If you’re a federal employee who is fast approaching retirement, the information and guidance you receive is crucial. But how do you know you’re being guided in the right direction? In episode 105 of the Federal Retirement Show, Val stresses the importance of receiving the right information from the right advisor in topics related to retirement and health insurance.
Don’t miss this episode if you’re looking to secure your financial future as a federal employee. Make sure to subscribe to The Federal Retirement Show for more episodes and leave us a review!
Have questions about retirement planning or other financial topics? Connect with Val and the topic could be featured in future episodes! Don’t forget to leave a review and share this podcast with anyone looking to boost their financial knowledge.
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American Benefits Exchange focuses on providing solid financial solutions to Federal, postal, and state employees as well as members of the United States Armed Forces and small businesses. American Benefits Exchange brings years of experience and knowledge to support these niche markets.
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9.6.24: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
9.6.24: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
But welcome back to the federal retirement show. I'm your host, Val Majewski with American Benefits Exchange. I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to learn about the content that we are providing, or to view the content we're providing, because it is for you, the federal employee that's looking for information about their benefits, retirement information, uh, top ten mistakes or just little known things that you wish you would have known when you first got hired. That's what this radio show podcast is all about. That's what the federal retirement show was founded on, was just to provide you this information, share some stories, share some insight so you can make the best decisions and be set up as well as possible as you venture through your working career and into retirement. So today, today we're going to be talking about a situation that just came up with a federal employee that I've recently been talking to and the topic, if you want to call it that is where are you getting your information from? Who are you talking to to get the answers to your questions? Are you talking to an expert, somebody that is specializing in that is knowledgeable, that knows what they're talking about when it comes to your benefits and retirement information? And I'll set the stage so this veteran employee is going to be retiring with full benefits this year by the end of the year.
Speaker1:
And they were talking about getting set up with their health insurance in retirement. This is the federal employee and the spouse in this case. And the spouse was talking to somebody with Medicare, right. Or about Medicare. This was not somebody that works for the Department of Medicare, the Medicare Department with the government. This was another insurance representative that specialized in Medicare and the spouse of this federal future retiree was asking questions about that, you know, what should we do? How does Medicare factor in with the health insurance from the government? And then what happens in retirement and all these things? And through that process, through the conversation, it came out that or came about from this person that specializes in Medicare, that the federal retiree was going to go under Cobra. If you're not familiar with Cobra. I'll explain that in a second. And that their, uh, coverage would not work with Cobra. Right. The Medicare coverage that this person was going to try and offer them was not going to cover them, along with or in conjunction with Cobra and this federal future. Retiree, right. This federal employee, future retiree was asking me the question, like, so what do I do about Cobra? What do I do if Cobra doesn't work or jive with Medicare in retirement? How does how is that going to operate? What do I do? What are my choices? And so you got to understand, first of all, Cobra is something that is generally provided to people that lose their health insurance coverage.
Speaker1:
I've gone through that in my experience when, um, if you don't know my background, I played baseball, uh, professionally for ten years, and if I stopped playing for a particular team or my contract ran out, my health insurance would run out until I picked up with another team and I'd go under. Cobra. And Cobra is a way to continue my health insurance coverage at full cost to me, and it could go for a maximum of 18 months in the situations that I was in. So this person was telling the spouse of this future retiree that the health insurance that he currently has, the federal employee health benefits, were not going to continue. He's going to go into Cobra and they've got to find another health plan because it's going to run out. Plus, any of the Medicare, uh, coverage that she could provide wasn't going to work with, in coordination with or conjunction with Cobra. It seemed, well, confusing and it was for them, which is why they were asking me the question. So first of all, I just want to let you know that federal employees are exempt from Cobra. You guys don't go in or have Cobra.
Speaker1:
You're exempt from it. So federal employees, if you're thinking, hey, what if I lose my job? What if I leave? I go under Cobra. You don't have Cobra. You're exempt from Cobra. Number two is this person that was trying to talk to them about Medicare did not understand that a federal retiree, if you retire with full benefits from the government, you have the ability to continue your health insurance coverage into retirement. So not only did this person confuse them as to how Cobra worked and in conjunction with Medicare and all this stuff, because I'll tell you, um, I didn't quite understand, you know, the logic behind all of it and the the conversation that they were having because what they gave me didn't really make a whole lot of sense. But this person did not realize that a federal employee that is retiring with full benefits could keep their federal employee health benefits and continue that into retirement. There doesn't have to be a change. There's not going to be any Cobra or loss of coverage. They're able to keep it. So again, the title being here and the thought is where are you getting your information from? Does the person you're talking to know what they're talking about? Do they know what they're talking about? Are they an expert in this? Um, you know, what is their knowledge level as far as as far as, you know, federal employee benefits, retirement, etc.? So explaining this to the the retiree, first of all, I went, look, federal employees are exempt from Cobra.
