This is the best answer. One thing to keep in mind, a number of people stick around to get an extra $1K or $2K a year, but that is a long payback period that may never pay off when you miss out on a much bigger number for a year and account for inflation.Log into the retirement calculator on my benefits and it may answer your questions or have you asking more. You can change the years and some other factors and it will give you a number and PDF you can print out and compare all your options.
The advice to "run the numbers" is dead on. I've been retired for several years so I don't know if anything has changed on the calculator but if you are married there are different options on what kind of pension payout you can take. Some options take only you into account and others actuarially consider you and your spouse The payout results depend on your age, your spouses age and even your birth month. I ran the calcs for each month of the year for retirement and it would go up or down depending on who was a year older that month. So for the choices we made for the pension payout there were certain months of the year that made sense to retire and others where the monthly pension would actually go down. This, of course, has to be factored in with the annual resets that came - another MIP, vacations, etc. I'm not sure how those are being granted now so they may not be a factor like they used to.I'm thinking about retiring this year instead of waiting until January. Are there any disadvantages to retiring at age 55 with 34 years instead of waiting until the year 35 in our retirement benefits that I may or would want to consider?
I agree 100%. If you have the $ to retire get the fook out of that sheethole ASAP! You won’t regret it.You won't regret leaving sooner rather than later.