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Video: The Daily Show on Apple's Taxes
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Tammy Flanagan
Tammy Flanagan is the senior benefits director for the National Institute of Transition Planning Inc., which conducts federal retirement planning workshops and seminars. She has spent 25 years helping federal employees take charge of their retirement by understanding their benefits.
For more retirement planning help, tune in to "For Your Benefit," presented by the National Institute of Transition Planning Inc. live on Mondays at 10 a.m. EDT on Federalnewsradio.com, or on WFED AM 1500 in the Washington-metro area.
Basic Retirement Computations
May 4, 2007 In last week's column, we opened our discussion of the importance of estimating your future retirement benefits. You should request a retirement estimate from your agency's human resources office at least a year before you plan to retire. This estimate will be prepared by a trained retirement specialist who works ...
Estimating Your Benefits
April 27, 2007 In my travels to various federal agencies, I've found that employees are trying desperately to understand their retirement benefits and would love to be able to project their retirement income. Often, they are very dependent on the assistance of retirement specialists at their agencies to explain the intricacies of various ...
TSP Withdrawal Quiz
April 13, 2007 Based on the responses to last week's column on two of the Thrift Savings Plan withdrawal options, some of you still want to know which is the "best" choice. Well, here's one thing I've learned in my experience as a federal benefits specialist. Never give advice to an employee on ...
Life Expectancy vs. Life Annuity
April 6, 2007 If you want to get withdrawals from your Thrift Savings Plan account in the form of monthly payments, you have two options: Take a life annuity or get monthly payments based on your life expectancy. There seems to be some confusion about how each of these works. So let's take ...
Back to Work, Again
March 30, 2007 Last week's column on what happens if you seek to return to federal work after retirement sure generated a lot of reaction. So I decided it would be worth exploring the subject again, and looking specifically at how the rules have changed at the Defense Department. First, here are some ...
Back to Work
March 23, 2007 For some federal employees, the idea of retiring from a government job but continuing to work is appealing. But what if that work takes you right back to a civil service position? It does happen. Some feds even retire on a Friday and return to the same office on Monday. ...
Service Interruption
March 16, 2007 The Iraq War has caused many civilian federal employees who serve as military reservists and National Guard members to be called up to active duty. Since the war started in 2003, I've received lots of questions regarding how such military service is treated when a veteran returns to the civilian ...
Part-Time Rules, Part Two
March 9, 2007 Last week, we began our exploration of the effects of shifting to part-time work on federal retirement benefits. In that column, I promised that this week we'd look in more detail at how part-time employment is treated under the Civil Service Retirement System and the Federal Employees Retirement System. So ...
Part-Time Rules, Part One
March 2, 2007 Have you ever thought how nice it might be to ease into retirement by working your way down from 40 hours per week to a part-time schedule before retiring? I've had many requests over the years to address the issue of what effect such a move has on a federal ...
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
February 23, 2007 Every week, I talk to people at my seminars who are focused on retirement. Some are there because they're anxious to leave government soon. But others aren't. In 2001, the Government Accountability Office reported (GAO-01-509) that federal employees have become less likely -- by roughly 50 percent -- to retire ...