Speaker1:
Now there is there are ways that federal employees can continue your coverage if you are leaving service or, um, if for some reason you're going on to another job or whatever it is and you're not eligible to continue your federal employee health benefits. You can apply for what's called temporary continuation of coverage TCC, and that's kind of the federal version of Cobra, if you will. But if somebody were to leave service, they will get up to 31 days of no cost continuation of coverage. Then they can continue the coverage similar to Cobra, but it's up to 18 months and they would incur the full cost plus 2% extra for administrative fees, etc. and that's the way a federal government employee could continue their health care coverage if they leave service or, you know, choose to do something else for the time being and are not eligible to continue their federal employee health benefits or take them with them. But retirees retiring with full benefits can continue your federal employee health benefits. So Cobra or the TCC does not come into play in this example. So going back to this person. First of all, this person was relieved to understand that they did not have to go searching for new coverage in retirement, and they're going to be able to continue.
Speaker1:
It's amazing. Right? The information that is not provided to federal employees, something simple like, yes, you can continue your health coverage once you retire. And they had to rely on somebody who is not an expert in federal benefits to get some information on that. Unfortunately, that information was inaccurate, but they was very relieved to know that, yes, he can continue his federal employee health benefits in retirement. He can continue to keep his spouse on his federal employee health benefits and retirement. She's contemplating whether or not she's going to take Medicare Part B when he does retire. He has some time until he chooses that he's got another year. But it's important to note that he didn't understand or know his options with his health benefits. And number one, that wasn't properly given to him by his agency while he was working in number two. He had to rely on somebody that was not an expert to provide information, and if he did not talk to us, he could have gone on thinking that he needs to look for additional health care coverage and try to get other plans that were not necessary, because he can continue the health care coverage that he's used to using his federal employee health benefits plan. So where are you getting your information from? Are you talking to an expert? And this is just health benefits.
Speaker1:
Are you talking to an expert when it comes to your retirement, your calculation, your options? What about your TSP? What about your family? You know, are you talking to somebody that really knows how to mitigate your costs when it comes to to phegley over the course of your career? Are you talking to somebody that is an expert in helping folks with their TSP and sort through all the ins and outs when it comes to your thrift savings plan, and what all the options are for you when you retire. You know, misinformation is is one of the the biggest causes of the mistakes that we've talked about in previous episodes. And if you haven't seen the previous episodes, I encourage you to go back and sort through our library of episodes that we have with all this information, but we've created a pamphlet called The Top ten Mistakes Made by Federal Employees. And it's not all of the mistakes, but let's just say top ten and misinformation or getting inaccurate information from people that aren't experts are some of the the biggest causes of these mistakes. Yeah, I just I didn't know where I heard this or I thought this or somebody told me that, and that's why I made this decision. So when you look at your situation, your your benefits, your retirement, your planning, are you speaking with somebody who is an expert in, is knowledgeable in, focuses all of their time and specializes in helping federal government employees throughout their career and into retirement? If not, I highly encourage you to seek out an expert.
Speaker1:
Seek out somebody who knows exactly what the the benefits are. The answers are, and they're they're not ashamed to say that they don't know, but you can definitely check their credibility by asking them other questions, and they can go and research and find the right answers for you. If that's us, great. We would love to help. We would love to point you in the right direction, get you the information you're looking for. How do you do that? You go to our website. Ww dot Federal Retirement Show.com fill out the form. We'd be happy to get in touch with you. Answer any of the questions that you might have. Make sure you're pointed in the right direction. But if you go through your career with thinking, you know what you know and you think that that's accurate, you'd rather talk to somebody that is an expert to get validation, to get all of that confirmed that everything that you think you know is correct, because there's a lot of times, too, it's not just misinformation, it's a false sense of security that can lead to making mistakes, thinking, hey, I know all this already.
Speaker1:
I'm the expert myself. It's always great to get confirmation. Always great to to make sure that what you know is actually correct and that the direction you're going in, the choices that you're making based on that information are also correct and in your best interest. You don't want to get to retirement and say, oh, I wish I would have known or I wish you would have told me, or I wish I would have sat with you ten, 20, 30 years ago. So again, reach out to us, go to our website if you do have questions. Do you have heard information like this? Like this person in this example, uh, reach out to us. We want to want to make sure we sort through it. If something somebody gave you or information that somebody gave you is confusing. Doesn't make sense. Um, you're not sure what to to think of it. You don't know how to put your finger on this. Reach out to us. We'll sort through it with you. We'll go through the mess, we'll decipher it, and we'll figure out the right answer. And not only the right answer, but we'll put you in the right direction going forward. Right. Don't you want to make sure that every move that you make going forward is calculated and calculated to maximize and optimize your situation so you can retire when you want, how you want.
Speaker1:
Live the lifestyle that you've been working all this time for because people get to retirement. You want to enjoy it. You want to make sure that all of this was for the right reasons, and you can enjoy retirement. Like I said, retire how you want, when you want. So go to our website, fill out the form. We'd love to hear from you. If you do have suggestions of other episodes, we'd love to hear from you there. There's information you have not heard about. We want to give that to everybody. So it's not just for you. We don't want to keep it only for one person. We want to share it with others. That's why I love sharing these stories. So somebody misinformation be, uh, towards the end of their career could be something you learn early on in your career. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to view this session with us to talk about, uh, health insurance and, you know, some of the misconceptions that are out there, making sure that you're talking to an expert when it comes to your benefits and retirement. Be sure, as I said earlier, to check out our previous episodes, a lot of great content out there for you, and we look forward to seeing you on a future episode.
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