#123 TSP Withdrawals: When, How, and Why to Start

Micah Shilanski  00:00

Welcome back to another great episode of Plan Your Federal Eetirement, I’m your host, Micah Shilanski, and today we’re going to be talking about something that affects every single federal employer. We’re going to be talking about a large component of your retirement plan that sometimes gets put on autopilot when really we should be taking a little bit more of an attentive approach to this, because it plays such a big portion in your retirement, in your cash flow, and the things that you get to do every single day, and of course, that’s your TSP, your Thrift Savings Plan, and really understanding what these options are, nd I also want to make sure we’re spending a little bit of time telling some stories of when things go well, but also when some things don’t go well, right? In some ways, problems can be avoided, and for that, I wanted to make sure we brought on boy, a reoccurring guest on the episode, one of our great financial advisors, Christian Sakamoto. Christian, welcome to the pod.

Christian Sakamoto  00:49

 Micah, I’m excited to be chatting with you today, thanks for the warm welcome. TSP, as we always talk about, is one of the better benefits that you have as federal employees, we love the TSP, and in particular, when you’re working, there’s lots of really good things there lots of good, solid investment choices, lots of just simple, simple things that, over time, that TSP grows, just because you’re putting more money in, you’re getting a match. The big thing that we’re looking at is, when it comes time to taking money out of the TSP, right? What are those distribution options, and that’ll be what we focus our conversation on today.

Micah Shilanski  01:30

You know, Christian, as we talkabout, right? There’s kind of these three phases of life that we go through. We go through no more on the accumulation phase, when it comes to money, right? Where we’re saving, we’re building, we’re growing money, and the TSP is fantastic that, right? The dollar cost averaging is fantastic,the limited fees inside of the TSP, the limited investment choices, yeah, I know there’s a mutual fund window, but almost nobody’s using that right now, so the limited investment choice is actually a really good thing, because we get to simply make decisions between five different funds. Yes, the L funds are out there, but that’s just a combination of the five that are there, right? So it’s only choosing between five, which is a really good thing, and accumulation is such an important part of our life and such a big part of our life, up until retirement, but then as we get close to retirement, we go to two other phases quickly we go through the preservation phase, which is, I have enough now, I just want to keep it right? The market’s been up, market’s been down, market’s all over the place, like I want to make sure I keep my money, how do I preserve it safely? Then we quickly transition to a really important stage in our life, the one we cannot screw up, which is the distribution phase, and that’s the third phase that we’re going to go through, and that distribution phase is so important because this is all the money that you have short of you going back to work, right? This is your entire life savings and and I don’t mean that to say that to scare anyone, right? You’ve probably done a great job of savings. It’s probably going to be enough money as long as you use it wisely, but you got to follow some really stringent rules that boundaries, let’s say, to make sure you stay on track, and make sure you stay down the narrow path of retirement, to make sure you have the cash flow that you want. So Christian, I are going to talk about today is we’re joking before when we’re preparing for this, and Christian, you said, Well, I don’t want to scare the people, I’m like, well, I kind of do, because these are real things that happen, right? We’re not making any of this stuff up, but I want to tell you these stories, and so you can get mad at me, we’re trying to scare you, but I would rather you avoid these problems that sometimes Christian I run into and now we have to fix and sometimes we can fix them, sometimes we can’t, sometimes everything’s okay, and sometimes it’s not, and I would so prefer you to learn from other people’s mistakes and the lessons that we go through to make sure your retirement doesn’t have that. Christian is that fair? 

