natural work that you've done with FERS, but they look at 35 years of historical earnings and every higher year of earning that you have, it kicks out one of your lower years of earnings.

And so the longer that you stay contributing to social security because you have a job and that job is at a higher pay rate than some of your other years of earnings throughout your lifetime, you are naturally making that social security benefit higher.

Again, that's a little bit more complicated and nuanced to be able to calculate, but can definitely make a difference.

Case Study

I'd like to dive into a case study, and when I went back and looked at the original webinar that I did in 2021 on this topic, I used three different people in this case study and I think it maybe added a little bit of confusion, and so I'm going to use one person that has a couple of different things that they're thinking about.

Because frankly, you're one person and you might have three or four different scenarios that you might be considering too. Hopefully this one is helpful for you today.

We are going to talk about Wendy. Wendy is 57 years old. She has 27 years of service, so she is not eligible, at least fully eligible to retire under FERS. She's a few years shy.

Here's her current situation. She's got a salary of just over 98,000 a year. She is a really good saver in the Thrift Savings Plan, is maxing out what the government allows her to do, which is based on her age, 32,500 per year.

Her social security benefit at 62, the estimate right now is $1,200 a month. That's going to come in handy when we start doing some of our calculations.

And then when she looks at her FEGLI, her life insurance and her health insurance under FEHB, she has had that for the past five years, and so she knows she's qualified already to be able to take those benefits into retirement, but certainly a lot of decisions even around those two benefits that we are not going to be covering today.

That's the situation Wendy is currently in. But let's talk about the scenarios that she's considering. She knows that of course one of her options is that she waits until she's fully eligible. That is what she's had in her mind all this time.

She knows she's got a couple more years or a few more years to go to be able to be fully eligible. The other option is that she could go ahead and retire now and draw the pension right away with a penalty.

This is the MRA+10 retirement with a penalty. The third option is that she could retire now and postpone receiving the pension until later. She's going to try to avoid that penalty or at least make it smaller.

And part of her is thinking maybe she goes and gets another job. Perhaps there are some offers on the table, but she's not really sure whether she wants to do that or not.

That'll be part of her decision, but it won't be part of what we're talking about today. There's lots of different jobs out there that come with different pay levels, different incentive plans and all of that. But know that this will of course be in the back of Wendy's mind if she decides to leave government service and has to make up an income shortfall, she could very well do that with another employer if she wishes.

Let's dive in to Wendy's scenario.

Scenario number one, Wendy keeps working until she's fully eligible. This is the scenario that we're going to dive into. In this case, she's going to wait to retire until she's 60.

At that time she'll have 30 years of service and she anticipates a high three average salary at that time of right at 100,000. For those of you who have been through our workshop or been through several of these webinars, that this is typically the example that we use and so seems fitting to use it today.

On the left-hand side, just to familiarize you with what we're looking at here, we're going to first take a look at the formula itself so that we know why we're using this particular formula under FERS.

This 1.0% formula is used when we have somebody retiring under the age of 62, which Wendy is, she's 60 years old, so we know already without even reading the rest of the sentence that she gets this formula.

It's very possible if she was over 62 but had less than 20 years of service that this is also the formula that we would use. But that's not really the scenario that we find too often with MRA+10.

It's possible, of course. In this case, the formula that we see on the left-hand side says that we take the high three average salary times 1%, times the number of years of service that Wendy has at that time, and that would become our pension.

In our example, we're going to show Wendy retiring at 60 years old with 30 years of service and a $100,000 high three. We're going to take that 100,000 times 1% times 30 years, and we come up with a starting pension of $30,000 per year.

Most of you know that in retirement there are cost of living adjustments and those types of things. Those will eventually come into play for Wendy once she hits 62, but for right now, at least for the next couple of years, once she hits the 60 mark, she's going to be right at this 30,000 level. What does it look like overall if Wendy waits to retire until she's age 60?

Well, there are a lot of different buckets, we'll say, that she's going to be considering. This is a new slide for us on today's session, and so I just want to take a moment to walk you through it, kind of left to right of how this works. Remember, she's 57 now.

She's going to go ahead and keep working over the next three years. In the paycheck column you're going to see her continuing to receive her paycheck and that paycheck is likely going to have a pay raise associated with it.

We've given some of those general pay raises as far as averages to her current pay, so you can see how that would change over the next couple of years.

At 60, she is going to stop receiving a paycheck because she's going to start receiving her pension and you'll see that 30,000 that we calculated on the previous slide is going to stay 30,000 until she reaches 62. And then you're seeing the cost of living adjustments being applied here as well. I'm not going to go into great detail about [inaudible 00:30:58], but I think it's worthwhile to know that they're there.

The next column, the SRS. This is the first special retirement supplement. This is the one that kind of looks like social security, but it's paid prior to the age of 62.

Now because Wendy waited until she was fully eligible to retire, she is eligible for the supplement for those two years. At 60 and 61, she would receive $10,800 and she would receive that in both of those years.

But at 62, this benefit will stop. Now that 10,800 is based on a calculation for her 30 years of service and her $1,200 of social security.

