3 Common Mistakes That Federal Employees Make When Planning Their Retirement

While planning your retirement years before retiring as a federal employee is excellent, it only does you good when you take each step carefully, paying attention to little things that may impact the outcome of your best federal retirement planning. However, many soon-to-be-retiring feds make mistakes when planning their retirement either because of their inexperience or reluctance to get help from professionals.

If you are planning your retirement, here are a few mistakes you should avoid to have the best federal retirement planning in hand:

Failure to review personnel records before the federal retirement

Employees should carefully and regularly review the information mentioned in their Official Personnel Folder (OPF), specifically Form SF 50 (Notice of Personnel Action), and make sure if it is correct and current. Form SF 50 includes crucial pieces of retirement-related information that every fed should be aware of. Apart from that, Box 30 of form SF 50 also states the retirement plan by which an employee is covered. They should also meticulously review their OPF and take special note of all the items that may affect their eligibility for retirement and the computation of their annuities.

Failure to timely requests estimates of redeposits or unpaid deposits

Many employees are unaware of the fact that by depositing temporary (“non-deduction”) or military time, they may push their SCD for retirement a little backward, which increases their service time and eventually the number of their annuities. Another likely course of making a deposit is to gain the ability to retire earlier than you first expected. For feds, and those who left federal service and withdrew their FERS and CSRS deposits but later reentered federal service, they should know that they can redeposit their withdrawn amount and restore their years of service that went into vain as a result of the withdrawal of CSRS or FERS deposits. However, many employees do not know this and don’t consider this.

Failure to have an up-to-date estate plan.

As part of the entire estate plan, feds are required to name beneficiaries for all of their bank and brokerage accounts, insurance policies, TSP accounts, and IRAs. Besides, they also need to prepare vital estate-related documents. An estate plan created by the best federal retirement estimator or a qualified estate attorney should include a Will or Living Trust, an advanced health care directive, Living Will and a durable power of attorney. But many employees do not have a thoughtfully-created estate plan.

Final Note

If you are soon going to retire from federal service, it’s crucial for you to have the best federal retirement planning in hand. However, make sure you don’t make the aforementioned mistakes when preparing one.

Author’s bio: The author is a blogger and this article is about three common mistakes that federal employee make when planning their retirement.

About This Author

Felix awet Joined: January 27th, 2020