Christian Sakamoto  03:37

Yeah, 100%, and I think the one particular story that we were thinking about actually happened to one of my clients. This is area in 2025 this is back in 2024 and this particular client had a TSP balance that we wanted to transfer to a traditional IRA, and the goal was to do that by the end of the year, and in fact, we were also then going to be doing a Roth conversion, taking some of that money that was in the pre tax traditional IRA, and moving it, transferring it, doing a Roth conversion, moving it to a Roth IRA, paying the taxes, unfortunately, it wasn’t done in time, and so this got pushed off a little bit too late into that November, late November phase, and so the check from the TSP didn’t reach the IRA in time for us to then be able to do the Roth conversion. In fact, the check reached the the IRA, but it still needed time to clear, and that’s all part of that process that the check just didn’t clear in time, and you only have, you know, $100 in the IRA until the check clears five business days later, a week later, and so a fourth day for this client, it just wasn’t done in time. Now, ultimately, this is just a story that we have to tell and just to remind. That when it comes to anytime we’re making changes inside of the TSP, we want to build a little bit of buffer time, just in case something goes wrong, and we have those cases, and Micah, I know you’ve got examples of maybe a lost TSP check that actually never made it, and they have to resend a new one, and so we have to really just be mindful about that.  Oh, I love that, I love that, and not to beat a dead horse, but we’re planners, and so using our stories with real life examples, it gives us that much more confidence that we need to build in that padding, so let’s look at, then, the options for taking money out of the TSP, aside from just leaving it right, you can always just leave your money inside the TSP. As a retiree, you also have the option for a lump sum, you just take it all out, put it on black, and now you have all your money in a bank account, that’s an option. You also have the option for partial distributions, partial withdrawals. Those can be set up monthly, quarterly, even annually. You have the option to move your TSP into the TSP annuity, that would be the Met Life Snoopy annuity, where you move some or all of it to the TSP annuity, or lastly, you have the option to transfer it to a traditional IRA, or transfer it to an IRA. If you’ve got Roth TSP, it goes to a Roth IRA. Traditional tsp goes to a traditional IRA. So let’s dive a little bit deeper into those options Micah, and just talk about that as we’re retirees, what those options are?

Micah Shilanski  05:20

I thought we just picked on your problems, not mine, thanks for thanks for bringing that one up. No, these are, these are good things, right? So timeline is what I want to put this one under Christian that the timeline is so important right now, when people are preparing to retire, we look at the retirement application, and I generally give clients a range. If everything is normal, everything looks good in your time, medication, there’s nothing weird. I’ll talk about what weird means in a minute, there’s nothing weird. Then I’m gonna say, hey, it’s probably six to eight months before you get your first or full retirement check. Let’s plan on zero income for the first six to eight months. Now. Does that normally happen? No, normally they get, they get a partial payment that going to be sooner than that, the interim payment, right? They’re going to get that in a couple of months, and the retirement is probably going to be adjudicated within that six months, if it’s if it’s normal and everything’s easy. So why do we say six to eight months? Because we’d rather prepare you for the worst case situation, right? Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, and you know what, if we planned on eight months of no pension income, and we had a plan, cash flow plan for that, and your pension came in four months, are you okay? Absolutely. But if we said it’s going to be four months and it took eight to get your pension and you didn’t have the money, is this the same thing? No, it’s absolutely not, this is not okay, right? So this is the reason we want to put in some padding in there. So what’s a weird retirement if you’re going to have a divorce, and your ex is going to get a portion of your pension, right? If you’re remarried, well, I say weird, that’s something that’s outside of the easy scope of OPM. What’s an easy scope of OPM? I work for the same age, for 30 years. It’s super clear, there’s no breaks in service, I really didn’t transfer anything, I didn’t buy anything back. I didn’t take anything out, right? That’s a simple, easy, normal retirement is what I want to classify that as. So anything besides that, I start stacking months on, and so OPM is going to have time to really get to that and to issue it correctly, so these are things you got to know in retirement, but Christian as you just pull it out, that’s the same thing with the TSP, right? The TSP, we have to have a timeline on, and while the TSP generally doesn’t get involved so much in and the divorce decree standpoint of it generally, that would happen at the time of the time of the divorce, not at the time of retirement. There’s still a delay process that can happen, and what I think catches people off guard is they’re like, oh, it normally takes four to six weeks to take money out of the TSP. That’s no big deal, I’ll just wait till the end of the year, but the problem is, you and everyone else waited to the end of the year, and there’s a bunch of time off at the end of the year where the TSP is closed, there’s holidays, et cetera that are going to happen, and it’s now no longer four to six weeks, it’s two months to potentially get money out of the TSP, and yes, I’m painting kind of worst case scenarios here, but we got to have that padding time in there, so if you’re starting anything, and I know this is like beginning of the year, right? This is March we’re talking about this. The reason we’re talking about it now is if you’re planning any of these great tax strategies that Chris and I are going to talk about. To do these do not wait till November to say, hey, I need to move money out of the TSP to figure this stuff out, it could be too late, you need to move it sooner. In order to get it done now, you got to be eligible to move it, so there could be a case where you just can’t, and sometimes we’re in that situation and we’re just going to do the best we can, and we’re going to let the chips fall where they lay, but yeah, there’s been issues where TSP checks have been lost, we’ve had to get them reissued, right? And that screws up tax planning, TSP says they sent out the million bucks, the million bucks never showed up, that’s a little bit of a heart compensation for us and the client right now, good news is it all got resolved, which is fantastic, TSP canceled the check, reissued the check, the money came in, but now we’re two and a half months into a transfer, not four weeks into a transfer that takes place. The same thing can happen with withdrawals, et cetera. So what’s the moral of the story? We’re gonna get into your distribution options in a second, the moral of the story is you gotta have padding anytime we’re doing this planning, especially on the government side, right? And our listeners, come on, you’ve been federal employees for a long time. You know how this works, right? There’s a process to go through, and sometimes that process is longer than we like, but it just is what it is, so how do we control that? We put time on our side, right? Time buys us options, so the sooner we’re planning, the sooner we’re moving to these things, the better your retirement is going to be.

