Federal Employee Medical Retirement: Flexibility in a Plan

“What is the game plan?”  That is the question which, when posed, is evidence that one recognizes that engagement in an activity or process should have a logistical and strategic paradigm from which to proceed.

Such an overarching plan need not be a formally drawn, meticulously detailed one; it can be fairly general in its guideposts, with some specificity in milestones.  But to formulate a plan which is discernibly comprehensible is an important first step before initiating any process, whether legal, recreational or otherwise.

In preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, the plan of action is important to the overall administrative facet, if only to respond to outside pressures which will almost certainly prevail upon the Federal or Postal employee — from one’s agency; from the financial pressures which will continue to remain a factor; from the ongoing medical condition itself.

Yet, within any “game plan” or “master plan”, one must also figure in a necessary component of flexibility.  Just as the future is never a certainty or a predictable development, so changes in a process where one is attempting to file for a benefit will often incur and involves unforeseen changes and malleable circumstances.

An unseen event or trigger, however, does not necessarily mean that one cannot proceed; it merely require the ability to circumvent the obstacle, if indeed it is an obstacle at all.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Federal Worker Disability Retirement: The Cumulative Emergency

Most emergencies need not have been; either through preventative maintenance or attending to it through troubleshooting at regular intervals; or by cautiously identifying overt signs of oncoming problems, the vast majorities of apparent emergencies turn into the status of such urgent needs because of neglect or deliberate avoidance.  

That is not to say, however, that once an event reaches a heightened status of requiring an urgent response, that it should not be treated with the appropriate manner of alarm; rather, it is merely a recognition that most emergencies need not have become so.

In preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, the best course of action is to attempt to avoid having the entire administrative process become an emergency need.  

In order to practice containment, one must recognize the medical condition, the potential impact of the medical condition; the time when the medical condition begins to impact one or more of the essential elements of one’s job; a carefully prepared plan to initiating the needed conversation with one’s treating doctor; financial planning to weather the long and arduous bureaucratic morass; and an expectation that one’s own agency will not be supportive, for the most part, throughout the process.

Such recognition of some of the bare essentials which comprise the entirety of the Federal Disability Retirement process is easier said than accomplished.  

Life rarely occurs and presents itself in neatly folded stacks of laundered clothing; instead, the more apt analogy is the pile of dirty clothes brought home in a black garbage bag by one’s college son or daughter, with the door opening, a smile on the face, and declaring, “Here, will you take care of this for me”?

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire