All About FERS- What is TSP?

Hi, my name is Mike Lanway, I'm a financial planner. I'm an expert in federal employee benefits, and I'm here to help you decide what you need to do to make best use of those benefits to your advantage. 

The Thrift Savings Plan, or TSP as people like to call it. It's an acronym that indicates it's a savings plan for you that you're going to save money in and invest money in for your retirement. Some people would call it a 401(k), some people might call it something else, but technically, it's called a 401(a). Practically, however, it's just a way to save money for retirement. You have a chance to save money before taxes that's called Traditional TSP. You have a chance to save money after taxes, that's called a Roth TSP. You can do one or the other, or both with one contribution, the same contribution.

So what we're trying to do is just figure out, what is TSP and what does it mean to you? TSP is your opportunity to decide- 

1. Do you want to invest money at all? If you don't then you don't have to use the investments, you can use the savings plan. It's called G Fund. 
2. Do you want to invest money and not save anything at all? Well then you can ignore G Fund and you could invest in the other funds. All the other funds are investments. So what do you want to do? How do you want to do it? 
3. If you don't know what to do at all, they have the L Funds. What are the L Funds? They're basically managers of those individual funds, and those L Funds means, 'Hey, I just put my money here and not have to think about it anymore.' 

So we're going to go through what TSP is all about and some other parts of our annual benefit statement, and we're also going to go through it in other videos that are gonna happen. What we want you to know now is: TSP it's your way to feed your retirement. It's your way to build your retirement where you're having some sort of investment, or some sort of savings, or both, where you have a pile of money when you retire so you can decide, 'how do I want to use this money? How is it going to help me feel more secure and do the things I want to do once I'm retired?'

We hope you enjoyed our video series on the different components of your retirement and your benefits. If you want to see more, learn more at your own pace, use our annual benefit statement. You'll see the link at the bottom and within the description. Go there, take a look at it, we think you'll be happy with what you see and and that it's going to help you.