Christian Sakamoto  09:23

So the first one, leave it. Can we really leave the money there forever?  You can’t, because of those pesky RMDs, right? 

Micah Shilanski  10:35

There’s Required Minimum Distributions right? Now, the good news is our listeners know this, right? RMDs have gone through several evolutions the last several years. Their current evolution is somewhere between 73 and 75 is when you have to make your first Required Minimum Distributions. They did lower the penalty. The penalties used to be 50% if we failed to comply, now they’re down to 25 you might be able to argue them down to 10, but you know, 25% is probably a penalty, and plus taxes on top of that, and it’s pretty steep, so be careful with your leave it options is not as simple as it does sound. And then Christian, we have our lump sum options, right? I like to call this the Vegas option, but where do you see people really want to do a lump sum out of their TSP? Like, what’s the purpose of that they’re looking for? 

Christian Sakamoto  11:15

You know, it would be like to pay off their mortgage, right? They read something online, they see something on YouTube that says, Let’s pay off the mortgage, be debt free and shoot now I just have groceries and gas to pay for, right? Well, I guess you could do that. 

Micah Shilanski  11:34

Concept is that sounds great, right? Pay off the mortgage, be debt free, like I feel great about that, but there’s a little theory versus reality here, right?

Christian Sakamoto  11:42

Right, right, right, and the biggest one being that lump sum could push you into a higher tax bracket that we all know would happen if we took out several $100,000 right? If you’re in a 12% or 22% tax bracket, getting bumped to the 32, 35 right? Whatever it may be that’s a lot of tax money that we might not have needed to pay if we just either kept the mortgage, maybe we look at refinancing, there’s lots of other options that you have, maybe you do an extra principal payment, right? But that’s where the biggest one wants to come off. 

Micah Shilanski  12:15

You know Christian and with this, right? I know Dave Ramsey talks about a huge Dave Ramsey fan, by the way, fantastic stuff, and he talks so much about being debt free, which is great in the part that I push back on, and Dave talks to more people in a day than we probably talk to in our lifetime, but the part that I’m gonna push back on is saying, what’s the cost of being debt free, of just clearing out the chips in order to move it? We have a white paper on our website, plan your federal retirement.com about paying off the house, and it really kind of shows that it can be really expensive. This can be in the loans as well, and you could look at it and say, hey, I got a mortgage right now, maybe you got a rock star mortgage at 3% where there were several years ago, maybe you have a current mortgage at 7% with current rates right somewhere there, which even 7% is that that high of a mortgage compared to 30 year averages, but I, what I got to do is I got to look at if I’m going to pay off the house. Is number one, who is the first person that gets paid anytime I take money out of my TSP, aunt IRS, right? The government. Now, I could have money in Roth, okay, that could come out tax free if you meet the rules, which is always great, but then also, I got to look at it and say, okay, how is that money in TSP invested? Or how’s that money my IRA invested? And what’s it doing on average, right? Clients at 3% mortgages, and I’m like, hey, your investments, on average, even with downturns, are outpacing 3% hands over fist, right? Tons, right here, does it really make sense to pay this off, or does it make sense to come up with a five year plan and slowly pay the money off over five years with your proceeds right of the money that you’re going to earn versus a lump sum, so there’s more than one option that’s here, and it’s your money, right? It’s your choice. Our job, Christianized job, is to help you make an educated, informed decision as you’re going through this, but just be careful with that one, because there’s not really an undo button with this.  One of the mistakes that I see as a financial advisor after federal employees go to retire is not understanding how it’s different, when you’re in accumulation mode, saving money for retirement, building your TSP to you’re in the distribution mode, pulling money out of the TSP, sometimes we think that we can manage everything the same, then it comes to retirement, and we, all of a sudden, we have this flood of different types of emotions, and it only happens to people that generally aren’t emotional about investments, and if you are, it happens to you even more, so we put together a guide for you, a free guide in order to help know what questions you need to ask, know what learning lessons are out there, and how should you build a proper distribution plan with your TSP. This is so important, because how you got here in order to be able to retire is not how you’re going to stay retired. There are some differences that we need to keep in mind, and more importantly, we have to come up with a plan that not if, when the market goes down for a long period of time, how do we say dispatch in investors, how do we hold for the long run, but have a plan that you won’t run out of money. In order to get your free guide, jump on our website at planyourfederalretirement.com/tspafterretirement. That’s planyourfederalretirement.com/tspafterretirement. Take control of your retirement savings. Get this guide so you can make smarter decisions about your retirement till then, happy planning!