I put it into the supplement formula. Not reviewing the details of that formula on today's webinar, but it gives you an idea that there is something waiting for Wendy in this program and so your numbers will likely be quite different.

In the event that Wendy does wait until 60 to retire, a couple of things keep happening. She continues to contribute to the Thrift Savings Plan.

We're going to assume that the IRS does not change the limit and that Wendy just continues to contribute that maximum amount based on her age, which is $32,500. We also know that there's a match on her contributions from her agency, and so she'll continue to get 5% of her salary as the match. You're seeing those numbers slightly increase each year.

On the far right hand side for FEHB and FEGLI, you'll see there's no gap in her FEHB or FEGLI coverage as long as she met the requirements, the five-year rule, and she was enrolled in those programs on the day she leaves federal service at 60, she will be able to keep it exactly like it is.

She can switch around her if she wants, but all that FEGLI, she would have the option to be able to decide how she wants that life insurance to continue in retirement.

Great news, no gap over on the right-hand side for FEHB and FEGLI. Now keep in mind, this scenario assumes she continues working over the next three years and retires when she is fully eligible at 60.

Scenario number two, that Wendy goes ahead and retires now under the MRA+10 rules and she's going to draw her pension right away with a penalty. What does it look like? Well, the same scenario happens with respect to calculating the formula.

On the left-hand side, we use that exact same 1% formula, but when we look to the right-hand side, when we go to plug in all the numbers, you'll notice that because she's 57, she only has 27 years of service.

She doesn't have the 30 like we previously calculated, and her high three isn't as high because she hasn't continued to work and earn more money that influences her high three.

We're going to use that high three of 96,000 times 1% times 27 years of service. We would have a starting pension of 25,920 each year.

But this scenario that we're looking at is if she goes ahead and retires at 57, draws the pension right away with a penalty. We have to calculate that penalty here.

That penalty would be based on the original pension calculation of the 95,920 times 25% because it's 5% for every year. She is under the age of 62. That's five years in this case.

A 25% penalty that ends up being 64 80 per year, which gives her a net pension, net of penalties, $19,440 per year. Now keep in mind she hasn't paid taxes out of this.

She hasn't paid for her health insurance, her life insurance, survivor benefits, any of those other things.

The only net this is, is net of the penalty that we've just calculated. We're already scratching our head. We went from 30,000 to 19,000 pretty quickly.

Let's take a look at what this looks like for Mary, again, if she goes ahead and retires at 57 and draws the pension right away with a penalty, you'll notice she only has this one stream of income from 57 on and it's her pension.

You'll also notice that that $19,440 a year pension stays level until 62, because keep in mind those cost of living adjustments don't kick in until the age of 62.

She's losing some purchasing power between 57 and 62 pretty consistently. Every time we experience inflation, her pension is not keeping up with that amount.

Wendy might look at this whole situation and say, “You know what? Based on everything I've got going on, I'm willing to do this,” and that's going to be Wendy's decision, just like it's your decision.

It's not always all about the money, but money is how the world keeps score and retirement tends to take a lot of money. We want to at least consider this as one of the factors of whether this seems like a good decision in this case for Wendy.

I do also want to point out on the far right-hand side for FEHB and FEGLI, because she's drawing her pension right away, she has FEHB and FEGLI all the way through from the moment she takes her federal pension, even though it's penalized, she's going to have all that coverage continuing in retirement.

The third scenario is if Wendy retires now and decides to postpone the pension to avoid the penalty, what does that look like? Well, again, back to our same kind of shell of a slide here, if she does in fact leave government service at 57, but postpones receiving her pension until 60, you'll see at 60 it is a higher pension.

It's 25,000, almost 26,000 versus 19,000 that we saw in the previous slide, but she has three years where she's not receiving any pension at all.

I also want to point out on the far right-hand side for FEHB and FEGLI, for those years where she is not receiving her pension, she does not have health insurance or life insurance through OPM, so she's going to have to find some other way.

Maybe she has private life insurance already. Maybe she's not even contributing to FEGLI right now. She doesn't even have the coverage. That's certainly possible.

But if we're reliant on FEHB and FEGLI, it is important to realize that if anything happens in these first three years of retirement, from a health standpoint, from a life or death standpoint, there is no coverage in force during those years.

If part of Wendy's decision is she's thinking about taking another job, perhaps they have health insurance and life insurance over there, and that would certainly fill that gap.

It might also fill some of this income gap that she's going to have if she's trying to avoid this lifelong penalty to her pension, having another job may fill that income gap between 57 and 59 or maybe even beyond that. If she continues to work, maybe she really enjoys that other job that she's got and wants to work until she's 62 or 65. She's welcome to do that.

But without another job, the natural place that Wendy will likely look to get money is the Thrift Savings Plan. And so you can imagine the more and more money that Wendy takes from the TSP early, so 57 when she leaves government service, that money is no longer in the account and growing for the long term.

And there's lots of different ways to take money out of the Thrift Savings Plan and other accounts like it. We're not going to dive deep into those details today, but we do need to recognize there is an income shortfall in this scenario that Wendy needs to figure out how she's going to fill.

