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#109 How Does Retirement Income Work – A Roadmap To Financial Freedom

Home » Pension Payments » Computation » #109 How Does Retirement Income Work – A Roadmap To Financial Freedom

Listen to the Full Episode:

Are you ready to turn your retirement savings into a reliable income stream? 

Understanding your spending goals and determining your net income is not just crucial, it’s the key to managing your cash flow during retirement. Whether it’s Social Security benefits, pensions, or your Thrift Savings Plan, knowing how to handle these various income sources can truly make all the difference in your retirement lifestyle.

Join Micah and Tammy as they explore the essentials of retirement income management. In this episode, they cover the essential things, from calculating your net income to navigating different sources of retirement income, including investment earnings and annuities. You’ll learn how to avoid common pitfalls and, most importantly, you’ll get practical advice that you can immediately apply to make the most of your retirement savings.

Ready to take control of your financial future? Tune in today for expert advice and take the first step toward a financially secure retirement.

What We Cover:

    • Cash Flow Management
      • What is Your Spending Goal in Retirement?
      • How Do You Determine Your NET Income in Retirement?
      • Managing Expenses
    • The Concept of Retirement Income
    • Various Sources of Retirement Income
      • Social Security Benefits
      • Pensions
      • Retirement Savings Accounts
      • Annuities
      • Investment Income
    • Social Security Benefits
    • Supplemental Retirement Savings
    • Thrift Savings Plan
    • Common Mistakes and Solutions
      • Avoiding Errors
      • Understanding Net vs. Gross Income:

    Action Items

  1. Ensure the Accuracy of dates of service and buyback records 
  2. Request final retirement estimate (6-12 months before retiring)
  3. Get your EOPF
  4. Attend a Training

Resources for this Episode:

Ideas Worth Sharing:

One technique I use with clients is to simulate retirement spending by setting up a separate bank account. For example, if you currently earn $10,000 a month but plan to spend $8,000 in retirement, transfer $2,000 into a separate account. If… Share on X

We also need to build a retirement income timeline. This includes understanding when each source of income will kick in and how it will change over time. For instance, if you retire before age 62, you might receive a pension supplement until… Share on X

It's crucial to have a plan for unforeseen costs. Whether it's through additional income or tapping into savings, having a strategy in place is key. Just like in your working years, you need a plan to address big expenses in retirement without… Share on X

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Micah Shilanski  00:51

Welcome to the Plan Your Federal Retirement live podcast. I’m your co-host, Micah Shilanski, and with me as usual, the amazing Tammy Flanagan. How’s it going Tammy?

Tammy Flanagan  01:02

Hey, Micah, I’m doing great today. I’m glad to be here, and we are fired up for another session that hopefully is going to help some people get ready for the big event of that transition from employee to annuitant.

Micah Shilanski  01:14

Oh, that is such a big transition, right? And Tammy, a special thank you to you, because I know you’re traveling. I know you were teaching some classes coming up, so you’re not in your normal place, but thanks for being here for the pot. I really appreciate it.

Tammy Flanagan  01:25

Sure. I’m at my brother’s house so…

Micah Shilanski  01:27

Well, today we got a couple of fun things to make sure we’re talking about right? A roadmap to financial freedom. What does retirement really look like? And Tammy, as you and I were kind of jamming us on our on our pre session, a little bit, it was really kind of the same fundamentals we look at. And what I love having you on this pod, or both of us on the spot doing it, is I look at it for more like the CFP financial planning hat, right? You’re looking at it from the benefits hat. But when you come together, we might ask things slightly different, but we’re all solving for the same thing. And I love what you said about it. We’re all solving just for common sense, right?

Tammy Flanagan  02:01

Yeah, I’ve worked, you know, over the years. In the past 35 years, I’ve worked with financial planners a lot, doing training throughout the years, and we’ve always put benefits on the first day, because if you don’t have a foundational knowledge of your benefits, the financial planning is not as meaningful, like it doesn’t really sink in as well. So we always try to do that. We never put the financial planner on day one. We try to cover benefits, get you up to speed with understanding reductions and withholdings from your FERS benefit, and understanding how Social Security works and how it fits into the whole puzzle piece, because it is like putting together a puzzle, because your retirement is not just one stream of income. You know, we’re trying trading that one paycheck in for at least three, maybe four.