Christian Sakamoto  15:30

And it’s as much as a math question, right? Comparing interest rates on the mortgage versus interest rates that your accounts can grow by versus it is an emotional question, especially when they’re talking about paying off a mortgage, because emotionally, again, to your point, that might be where you’re headed, and that might be where your mind is, but we have some other options to pay down that mortgage a little bit sooner. Well, another option that you have I mentioned earlier with the TSP post retirement would be partial withdrawals, and you can set those up online, either it be a monthly option, quarterly or annually, and those tend to be probably the more preferred way to access tsp money, as opposed to lump sums that you either sporadically take money out, because why? Well, you’re used to making money every two weeks while you’re working. Every two weeks you get a new check that hits, and so if you time it right, you’ve got your money that comes in from the pension when you’re retired, and then you can also then set it up that your monthly TSP withdrawal would come out as well, and essentially have two paychecks a year that come in that you can then base your monthly living expenses on, right?

Micah Shilanski  16:44

No, it’s a really good way to think about it, and of course, the big thing whenever you’re doing partial withdrawals and taking money out is, as you were talking about understanding the taxes, understanding the longevity, understanding your investment plan, right? So important with these key points about saying, okay, that distribution I’m gonna take out, how long is it gonna last? What rules do I need in place to make sure that how I’m taking my money out is really set up for the long run? So emphasizing that is really important. Christian, you know, we talk about this all the time with clients, but money’s emotional, it really is, and it’s one thing to look at something hypothetically and saying, oh, this is how it’s going to work in retirement, it’s much different to walk that path and to live in and be like, holy crap, this is all the money I have, right? I’m going to retire with X amount of dollars in TSP that it I’m not contributing now anymore, how do I make sure my wife and I never outlive this money? That’s an important question, and you really got to be pretty disciplined to make sure you guys are taken care of. Sorry, I know that’s kind of preaching a little bit on there.

Christian Sakamoto  17:45

No, no, no, that’s good. Now, one other thing to highlight when it comes to any distributions, whether it is a lump sum or a partial, would be the pro rata distribution rules, the proportionate distribution rules that unfortunately, the TSP is still subject to well, how do those work, and why is that important? Well, as you’ve mentioned earlier, you’ve got different investment choices inside of the TSP, two that are on the safer side, the G fund would be government securities, and then you also have the F Fund, which stands for the Fixed Income Fund, and those would be more bonds, so cash and bonds, the G and the F Fund, but then you also have three other funds, the C, S and I funds, C for common stock, large US companies, S for smaller.

Micah Shilanski  18:34

That’s like the S&P 500, right? Large companies, the C fund, S&P 500 would be the equivalent?

Christian Sakamoto  18:39

Yep, exactly, and then, you know, S fund would be, you know, Russell 2000 essentially, just smaller US companies, and then the last one would be the I fund that would be the International.

Micah Shilanski  18:51

And they just updated that, I’m sorry to interrupt Christian, they just really changed that I fund, the composure of it this last year as well, so just something to know as as well, which is, I think, kind of good, but I don’t know, we’ll find out in the end how it works.

Christian Sakamoto  19:03

I think they put a little bit more Asian companies in there, instead of it just being more Europe based. Yeah, yeah. That is good, that is good. So G and F are safer, C, S and I are going to be on the growth side, so let’s just say, an example is you need 1000 bucks a month, and let’s say, for very simple purposes, 60% of your money is in the C fund, the S&P 500 ish fund, and then 40% of your money is in the G fund, and that’s the cash side, and you take out 1000 bucks. So every month, 60% of the 1000 so $600 is getting sold out of the C fund, and 40% or $400 is getting sold out of the G fund, and that’s happening every single month that you’re taking that distribution out, as long as that’s how your allocations, that’s how your TSP is set up, just with your investments, you can always change those allocations of course, but let’s just say that they continue to be the same. The downside with those proportionate distributions is that great, if the market’s up 20% you can take money off the top, you can sell when the market’s up, you can even sell when the market’s flat, but what happens when there’s another 2008 what happens when the market’s down? Do you really want to be selling your C fund when it’s got cut in half. 