It's a Balancing Game

When I think about MRA+10 and the different choices that people have, I think we all can appreciate that this is a bit of a balancing game. It's not always all about the money.

There are other factors that go into people's decisions, their own health, their mental health, their purpose, the love of their job. If those things are starting to fall by the wayside and you qualify for MRA+10, there very well may be some great benefit to you taking this type of retirement.

What I don't want is a short-term problem that you have. Maybe you don't like your supervisor. Maybe you've got a contentious office space that you work in. You are used to working from home, and now you have to commute into the office, and that's a pain in the neck.

Those things that are relatively temporary in nature that end up causing you to make a decision that you can't take back later. That's the real hope that I have for all of you who are considering this MRA+10 concept.

It is a balancing act and you owe it to yourself to know what's on both sides of that scale.

If your mental health and wellbeing and purpose of going out and doing the things that you love while you're still healthy to be able to do them, or perhaps you've got a parent that you're taking care of and you need to be present, you've got a special needs child, there's all sorts of reasons why someone might very well take the MRA+10, but I never want it to be a blind decision where you don't realize the financial consequences on the other side of that decision.

Wendy Gets to Pick The WINNER!

Here's the good part, Wendy is the one who gets to pick the winner. We know we love gold. We just finished up the Olympic Games and we love to see those golds coming home. Gosh, bronze and silver are pretty good too, but Wendy is the one who gets to be the judge.

Nobody else, nobody else has a say in this. The agency has no control over whether Wendy decides she's going to go ahead and retire, whether she's going to take the pension right away with a penalty, whether she's going to postpone receiving that pension, so she avoids the penalty.

She is the one who gets to decide. When it's your turn to go through all these details and figure out what this means for you, you are the one who gets to pick the winner for your own life.

Remember, you are free to choose, but you are not free from consequence. There are some big financial consequences to the MRA+10 scenario that I want you to really consider carefully before you make any of those big decisions. When it comes time to deciding when to start your pension, I want to point out something.

I think it's obvious based on the way I described this today, but I want to be really sure the date you choose to leave government service and the date you start drawing your pension are two separate decisions.

They might be commingled in your mind, but as far as OPM is concerned and your agency is concerned, these are two separate decisions.

When you leave government service, you may have a pretty good idea of when you plan to start your pension. Wendy might say, “I'm going to go ahead and leave at 57 and I think I'm going to draw my pension at 60,” but she could change her mind at any time. She could be 58 and say,

“Never mind. I decide I want it now.” And she has every right to be able to do that. If you decide on an MRA+10 retirement, when you are ready to begin receiving your pension, whatever date that might be, you'll submit form RI 92-19 to the Office of Personnel Management.

The address where you will send it is right on the form, and you're going to submit this about 60 days in advance of when you want your first payment to begin.

A lot of people get confused or hung up on this idea that they have to make a decision about when the pension is going to start and that they're locked into that when they leave government service. And that's not true.

You're going to have lots of flexibility to be able to decide when to start that pension and you can change your mind. But once you start it, you can't go back and change your mind, but you can decide at that point what is going to be right for you.

Wrap-Up & Next Steps

Quick wrap up. There's a lot that goes into the decision of when to retire, whether that's being fully eligible, whether that's taking an early out, a deferred retirement, disability retirement, or of course MRA+10.

And I never want someone to take this big decision lightly, because frankly, this is a decision that you have to live with for the rest of your life.

I want you to take the time to consider all those long-term implications of your decision so that you go into retirement eyes wide open. You know exactly what you can expect, and there are very few surprises for you in retirement.

The very best way that you can make sure that there are very few surprises in retirement is to get to one of our workshops. We hold in-person retirement training in communities all throughout the country.

There is no cost for you to attend. These are sponsored sessions. The fee's already been paid. We are on the GSA schedule, so it makes it easy for us to do contract work with the government at the individual agency.

But these particular sessions are available for any federal employee to attend regardless of the agency that you're with.

There is no cost for you to attend, but there is a little bit of a perk here, and that is because we're on the GSA schedule, your agency can permit you time off on the clock to be able to attend our workshop.

This is not you taking leave, but your agency has a discretion to be able to allow you to attend our off property workshop and consider that training time for you.

In those workshops, you cover all of the federal benefits topics and the decisions that you're going to be making so that you have a really good checklist of those things.

And probably one of my favorite parts of the workshop is that we have one-on-one help that's available following the, in the weeks following, to be able to get clarity by reviewing your numbers in the FedImpact benefits report that we're going to prepare for you, and really make that as clear as possible for you so that you can see what those numbers are going to look like and avoid those surprises, so you can see all the details of our workshops by going to fedimpact.com/attend.

Thank you all so much for joining us. I hope that you'll stay tuned for benefits and news updates that we have on an ongoing basis.

Remember to find a workshop, you can go to fedimpact.com/attend and to register for that next webinar or to see all of the replays that we have of past webinars, you can go to fedimpact.com/webinar.

Thank you all so much. We'll see you next month.

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