Micah Shilanski  02:43

You know, Tammy, I like when you bring that up, right? Because what happens is, whenever we learn something, we start applying it to our own personal situation. So if I learn the financial planning first that we’re going to be talking a little bit about, but I didn’t really understand my benefits, I’m plugging the wrong variables into the equation, right? I’m plugging my gross income, or maybe I work part time, and I didn’t understand how the part time reduction works, and I’m counting, I’m really grossing up a pension that I don’t actually have, and I’m plugging that into my plan. I’m saying, Oh, I’m set. I’m fine. I got enough income, and then you kind of don’t pay attention. And the reason we say this is Tammy, you know, this we run into this right? Where someone says, I’m set, here’s my retirement, all the details, and we’re like, Well, I gotta need to bear up bad news here, right? That’s not exactly how this math works, and so we really want to make sure our listeners are well knowledge in this area, they have a lot of understanding to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

Micah Shilanski  03:36

I love it. Well, Jamie, all of those details that we’re going to start diving into a little bit more planning. It all starts with one conversation at the very beginning, though, and that’s our useful conversation, because what we’re solving for at the end of the day is, how much money can you spend comfortably for the rest of your life? And that is 100% cash flow. So that’s why I know you like to start there as well. I always want to start here on cash flow. And so when I’m having the cash flow conversation with clients, right? It’s really about dispelling a little bit of a myth. And that myth is, when I retire, I will spend less. And what I see? What do you see?

Tammy Flanagan  03:36

Exactly! And I’ve seen the opposite, where somebody’s looking at their thrift savings plan, saying, How in the world am I going to retire on this? Like, well, you’ve got a pension too. What do you mean I have a pension? Like, there are people out there that don’t understand that FERS is made up of this defined benefit, government pension, plus the Thrift Savings Plan, plus Social Security, and all of that has to fit together. You know, how many times have you taught like a new employee class or mid career class, and they don’t think Social Security is even going to be there for them, for their kind of discounting it, which, in a way, is better than counting on it too much, because that way you are saving enough to make you comfortable. And then when you get the bonus of by Hey, Social Security is still here, then you’re even better off, and then you can really decide when’s the best time to take Social Security if you’re not going to rely on it so heavily.

Tammy Flanagan  05:04

Well, actually, I think there’s truth to that. A lot of people have to spend less because they have less. We don’t want to be in that situation. We want to feel like, Hey, this is retirement. We can do things that we want to do. We can do all the things we were doing while we were working. And that is possible. I think a lot of people feel like you have to spend less in retirement. I’m on a fixed income, you know, I gotta watch my pennies, but hopefully you have to still watch right? You can’t just spend frivolously. But it is possible. You know, there’s a lot of things there that people have under expectations about. So I think it’s both ways. You know, some people are overly optimistic about it, and then we have the opposite of that. So, I’m anxious to get get this out in the air so we can really focus on what’s true behind it, and what do we really need to watch out for? Because, like you said, we see both. We see some people who are really well off, and yet they feel like they have to work another six years, and then we find people who are ready to walk out the door at 50. Is like, Okay, you gonna have a second career? Oh, no, okay, come back and see me next year.

Micah Shilanski  06:11

Yeah. So how do we balance those things out? And I think it starts with our cash flow conversation, and it starts with understanding what our net spending is, right? And Tammy, we talked about this in the past, but kind of our net spending is. What hits your bank account every two weeks, right? More than likely, what hits your bank account is pretty much close to, if not, what you’re spending. And so for my job as a financial planner, especially when I’m just getting to know a client and we’re working together, is trying to find out what we really spend money on. Now, a mistake that we make is we say, okay, great. How much money a month do we spend in the spend? And then I pull up my pen and calculator says, okay, my mortgage is this. My taxes, real estate taxes, are going to be this. My utilities are this. My gas is this. Even if I did that right now, I would be way off on what I spend on a monthly basis, because we forget about so many expenses we have. So the cheat code on this, the super easy one is, how much are you paid? What’s that net check that comes into your bank account every two weeks? That’s what we need to use as our baseline. How do we keep that going into retirement?

