Monthly retirement benefits are effective the first day of any month. A retirement application must be signed, dated, and filed at least one day and not more than 120 days prior to the effective date of retirement.

A delay in filing the Form 6, “Claiming Your Monthly Retirement Benefit,” could delay the first benefit payment. Since the Retirement System processes retirement applications based on the date they are received, the earlier that you file the Form 6 (within the 120-day period), the sooner you will receive the “Choosing Your Retirement Payment Option” form (Form 6E sample) from our office. In other words, even though you are eligible to file your retirement paperwork just one day prior to the effective date of your retirement, the likelihood of your receiving payment of your retirement benefit within the same month of your effective retirement is greatly diminished. If retroactive benefits are payable, your first benefit payment will then include the amount that you are retroactively entitled to receive as of your effective date of retirement. Therefore, we recommend that after you have made your decision to retire, that you file your Form 6 as close to the 120-day advance period as possible in order to increase the likelihood of receiving a retirement payment within the month for which your retirement is effective.

First publicly conceived in 1808 by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, the concept of a national, protected, north-south waterway was introduced in his report to President Thomas Jefferson that year. Gallatin noted that the United States possessed an inland navigation solution from Massachusetts to Georgia (then the southernmost Atlantic state) that was “principally, if not solely” interrupted by a mere four stretches of land – Cape Cod, a section of New Jersey between the Raritan and Delaware rivers, the peninsula between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay, and the marshy tract between the Chesapeake Bay and the Albemarle Sound.

By 1808, there were but a handful of fairly successful manmade canals in the country, and many more were either already under construction or soon would be. Gallatin explained in his report that if the federal government would appropriate the necessary funds then these mere four stretches of land could be dredged with new canals, therefore a sea vessel could travel by rivers, bays, sounds, and a handful of canals from Boston to Beaufort, North Carolina, on down to the Cape Fear River, then broken by a short ocean run the inland navigation could continue again inside the chain of barrier islands skirting the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia.

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