Financial Landmines to Avoid as a Federal Employee.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Financial Landmines to Avoid as a Federal Employee.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Val Majewski:
Welcome back, everybody, to the Federal Retirement Show. I'm your host, Val Majewski, with American Benefits Exchange. And we've been really talking about a lot of benefits, a lot of pertinent information for federal employees just like you. But then we go into strategy talking, right? We talk about some ideas and things to really help you along your journey that can trip us up, because it's not just about knowing the information, it's about putting it to use. It's about timing. It's about actually getting up and doing something. So today I'm going to be talking a little bit differently. I would change gears a little bit, and the title of today's podcast is Financial Land Mines. Now, what does that mean? Well, everybody should know what a land mine is, but this is what trips us up, what causes us to get distracted to not do what we're supposed to do, to get in our way, be in it impediment, do a be a barrier to success. So we're going to talk about financial landmines when it comes to your benefits and retirement information. Now, there are a ton that we can talk about, trust me, just for the sake of timing, though, I've limited it to my top four financial landmines when it comes to federal employees and their benefits and retirement situation. Now, I will encourage you, if you find today's information pertinent, if you are hit by any one of these, you know, a light bulb is going off, a bell is going off and saying, hey, I need to do something.

Val Majewski:
I encourage you. Visit our website Federal Retirement Show dot com. Request some information. Let's go over your personal situation, get your questions answered and make sure that you are not getting tripped up by any of these financial landmines. Also, I encourage you to like our podcast, follow our podcast, subscribe wherever you listen to podcast, share it with your friends, those that you work with. Because our expertise, our area that we specialize in is federal employees. And guess who you work with? Every other federal employee that I'm ever going to have to talk to or help. So we encourage you, please, if you like our content, you like our show, share it with your friends. Do not keep us a secret. We love to help out as many federal employees as humanly possible. So let's dive into the financial landmines again. These are things that are tripping us up, things that are causing us to not get to where we want to be when it comes to our benefits and retirement information. Now, number one, lack of planning and this goes without saying. So this is people would say, well, Val, duh, you know, I'm planning to retire at some point. The government takes care of some things for me. I've got my pension that I'm going to get. I've got Social Security that I've been contributing to, I've been putting into TSP, so I should be taking care of. I'm going to put my 30 years in.

Val Majewski:
I'm going to get my gold watch. I'm going to be good to go. The government's going to take care of me. And that is a common misconception that you just work your years and you're going to be taken care of for life. You need to plan, you need to prepare. You need to know what your situation is going to look like. You need to evaluate and see if you need to make any changes. Now, there's that old cliche, right? Failing to plan is planning to fail. We don't want anybody to plan to fail. We want you to succeed. We want you to out hit your goals when it comes to retirement. We want you to get to retirement and give me a call and say, Val, I don't know what happened, but we messed up. We did something wrong. I have way too much money in retirement. There's a problem here. Nobody is ever going to say that to me. But that's the problem I want you to have. If we can say it's a problem, write with air quotes. The problem is I overprepared and I have way too much money in retirement. That would be a great problem to have, don't you think? So we want to make sure that you have a plan. Now, having a plan comes with answering some questions. Now, these are by no means all the questions that you need to answer, but to plan properly. When do you plan on retiring? When would you like to retire? Do you have an end goal in mind? How much money will you need in retirement? What was your lifestyle look like? What is it that you want to do in retirement? And what do I mean by that? Now you don't have to do anything as far as a job, but an ideal situation.

Val Majewski:
Do you have a hobby? Do you like to golf? I certainly do. Do you want a golf every day? Do you like to travel? Do you like to go visit family? Maybe there are grandkids involved or your own children you want to go visit. What is it that you want to do in retirement? Do you want to paint? Do you have a certain hobby or a part time job that you want to get into? That's up to you. But everybody's situation is different, right? If you're watching this with two different people, if there's two federal employees, look at the person next to you and say, hey, what is it that you want to do? I bet you it's probably different than what you want to do because everybody's individual situation is different. Now, once you realize what you want to do and how much money you need, we can run your report and we can see if you're hitting those goals, if you're on track to hit those goals. If not, do you need to save more money for retirement? If the answer is yes, well, how is that money going to get there? You can't just say, I need to save more and I hope that it happens.