Tammy Flanagan  07:13

And you know what music to my years is when I hear somebody tell me, Well, I don’t really spend my full check. I have to put part of that away in the bank account, separate bank account, or investing in a bit elsewhere. You know, that’s like, great. Then you really aren’t living on your full paycheck. And then, in some cases, you kind of worry, because you think what these people are living beneath their means, which they really could have a better lifestyle, but they’re sacrificing because of fear. So I think if you have a better understanding of all of this, a lot of the fear goes away, and then you feel more confident.

Micah Shilanski  07:44

Yeah, on both sides. The fear goes away, yeah. So Tammy, the way I love to do this with clients is living on retirement in advance, whether they’re an underspender or over spender. This works really, really well. And we’ll say, okay, great, you’re going to go into retirement, and let’s say you’re both retired, and you’re gonna have $8,000 a month and spendable income, perfect. And let’s say right now they have $10,000 a month coming in. Okay, great. Then what I want to do with my clients is we open up a separate bank account, nowhere at where they currently bank at right now, I want a different bank, hopefully one that I can see as well for a little accountability. And it changed the allotment on their check. So instead of them getting, you know, 10,000 net, I want them to get 8000 net, and I want 2000 to go in a separate bank account. And it’s real simple. In three months, when you come in and chat with me, if 2000 a month has been in there, there should be $6,000 in this account. And Is it there or not? If it’s not there. We’re not spending 8000 a month. If it is there and your checking account is still grown. Okay, you’re spending less than 8000 a month. But this gives us a real life test. Now you could be saying, Micah, I hear this a lot from class, it doesn’t matter. I’ll do the same thing. I’ll just keep track of it inside of my own checkbook. I can do this. And maybe you can, right? Maybe you are so disciplined that you can actually do this. No one else can. And so when we actually separate this money out, it comes real, because we have this thing called our financial thermostat in our checking account. When we log on and my checking account is between X and Y, I feel comfortable. When it goes above Y, I feel really good. I started spending that money, and it goes below X, and I’m like, who spent all this money, right? And then we save it back up. So we gotta have this little mental exercise of extracting that money to find out what you really spend. And then Tammy, from your point, especially if you’re an underspender, this really gives you a scenario that says, hey, I can actually go on these trips, I can actually do these things and have enough money in retirement.

Tammy Flanagan  09:46

Yeah, and sometimes you do find it funny, and now you’re funny that we do the numbers, we get the net income in retirement, the net paycheck, and they’re good to go. I mean, they don’t have to do anything else. They’re already living on their retirement income. But when you do get a client who comes in with these higher expectations, then there’s a solution, isn’t there? Like, we can fix that problem. You may not like the fix, but believe me, the end result is going to be something you don’t like. This is, unfortunately not good news to bear, right? We don’t like to tell people what they need to hear, but if you hear it, at least, it’s like a starting point. You know where you need to go from there.

Micah Shilanski  10:25

And Tammy, as we say all the time, whether I’m dealing with a credible service issue with OPM, whether I’m dealing with a cash flow issue or whatever it is, it’s so much easier to fix problems while I have that paycheck coming in versus when I don’t have a paycheck coming in. So the sooner you look at this, the sooner we address this cash flow, it’s going to make life easier. So I’m going to say that’s our first homework assignment, right? Is number one, what do you really spend a month? And if you want to come see me, I’d say exactly how I’m going to do it. Do you make 10,000 a month? And you say you’re only spending eight? I want 2000 a month to go in a separate savings account. And let’s see how that works in several months.

Tammy Flanagan  11:01

Yep. And the other part of that is, while you’re on the payroll, it’s easier to fix your benefit problems, too. Don’t come to me after retirement saying, Why am I getting $1,000 less than my retirement estimate? I want to see that estimate while you’re still working so we can evaluate it, where it’s coming from, make sure it’s accurate, because then the financial planning is going to be more accurate if we’re dealing with real numbers.

