All About FERS- What Do You Actually Make?

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. 

Let's talk about how much you get paid. Do you know how much you get paid? I talk to a lot of people, they don't seem to know. They know how much goes into their bank account, but they don't really know what they're getting paid per year; they don't know what their gross income is; they don't know what they're getting paid per hour; and they don't really think about how much they're getting paid per month.  They're just thinking about what hits their bank account every two weeks. Nothing wrong with that, it's just it limits you on what you're able to actually adjust and plan for. 

So, here's my suggestion: get to know those things. We think it's important enough to include it in our statement, so we think it's important enough for you to include in your planning. How much do you make an hour? Why is that important? Here's why it's helpful to you to know how much you make an hour: you can take that hourly amount and begin to figure out some things, as to how valuable certain benefits are. 

For instance your annual leave, however many hours of annual leave you have already accumulated, you can multiply that by your hourly rate, and that's a lump sum that you would get if you quit right now. If you just walked away and said, "I'm leaving," you get your annual leave with you, you get to take that with you. So, how much is it? Now you gotta think about, "Well, I say to another two, or three, or four pay periods, it would be a little bit more. Maybe I'll hang around for that long and then I'll stop." 

It's just an opportunity to plan things through a little bit better, to fine tune it so that you get what you want and you know when that's available to you, making sure you understand that. We believe that your annual pay is really important, more important or just as important, I think it's actually more important to you, know what your additional compensation is. That's the next topic, so make sure you see that too. 

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.