Micah Shilanski  19:04

Or just a 2020 when it just fell 30% right? Just a little correction within a couple of months, right? 

Christian Sakamoto  19:44

Yeah, there’s, it doesn’t have to just be 2008 there’s all kinds of downturns that happen even just throughout the year, so unfortunately, not to drag this on too long, you have to be aware that that TSP does have those proportionate distribution rules, those pro rata distribution rules, and just be aware how that plays into your overall investment goals and all the other investments that you have.

Micah Shilanski  20:54

Yeah, that’s that’s really kind of a big question, right there, so again, this is going to go back to our rules, right? And we’re a buckets based firm, right? We really like but different buckets for things, for cash flow, for savings and definitely for investment distributions, but how, what is your plan to take money out? I know we did another pause on this. We won’t believe it too much, but what’s your plan to take money out in a down market? It’s easy to take money out and up market. What’s your plan to take money out in a down market so you don’t limit your lifestyle and the things you need to do? Christian, I’d say the next one is distribution options, that tsp annuity, and boy, I gotta say a bunch of red flags always come up when we’re talking about an annuity, especially the TSP one, because it’s an irreversible option. So anytime you’re gonna make an irreversible decision, I think it’s worth putting up a red flag, coming to a complete stop and be like, hey, before I make this irreversible decision, is this a good idea? Does that mean the TSP annuity is bad? No, but I don’t think it’s good for most people. You know, I just really haven’t seen that kind of play out with the restrictions, so we won’t belabor it too much, just big red flag on that one before you pull the trigger on that TSP annuity really understand, you know what it means, because it works a lot differently than other annuities that are out there on the marketplace.

Christian Sakamoto  22:02

Well, last distribution option would be transferring it to an IRA, right? Remember, we’re not using the rollover word, and we’ve mentioned how before rollover, if done correctly, there’s not a direct rollover, it’s a rollover, they send you the TSP participant at check for the balance, and they send an IRS 20 or they don’t withhold for taxes, and then you’re responsible for paying the taxes, right? So that’s the downside there.

Micah Shilanski  22:28

Well, with that Christian, I mean, on the rollover side, one of the big reasons that I’m so adamant that our firm does not use that nasty R word, right? And we only talk about the transfer talking to advisor last year, and long story short, there’s a $60,000 tax mistake made, not not a $60,000 rollover, it’s a $60,000 tax mistake made because they did not do a transfer versus rollover, it was handled improperly, and it could have been because there’s a little fast and loose actions that was happening with what these rules are, I don’t know, this little bit of speculation was kind of brought in a little bit to talk about what happened and ways to fix it, etc. But this is why I’m very adamant that says, no, we do transfers, and I don’t think there’s hardly a time that you should be able to use that R word. So keep that transfer word always top of mind, because again, I want you to learn from other people’s mistakes and not have a $60,000 mistake on your own.

Christian Sakamoto  23:19

And we have our own unfortunately, that you’ve told that story before, but not to, not to drag that on, but yeah, that’s we got to use that transfer. So that is an option where, whether it’s a full transfer of every dollar that’s in the TSP, or it’s a partial transfer, you transfer it to the IRA, your individual retirement account. Traditional TSP goes to traditional IRA, Roth TSP goes to Roth IRA. That option allows you now when money is inside of an IRA, it allows you more investment choices. You have the option to work with an advisor that can manage it, you have lots of other control that you might not have had inside of the TSP, one big one being the distribution rule that I was just talking about that the TSP has. You no longer have that proportionate distribution rule inside of a traditional IRA or Roth IRA, but also better tax planning options that are available, one being at least from 2024 the not the ability to do a Roth conversion inside of the TSP, you can do Roth conversions inside of a traditional IRA and 2025 yeah, in 2025 and you also are able to do other things like qualified travel distribution, some other neat tax planning strategies that otherwise wouldn’t be available inside of the TSP, and that is an option, you either move some or all of it to an IRA and transfer it. 

