>>Skip the post and go straight to the calculator<<
It’s been 4 years since I touched this site, and a lot has changed in our financial, personal, and professional lives in that time. Without trying to catch up on that, I dusted it off for one purpose, to try to answer the following question…
Are you throwing away your FERS retirement if you take the fork?
To be fully transparent, I do not know! But there is and has been a “deferred annuity” available for feds that separate before they’re eligible for one of the ‘traditional’ immediate retirement options like MRA+30, Age 60+ 20 years of service, etc.
The way I understand it, let’s say you have 9 years of service at age 42 with a high-3 of $150k/yr. With a deferred retirement, you separate at age 42, and then at age 62 you’re eligible for an annuity that’s calculated like this:
Base Amount = Years of Service * High-3 Salary * .01
So in the example above, it would be 9 * 150,000 * .01 = $13,500/yr.
How To Calculate your FERS Annuity
I (well, me and chatGPT) threw together this Basic FERS Deferred Annuity Calculator off a spreadsheet we’ve been using. I wouldn’t call it gospel, but it should give you a rough idea what you’d be eligible for if you’ve got more than 5 years of federal service under FERS.