Step 1: Select a retirement date.
Step 2: Fill in your birth date.
Step 3: If your estate or a trust will be your beneficiary, check the box and go to the next step. If you name a person, such as your spouse as beneficiary, fill in your beneficiary's birth date.
Step 4: Select your participation date. Your participation date is the first month that you began earning service credit in a state-administered retirement system. Service purchases that can change your participation date are omitted service and recontributions of refunded service.
Step 5: Choose your agency. There are nearly 1,400 agencies listed. The agency you select determines the system, benefit factor and treatment of sick leave. Some agency names are abbreviated.
Step 6: Note if you had continuous service from January 1, 1998, through January 31, 1999. This is used to determine the KERS nonhazardous benefit formula factor.
Step 7: Enter your total service credit in months as of the end of the month prior to the retirement date you entered in Step 1. For example, say you would like to retire August 1, 2009, and you will have 240 months through June. You also plan to purchase 5 years of nonqualified service before you retire. You would have total service as of July 31, 2009, of 240 months + 60 months nonqualified + 1 month additional employment for a total of 301 months.
If you have service in more than one system, enter total service for each appropriate system or for each type of coverage within a system (hazardous or nonhazardous).
Also, enter your accumulated sick leave hours for each system. KERS and SPRS employees note: Sick leave hours will be prorated based on your months of service credit in each system. If you are unsure if your sick hours will be used for retirement or if your agency participates in the alternate sick leave plan, do not enter your sick leaves hours. If you are currently contributing to KTRS, do not enter sick leave hours.
Step 8: If you have service in the Judicial Retirement Plan, Legislator's Retirement Plan or the Kentucky Teachers' Retirement System, list the months of service in the appropriate box. This service will be used to determine your total months of service, but not the amount of benefits.
Step 9: You should include all service purchases made on or after 8/1/2004 with the exception of omitted service, recontributions of refunded service, and conversions of non-hazardous to hazardous service.
Step 10: Enter your final monthly salary. You may enter it with or without cents (2500 or 2500.00).
Step 11: Enter your compensatory leave balance. The program will compute the value of your compensatory leave based on the salary given in Step 10 and will add it to your final salary if you are typing in your actual fiscal year salary information in Step 14.
Step 12: Indicate whether you work 7.5 or 8 hours per day.
Step 13: If you are interested in the Social Security Adjustment Options, fill in your estimated monthly Social Security benefit at age 62.
Step 14: You have two choices. Either estimate your final compensation or fill in salaries for actual fiscal years.
If you have calculated your final compensation or are estimating more than five years into the future, you may simply want to check the box and type in a figure. (If you have listed service in both hazardous and nonhazardous systems, you must type in the fiscal year salary information instead of typing in your final compensation.) It is hard to predict salary increases very far into the future, because economic factors and promotional opportunities play a major role. For long range projections, you may want to use a conservative salary figure. It is better to end up with more than you estimated, rather than the other way around.
If you are within five years of retirement, type in your actual fiscal year salaries, (July 1 - June 30). Remember, if retiring during a fiscal year, only include actual salary and months of service as of your retirement date. For example, if retiring August 1, you will have only your final monthly salary and one month of service for the month of July in that fiscal year. If you are eligible for final compensation based on the three highest years, you only need to type in three fiscal years of salary, so long as they contain at least 24 months of service. If you do type in more years of salary, the program will automatically select the appropriate number of fiscal years to use.
NOTE: There is a federal limit of $230,000.00 annual salary for pension purposes. While your salary may be considerably less, you can exceed the $19,166.67 average monthly maximum if you have a large compensatory leave balance and retire August 1. If the program gives you a message that you have exceeded this amount or if your salary for the fiscal year prints out as $19,166.67, you should change your retirement date to be later in the fiscal year to gain full benefit of the payment for compensatory time. A person earning $93,500.00 per year with 240 hours of compensatory time would exceed the $19,166.67 monthly maximum if retiring August 1, but not if retiring September 1.
Step 15: Click on the "Show Estimate" button. If you have completed all the required fields correctly, you will be shown the payment options available to you to help you with your financial plans.