All About FERS- Retirement Options Explained

Hi, my name is Mike Lanway, I'm a financial planner. I'm an expert in federal employee benefits, and I'm here to help you decide what you need to do to make best use of those benefits to your advantage. 

In FERS retirement, there are several categories and there are several different ways to think about it, and if we try to take care of all that right here, right now would be so confusing it wouldn't be worth it. Let me just help you understand a couple things here: With our FERS retirement reports, we have two reports. One is called Option One, and the other one we call Option Two. 

Option One, or for people who have mandatory retirement dates, and for this particular report we're talking about federal law agents, federal law officers, firefighters, and air traffic controllers.

That's who we're talking about, so if you are one of those people, if you're a federal agent, if you are a federal firefighter, or fewer federal air traffic controller, then option one is for you. If you're not one of those, if you don't have one of those occupations, if you're a FERS employee doing something else, then you're a regular rules employee. 

So, Option One for special rules employees: for law agents, the firefighters, and air traffic controllers, and then Option Two for everybody else. Make sure you hold on to the right one, to get rid of the one you don't need, to keep the one you do.

We hope you enjoyed our video series on the different components of your retirement and your benefits. If you want to see more, learn more at your own pace, use our annual benefit statement. You'll see the link at the bottom and within the description. Go there, take a look at it, we think you'll be happy with what you see and and that it's going to help you.