All About FERS- Why Retirement Matters Now

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. 

FERS retirement has a lot of categories to it. I mean, my gosh, they've made it as complicated as possible. My job is make it simple, and what I want to do right now is just talk to those people who are early in their career; maybe they're mid-career; maybe you put ten years, maybe 15 years in your career, but maybe you just started. We want to talk to you right now. 

What is the use of really looking down the road 20 years from now and just trying to figure out what retirement is going to look like? What does that really mean for you? I don't know, maybe you're a long-term guy or a long-term girl and you like to see long-term things, and you want to plan that far out... I'm not that way, and I'm thinking there's a lot of people who aren't that way either. They just want to know what's happening right now.

What's the best thing to do right now? What are you getting out of it right now? What if you just stop being a FERS employee right now? What would I get out of that? I mean, would it be all wasted, or would there be some value to what I've actually done if I just spent 5 years as a FERS employee? Is there anything that I can collect from FERS for my lifetime? The answer is: yes, there is. 

So what we want to do is just, let's just look at FERS retirement year by year. We can have a long-term vision, we can try to think about, dream about retirement, but having a long-term plan? Well shoot, we don't even know what's going to happen next week. How are we going to plan for the next 10, 15, or 20 years? We're not. 

What we're going to do is have a long-term vision and keep a short term plan, and make and adjust our plan every 12 months. What we're going to do right now is give you a snapshot of what retirement looks like if you stop working as a FERS employee right now. What would it look like for you? Now, the beginning point of that making real sense, and the beginning point of it having real value for you is having five years into your FERS career, just five years.

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.