Val Majewski:
You have to actually get up and do something right. You have to decide to take additional money out of each paycheck and put it somewhere, put it towards TSP, a supplemental retirement account, put it in savings, whatever it might be. If you need to save more money, number one need to understand if you need to save more money, that's where getting your personal benefits and retirement review, getting your reports created comes in. But then you have to take some action. Right. And we'll get into that in just a second. But the first financial landmine is not having a plan. The misconception is that the government is going to take care of you and everything is set as long as you get your years in. That is not always the case. So you have to take the initiative and create your own plan. Number two, this is big procrastination. Now, I'm the first to admit when it came to high school or college, I was a huge procrastinator. Right. You had a month to do a project. You're doing it the day or two before. Maybe even just the night before. Right. Well, retirement, your planning for retirement is not like cramming for an exam or a test or a project the night before. You can't just say, hey, I'm going to do it all at the last minute and it's all going to be good.

Val Majewski:
It takes time and time can have a huge effect on your savings, huge effect on your savings. If you start it early, you're probably extremely thankful and grateful that you did it, that somebody gave you the advice to start planning. Now it's never too early. In that case, right. It's never too early to start saving or preparing. And it's also never too late. Never too late. You may think, well, I'm only a few years out, but you can still do something with that time. You can take advantage of it. So it's never too late. But you need to start. You need to start. So it goes back to the first one saying, I need a plan. Now you may procrastinate and say, Oh yeah, I've realized I need a plan, but I'll get to it when I get to it, right? I'll get to it after this quarter. I'll get to it after the holidays. I'll start next year. We see this with what? Diet and exercise New Year's resolutions. I'll do it next year. And you keep putting it off. Putting it off. Putting it off. Next thing you know. You've waited a year or two before you've done anything. Why do people typically wait? Well, they give themselves their own excuses. They make rationalizations. I have plenty of time. I'll do it next year. I'll do it next quarter. I'll do it after the fiscal year. I'll do it after this big project is done.

Val Majewski:
No. If you realize that you need to do something or if you need to figure out if you need to do something because you need to get your report done and you need to see where you currently stand. It is time to take action now. No more procrastination, no more waiting, no more taking that time. Get it started. Now this goes into number three, the inertia factor. I'm a math and science guy, right? So if we ever learned laws of inertia going through school, we understand that an object at rest tends to stay at rest. And an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Right. There's so momentum built up once an object is in motion. Another way to put it. If you do what you've always done, you're going to get what you've always got. You can't expect something to change if you don't get moving. So back to procrastination. And another reason why you need to get moving is because once you start moving, you're going to find that you're going to build momentum. You're going to look and be like, Wow, I've been putting extra money aside for a couple of years now. Look at this balance that I have. Look at this additional money I've set aside. Look at this way that I've prepared. Look at the balance in my TSP now compared to what it was just a short time ago. You've built up some momentum, but if you put it off, if you procrastinate or you remain still, you cannot expect any major breakthroughs to happen.

Val Majewski:
By doing nothing, you have to actually get up and do it. You have to get moving. So just look, you're looking at inertia and all that stuff. Forget the fancy science terms. Science terms. Get up and do something right. When it comes to your benefits of retirement, the first step that I always recommend. Get a personalized benefits and retirement review. See where you currently stand, where you currently are. And that way you realize if you need to do something else in addition to what is already going on, chances are the answer is going to be yes. Now, if you realize you need to do something, do not procrastinate any further. Let's create a plan. So that you can build some momentum and get to where you want to be. Right. It makes sense. Common sense, but common sense doesn't always prevail. And then there's timing and other things. Let's get it done. That's a piece of mind that you want to have knowing that you've created a plan. You've started to build momentum. And when you get to your desired timeline for retirement, whether that's at a certain age or a certain amount of years of service, you're going to be exactly where you want to be, exactly where you have planned to be. So, number one. Create a plan. Number two. Do not procrastinate. Number three. Let's build some momentum and get moving. Number four. Okay. It's acting. The number four land mine is acting like the future will never come.

