How Much Notice?

OK, you've decided that "it's time," and you want to retire. How much notice do you have to give? It turns out the answer is "not much."

THE BASIC RULE: 120 DAYS' NOTICE

The reg says that you must submit your retirement application no less than 120 days before your retirement date, start of terminal leave, or start of permissive TDY. So, in a normal scenario, you can be sitting on the beach and growing a beard within 4 months of dropping papers. For those who, like me, lived in fear of spending a full year as a "lame duck" after dropping papers, learning this was a big relief.

UNCONVENTIONAL TIMELINES: FOUR MONTHS OF 1-DAY WORKWEEKS, AND OTHER TRICKS

But let's say that you can't stomach even 120 days of showing up at the office. There is an answer: just take some/all of your leave as "ordinary leave" (i.e. before you final-out) rather than as terminal leave. A buddy of mine talked his supervisor into letting him take leave Monday-Thursday for several months; as a kicker, the Friday duty day was used exclusively for "outprocessing." If you have 60 days of leave, you can parlay that into 15 weeks of "off Monday-to-Thursday, one outprocessing appointment on Friday."

Alternatively, you can just take some/all of your leave balance as a big, contiguous period of ordinary leave (e.g. 45 days off), before coming back for a few weeks of final outprocessing.

And don't forget that you can also take your 20 days (30 days if OCONUS) of permissive TDY before you final-out. Even better, you don't have to take them all at once! You can take 4 straight weeks of Monday-Friday permissive TDY before you come back and outprocess. Or 5 weeks of Monday-Thursday permissive TDY. Or whatever -- you can break up your permissive TDY however you'd like.

EVERYTHING IS WAIVERABLE

As anyone who's been in 20+ years knows, everything really is waiverable. If you can make a case for hardship or "good of the service", the 120-day notification can be waived. I have no idea how hard it is to get this waiver; AFPC Retirements Branch is the waiver authority, and I'm guessing they're probably very conservative because short-timeline retirements have all kinds of potential for causing administrative problems.

MINOR PLANNING FACTOR: THE RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY CHECK

When planning your retirement timeline, don't forget that you cannot drop papers until AFPC completes a "Retirement Eligibility Check" on you. This check is painless, is done entirely on line, and no one in your unit is ever notified that it occured. Doing the check doesn't obligate you to retire, and isn't entered into your permanent personnel record. It's just an opportunity for AFPC to look at your proposed retirement date and say either "yup, you could retire on that date" or "no, you can't retire on that date without one or more waivers."

AFPC advertises that it takes "5 duty days" to perform the check. I ended up doing 3 of these checks, for 3 different dates. In my experience, AFPC come back with an answer within a few hours of your request in the best-case scenario, and in about 4 duty days in an absolute worst-case scenario (i.e. I asked them the day before Christmas, they didn't get back to me until the day before New Year's). Once you have a positive "Retirement Elgibility Check", you can drop papers.

BOTTOM LINE: YOU CAN BE RETIRED 127 DAYS FROM NOW

So, when if you're planning on retiring on a short timeline, make sure you allow a week to complete the "Retirement Eligibility Check" before you drop papers. And remember that you can't drop papers less than 120 days before your planned terminal leave date or (if not taking terminal leave or terminal PTDY) 120 days before your retirement date.