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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In our household, I am a federal contractor and my spouse is a Civil Servant.  Spouse has been a CS for about 35 years and is due to retire in about 5 years.  They are a GS-14T/9.  I have been with my agency for 30 years.  Here are some of the differences to note:

Leave:
My spouse has 26 days of AL plus 11 days of sick leave.  Rarely uses sick leave and just uses AL as needed.  In order to keep annual rollover of AL maxed, will sometimes work credit hours on weekends or evening before we go on vacation and use the credit hours to ensure that even with Use-or-Lose at the end of the year, they keep to about the cap on rollover.

The problem with being a federal contractor, is that when a contract turns over, you have a choice to leave your job and find another one by your current contractor, or to stay with the job and switch to the new contractor.  Over the years, I've had 7 employers and 7 jobs within the agency, not overlapping.  I've had times I've stayed with the job and had to get a new employer.  I've also had times that I've stayed with the employer and found a new job on a different contract.  The issue is that each time you switch employers, they pay out your vacation time in cash and you start out again at zero with the new company.   More importantly, every employer has different benefits plans.  I've had some employers where I could negotiate additional leave to match what I had at the last employer, but there are some employers who have strict leave policies based on seniority within the company.  My current employer is one of those (I've been with this contractor for just over 5 years now).  I had 5 weeks of PTO leave at the last employer, but this employer strictly ties leave to the years you've worked and I had to move back to three weeks of leave.  While negotiating, the recruiter understood and she negotiated adding salary dollars slightly over one week of pay (one week of pay, rounded up to the nearest $5K mark) to my offer since she couldn't get me the additional PTO.  She said this way, if I needed, i could take LWOP for the time off and still break even.  But most employers are not this good when they can't meet your time off requests during negotiation.  After passing the 5 year mark, I am up to 4 weeks of leave, but it was still hard making do with less PTO, especially with kids.

Pension:
In my case, with the 401K and company matching, my retirement benefits are close to what I would get with FERS, although still not quite as good.  Mostly a break even, but not quite.  My spouse on the other hand has been with the federal government long enough, that they are on CSRS-offset (the brief transition plan offered at the change from CSRS to FERS for about 2 years worth of hires).  The CSRS-offset is signficantly better than my retirement.  But that's no longer available.

Health insurance:
One of the big perks with being a fed is that when you retire, if your spouse and children have been on your health insurance for at least 5 years, they are guaranteed insurance for life (children to age 26 if they are full time students, 22 otherwise) even if you predecease them.  This was big for us.  So a few years ago, we switched all of us to my spouse's BCBS plan for the guarantee.  My spouse was qualified to retire about 4 years ago, but will continue working to maximize the pension payouts.  But we are set so that at any time if they choose to retire, they can.  It was close in 2017 when the administration changed; things got very difficult at work and my spouse considered retiring, but stuck it out and things got tolerable.  Spouse may again consider in 2025 at the change of administration if things get difficult again, especially since they'll be within 2 years of maxing out retirement benefits.

But, I have the best of both worlds.  I have the health insurance and the pension benefits of my spouse being a civil servant and I have the higher salary for being a contractor (I make about 20% more than civil service peers).  I make about 20-50% less than my peers in the private sector, but then I have a significantly better work-life balance than they do.  They pay for those salaries by being on demand for many more hours of work and needing to be available for emergencies anytime during normal work hours and many off hours.  Not worth it for me which is why I've stayed in federal contracting for so long.[/quote]

Feds always like to talk about how they work fewer hours. They act like all of us in the private sector work crazy hours. Of course, that isn’t true.

I work a straight 40 hours, and make $50K more than I was making as a fed. Same thing with my friend, who also had about 10 years as a fed (like I did). My leave package is comparable to what I had as a GS-13 fed. [/quote]

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