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Tammy Flanagan

Tammy Flanagan has spent 30 years helping federal employees take charge of their retirement by understanding their benefits. She runs her own consulting business at www.retirefederal.com and provides individual counseling as well as online training for the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, Plan Your Federal Retirement and the Federal Long Term Care insurance Program. She also serves as the senior benefits director for the National Institute of Transition Planning Inc., which conducts federal retirement planning workshops and seminars.

For more retirement planning help, tune in to "For Your Benefit," presented by the National Institute of Transition Planning Inc. live on Federal News Radio on Mondays at 10 a.m. ET on WFED AM 1500 in the Washington-metro area. Archived shows are available on NITPInc.com.

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The Benefits of Retirement Counseling

May 24, 2018 I recently received an email from an employee that highlights a key issue: the loss of the personal contact that used to be the norm for retirement counseling in most federal agencies. Starting in the 1990s, the consolidation and centralization of retirement services and pre-retirement counseling has become ever more...

Are You Ready to Spend Your Retirement Savings?

May 17, 2018 Have you started to think about how you’re going to use your Thrift Savings Plan investments once you retire from federal service? Are you already retired? If you’re among the many people who have accumulated a small fortune, what are you going to do with it? Many federal employees have...

Change is Coming to Health Plans

May 10, 2018 News about changes to retirement and insurance benefits always gets the attention of employees who are planning to retire as well as those who already have. Sometimes the news is good, sometimes not. There’s already news about the 2018 insurance open season that is causing some buzz, even though open...

TSP Withdrawal Update

May 3, 2018 I’ve been receiving quite a few questions lately about what is happening with implementation of the changes to Thrift Savings Plan withdrawal options as a result of the TSP Modernization Act signed into law last November. The short answer is it’s going to take awhile. According to a fact sheet...

Where Retirement Is Headed

April 26, 2018 When I left federal service in 1988 as a retirement counselor at the FBI, I fully expected that my position would become obsolete within a few years, because it seemed that retirement processing was becoming automated. We were told that in the not-too-distant future, employees would only need to decide...

Where Benefits Are Today

April 19, 2018 In last week’s column, Where Retirement Benefits Came From, we looked at the origins of the retirement system, both nationally and in the federal government. This week, let’s examine how we got to where we are today. Recent history in regard to private sector as well as federal retirement plans...

Where Retirement Benefits Came From

April 12, 2018 Martin Luther King once said, “We are not makers of history, we are made by history.” When I was in school, I had a hard time coming up with a good reason to study history. My history teacher was very theatrical and tried to bring the subject to life by...

When Life Takes an Unexpected Turn

April 5, 2018 One of the “what-if’s” of any career is that an unanticipated health problem could derail your future retirement plans. This has happened to many federal employees who, due to an illness or injury, are no longer able to perform their federal job, but they’re also not yet eligible to retire....

Benefits Cuts Are (Probably Not) Coming!

March 29, 2018 In 1986, not long before the implementation of the Federal Employees Retirement System, CQ Researcher reported on the Reagan administration’s plans to replace the existing Civil Service Retirement System. “The president's 1987 budget once again proposes to make the new federal retirement system akin to private pension plans, but with...

Follow These Steps to a Smoother Retirement

March 22, 2018 The process of retiring can be smooth for some people and a nightmare for others. Is it just the luck of the draw? The good news is that according to the Office of Personnel Management, 76 percent of all claims received monthly are processed in 60 days or less. As...