Val Majewski:
We'll never get here. Now. What do I mean by that? Well, when my son was born, my first child, people said appreciate every moment. They grow up fast and next thing you know is going to be driving off to college and it's going to seem like a blink of an eye. They grow up fast, right? Who? Who's heard that? I've seen all the hands go up, right? Yes. Same is true with your retirement. It's going to get here faster than you think. You may feel like, man, it's just. Just like yesterday I got hired. I filled out all this paperwork in a blink of an eye. 30 years in, I'm nearing retirement. What happened? Where did all the time go? Did you take advantage of all that time? Did you. Procrastinate a little bit. Did you build momentum? Did you think, hey, I've got plenty of time. And now it's here. Now the end is is coming up fast. So understand that if you believe if you know that you have to do something. If you've looked at these first three landmines and said, you know what, now you're right, I've got to do something. Well, how do I know that you believe that you have to do something. You have to take action. You have to take that first step. You have to reach out. And request help. Get a benefits and retirement view review done go to federal retirement show com fill out some information so we can help you.

Val Majewski:
Right. You need to take action again. It's never too late to start. Never. Even if you've only feel like you've got a couple of years left, you need to know where you stand. So there's no surprises. Now, what are we going to do for you if you say, okay, I want to make a plan, I don't want to procrastinate anymore. I want to start building momentum and I'm not going to act like the future is never going to get here. I need to start today. Now, what am I need to do? Well, you go again to federal retirement show dot com, you request some information simple fill out the form will help you. Number two, you're going to get a personalized benefits and retirement review. We create a workbook for you. You can see here on the left the Federal Employee Benefits Workbook. We'll go over everything your family, your pension, your retirement, your survivor benefit plan. We'll talk about TSP, Social Security. The first supplement, if you're eligible for that, will lay it all out. It's a good reference piece, too, because there's a lot of information in there. Not only is it customized and personalized for you and your unique situation, but there's a lot of other information reference material in there that you can go back to at a future time. And we try to make it as easy as possible to understand. You'll also get a supplemental report.

Val Majewski:
That's what's shown here on the right, and that is just more of the basic numbers, right? So it's more of an outline and you can get to the the nitty gritty and see what your numbers are. So informational with numbers. And then just the supplemental report, which has basically just the numbers, right? We want to make sure you have all this information and we can update it as we go. So once we do this initially, it's not like it has to set in stone. You can call me and say, now we need to update the report. I got a pay raise. My timeline has increased our plan on staying longer. Can we rerun the numbers? Yes, absolutely. Our system saves all the data and we can simply rerun it, update the information. Click print. Send it out to you and we can do this all virtually too. It can be done either face to face or we can do it virtually creating PDFs and sending them and talking over the phone or Zoom. So why don't we talk about this today? Financial landmines. What was the purpose? Try to just bring to light some of the things that trick people up when it comes to basic retirement planning, especially when it comes to federal employees in my history, ten plus years working with federal employees. This is what I've seen and reasons why people get tripped up. You know, I hear this all the time. I wish I would have met you five years ago.

Val Majewski:
Ten years ago. 20 years ago. I said, Well, you know what? You didn't. And I apologize, but you've got me now. How can we help you prepare and make sure you're set up properly? This is it. Avoiding these landmines, getting your personal benefits and retirement review done. So you know exactly where you stand and how you're trending as you're moving closer and closer and closer to retirement and ultimately hitting the goals that you want to hit, having the retirement that you want to have, not the retirement that the person next to you has or somebody else is telling you you should have, hitting the retirement goals that you have and living in retirement the way you want to live. So I appreciate you taking the time to learn about again, my top four financial landmines when it comes to federal benefits and retirement. I encourage you go to federal retirement show dot com requesting information get a report done. We'd love to help. If you need more information on other topics relating to federal benefits and retirement, go and check out our previous episodes. As I mentioned, like subscribe to our podcast, share it with those that you work with. Just really looking forward to helping you out as many federal employees as humanly possible. Again, my name is Val Majeski with American Benefits Exchange. I really appreciate you tuning in to this episode and really looking forward to seeing you on one of our feature sessions.

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