TRANSCRIPT:

Jim: Hi. This is Josh Byrd with United Benefits. Today we’re going to be talking about the FERS Special Provision Retirement.

Within the Special Provision Retirement there’s several different agencies that are covered under that. Today we’re going to be looking specifically at the LEO. So the big question everybody has is, when can I retire? If you have 25 years of service, you can retire at any age. If you have 20 years of service, you can retire at age 50. And for some agencies, there’s a mandatory retirement age at age 57. For CBPO that started July 6th, 2008.

So let’s look at, “What am I paying in to my retirement?” You can see here you’re putting in 1.45% into Medicare, 1.3% into retirement, 6.2% into social security. And then they’ll match up to 5% with your TSP for a total of 13.95%. That’s coming out of your paycheck every two weeks to fund retirement. Okay?

So now that we’ve looked at, “What am I paying into my retirement,” lets take a look at, “How do I compute my annuity?” We’re gonna use an example of a law enforcement officer who has 25 years of service, has a high-3 average salary of $100,000. So you can see with the LEO, the match you can get under the Special Provision is going to be 20 years for the enhanced retirement. So we’ll have to do two separate calculations.

We’ll take the first 20 years and what we’ll do is we’ll use the years of service– so, 20. We’ll multiply that times your high three average income; times 1.7%. So you can see here, based off of this example, the first 20 years of service for this officer will be $34,000 a year at $2,832 a month.

The additional five years will be calculated a little bit different. So you have to take your years of service, multiply it times your high three average income, times 1%. And you can see that’s an additional $5,000 a year. For a total of $39,000 a year or $3,250 month.

Here at United Benefits we have representatives that specialize in the Special Provisions Retirement, as well as the Federal Employee Retirement system.