Return of Pre-Reitrement Counseling Sessions

January 18, 2012 - The Pennsylvania Municipal Retirement System (PMRS) is pleased to announce that we now have a designated “retirement counselor” on staff. Heather Kreider recently was hired for the dedicated purpose of re-instituting pre-retirement seminars for our members. Heather was given the challenge of re-working the previous sessions and also developing different modules that could be used in different settings depending on the audience. While we expect this effort to be an ongoing work in progress, we are pleased to share the general guidelines directing our efforts. Our goal is to meet the expected demand in one of three ways.

First, we expect to establish a full pre-retirement class devoted to individual plan members and their spouses that will accommodate between 15 to 25 individuals from multiple municipalities. These sessions will likely last approximately three hours and will be held at regularly scheduled intervals at various locations around the state. Members will be able to take the initiative to sign up and attend these functions on their own. Watch for the announcement of the date, time and place for these sessions in the coming weeks.

We also anticipate more focused sessions dedicated to an individual municipality and the handful of members nearing retirement (our intent is to concentrate on those members within five years of retirement). These sessions would be focused on just the PMRS plan provisions, the retirement options available to those plan members, and the “how to apply” steps of retirement. We expect these sessions to be attended by five to ten members and perhaps a few spouses. These will be scheduled on an as requested basis. They will not replace the “general” informational meetings our Municipal Services Division staff handles; those involving a plan’s entire membership. Those sessions routinely involve briefing all of the pension plan’s members about the various retirement benefits like normal retirement, early retirement, vesting and disability benefits.

Finally, Heather will be available in our offices for those members who are near Harrisburg and who would like a one on one private discussion regarding their unique retirement plans. Our regular Membership Services staff will always be available to discuss a member’s retirement options with them via the telephone (our toll-free number is 800-622-7968). We just want to underscore that those who want a personal session can arrange one via a visit to our offices.
                                   
We will start scheduling the municipal visits in late January. If your municipality has a number of individuals nearing the retirement decision and these members are interested in scheduling a limited session, you can contact Heather via the toll-free telephone number or by e-mail at hkreider@pa.gov.

We look forward to enhancing the pre-retirement counseling services we can make available to our membership.