Basic retirement advice.

[damifiknow]

bottom line leave them the usps nothing find a way to use up all your sick time

 

[DB.Cooper]

The sick leave can't be used (cashed in) for achieving retirement eligibility, but it will be added towards your (time served) pension valued at the rate of a day for a day.

Now keeping that in mind lets say a days pay (sick leave) is equal to $300 dollars, so 5 sick days (a week) is worth $1500 dollars. Now if you have 100 sick days (20 weeks) its worth to be used is $30,000 dollars.

Now look at using it to add time to your retirement at a rate of 1 Sick Day = 1 Day towards time served. That would give you 20 weeks (39% of a year) additional time towards your retirement. So roughly 40% of a year or (.004) towards your pension. Each full year counts as 1% or .01 of your high 3. So your multiplier is 30.4% or (.304).

Using the data above $300 a day equals a working salary of $78,000 per year. So your high 3 would be about $75,000 maybe. Doing the math .004% of $75K is $300. per year towards your pension.

For example lets say you have 30 years at a high 3 of $75k your Pension would be Approx. $22,500 per year without Sick Time added to it or $22800 with it included.
$22,500 / 12 = $1875.00 per/mo.
$22,800 / 12 = $1900.00 per/mo.
a $25.00 per/mo. difference.

Based on these calculations, that $30k dollars you could have received by using the Sick Days before retirement, it will take you 100 years in retirement for you to break even!
$300 x 100 = $30,000 dollars.

I had some SL left when I retired... And it's a little different in my view than what you described... If you're just going to take a couple of days a week or whatever to burn it up before retirement, that's okay... But if you don't do that, it's not like you didn't get that $300 a day, you simply got it by working rather than taking the SL... then you end up with some SL that adds to your years of service... now if you can burn it all at the end, then that's a different story... Not sure how many can pull that off, but I know some do...