Micah Shilanski  24:47

So one of the things to think about right is on distribution options, and this isn’t so much talking about for retirees, but it is loans. One of the changes that came out several years ago was that if you had a tsp loan, this is a previous law, if you had. A TSP loan and you retired, you had to pay that loan off within a pretty quick period of time. Otherwise, there’s taxes and penalties on the quote distribution the unpaid loan balance. But now that’s changed. Now you can actually carry a loan into retirement, which is kind of interesting. Don’t not recommending this, right? But if you happen to be in a situation where you have a loan with your TSP, this isn’t like, oh my gosh, I gotta find a way to pay it off right away. You can keep making those payments. You cannot take an additional loan from the TSP, and that makes sense, because these are for employees, and you’re no longer employed when you’ve separated from the federal service. I do have to say some some cautionary tales with this one as well. Kind of the same concept with paying off the house, right? Is when people go to take loans out of the TSP, it says, Okay, what are we really going to do with that money? Is it really going to help us? Is it really going to hurt us? Like, what’s the balance with this? And whenever we take money out of the TSP, even alone, kind of the what I hear back from people’s Micah, you know, the rate is cheap. I don’t know what it is now, 4.75% somewhere around there. It’s 4.7% interest, and I’m paying myself the money back. This is such a good deal versus getting a car loan, so okay, well, there’s some truth in that, right? But the other part of the story we got to look at is that means the money you’re taking out of the TSP as a loan is not working for you. What does that mean? It’s not invested, right? So if you had your money in the C, S and I funds, whatever that allocation is, I mean, look at last year, I mean, oh my gosh, right, the markets are up, fantastic, even cut that in half, that’s still better than the than a loan rate that you could get for a car, so sometimes I hear Micah, I’m going to loan myself the money from the TSP, I’m going to pay myself 4% interest and change, and I want to do this, this car loan, so good you can do that, right? However, let’s look at current market rates, look at your average rate of return over five years, and which one performs better net at the end of the day, where did you make more money? That’s what I care about at the end, after taxes, after inflation, is then net, where did you make more money? And then we could look at it and you could say, you know, my God, that’s not enough money. I just want to be debt free, I’m going to do this anyways. okay, well, that’s your choice, but I want you to make an educated, informed decision with this, because sometimes it’s too easy to take a loan from the TSP when we’re not really looking at is this the best financial option for us?

Christian Sakamoto  27:10

Exactly, and you have to put it in that context too, that we do have to look at the math. We have to dissect it a little bit, and what’s that net going to be at the end of the day, it’s nice to know there’s those options that you can borrow against the TSP, it’s nice to know that they’ve updated the rules as well when you retire, that it doesn’t have to just be paid off, but use it seldomly, right? Use it with prudence.

Micah Shilanski  27:33

All right. Well, this podcast is all about action items. I know we’re getting a little long, and this really appreciate you guys listen to us as we go through so many great things in here, but let’s talk about some action items. So Christian, why don’t you kick it off for us? What’s kind of the the first action item our listeners should make sure they’re doing? 

Christian Sakamoto  27:48

Yeah, I would just say, as we’re talking about the TSP, just review current allocations, making sure that they’re in alignment with your goals, with your investment goals, when you’re planning to take money out, your goals with buckets and how much you want outside of the market, how much you want in the market, just take a review and see, are they in the right allocations, or do we need to possibly look to rebalance?

Micah Shilanski  28:10

I love it. Other thing I wanna say is, what is your retirement plan, right? Not when are you gonna retire, that’s part of a retirement plan, but what is your retirement plan? In our world, we have a process of success working with retirees, work with us, work with someone else, but this is what you need to do. It is a five step process, goes through estate planning, risk management, retirement income, investments and taxes. You got to go through all five of those areas to really build a robust retirement plan for yourself, so make sure you have that, and inside of that, you got to be looking at taxes, and I love to say, what’s your 10 year tax plan? Not sure what your one year tax plan, right? One year tax plan is simple, lower my taxes today, that’s everybody’s one year tax plan, right? But when I start spreading that question out over 10 years, it’s not just about today, it’s over the next 10 years, the next next 10 years, it’s 20 years from now, what’s your tax plan to beat the IRS out of 10s of 1000s of dollars legally over the next 10 to 20 years. If you don’t have one, you need to find someone to work with to get this because this is a huge game changer for your retirement planning.

Christian Sakamoto  29:11

That’s right,

Micah Shilanski  29:11

Awesome. Well, Christian, thank you again so much for being on the podcast, really appreciated going through this to all of our listeners, our goal is to help transform federal employee benefit information to get great information out there, the way we do that is by you sharing this information with other people, and until next time, Happy Planning!

Christian Sakamoto  29:27

Happy Planning!