Tammy Flanagan  11:25

Yes, ma’am. Or you know what you’re dealing with? One right now, someone came to us after retirement and they don’t have health insurance. Because there was, yeah, right. So they’re like, What do I do? I said, don’t break anything, right? This. We have to, we have a lot of things we have to fix, and sometimes that just happens. That doesn’t mean don’t reach out to a financial planner or a benefits expert like Tammy, but if we can do it sooner, there’s a lot of things that we can do.

Micah Shilanski  11:48

do

Tammy Flanagan  11:48

Absolutely, yeah, there’s always a solution to problems. We don’t find unfixable problems. It’s just sometimes the fixes, some are harder than others. You know, the no no pass the easy test.

Micah Shilanski  11:59

Amen. Alright, so step one is going to be cash flow, right? We can right? We got to know what that is. Tammy, I’m going to say step two in this road map to your financial freedom is building what I like to call that retirement income timeline. Where is your money going to come from every single month, and when does that change? Because in our federal pension, right? If I retired MRA and 30 my paycheck isn’t the same for the next 10 years. Is it? It kind of goes level that it goes down, and then it slowly kind of goes up again. Is that fair? 

Tammy Flanagan  12:31

Yeah, if you retire before 62 you have to be aware of certain things. You know, I always tell people, think back the last six years. You know, if you’re going to retire at age 56 and you’re going to be six years with the same level FERS benefit, just think over the last six years, if you never got a pay increase, if you never got a promotion, what would that feel like today? And that’s what it’s going to be like there. So I always like to see that someone has a plan B, like, Okay, well, I’m really looking at a part time job, or I have plenty of savings so that I can spend down some of that savings now, so that there’s still going to be plenty left when I’m 62. Coz if you can’t do that, it makes it really hard. I mean, I think it’s almost like a fairy tale, in some cases, to think, oh, I can just retire because I have 36 years of service and I’m 57.. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I always start saying, Today, we’re going to talk about when you can retire, and then tomorrow, when you have financial planning, We’re going to talk about when you can afford to retire. Those are two different conversations.

Micah Shilanski  13:34

Yeah, those are both really important. So we got to understand when our pension is going to come in. When are we eligible for a pension? Are we eligible for the supplement or not? When does the supplement stop? When are we going to get Social Security? When are we going to be able to access our TSP or IRAs, but Tammy, all of those things have something in common, right? Those are all the gross, is that how much is going to show up in our bank accounts? Like, if we look at our pension and we have this gross number, that’s not exactly what shows up in our bank account every month is it?

Micah Shilanski  14:02

is it,

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Tammy Flanagan  14:33

That’s right, yeah, you really have to think about the net. And you have to consider like a breakdown between what reduces your taxable income versus what is coming out after tax, kind of just like when you’re working, you know, isn’t it nice? You can pay your health insurance with pre tax dollars and have a flexible spending block. You know, those are all things that make living easier while you’re working, but it’s the same thing in retirement, there’s going to be things that reduce your taxable income. There’s going to be things that going to come out after tax, things that didn’t come out after tax while you were working. So you got to understand this switch. It’s like a light switch is turning the direction a different way. And once you get the hang of that, then you can start doing the real planning.

Micah Shilanski  15:13

So what that would look like for us is we’re going to build out this 10 year timeline of all of your retirement income. We’re going to have the gross number on there, and more importantly, we’re going to have the net number on there. I need the gross number because we need to figure out, Tammy, you mentioned the taxes, right? What’s that tax liability going to be? But I need the net number because that’s going to answer the question, can we really spend this $8,000 a month or not? And I want to see every single year how that number changes and what happens, because going six years without a pay increase is… can be challenging, and then to make it even better, let’s say you retired. You got the six years to 62 you chose to postpone your social security, which could be a great idea, but you’re still going to lose that supplement, and that supplement was 1000 bucks, or 1500 a month. Now I gotta pay cut for another What? Four years, five years, until I turn on my social security income? So how are we going to supplement that drop in income? That’s your TSP, that’s where your IRAs, your outside savings comes in. But we need to know how much to supplement. So Tammy, one of the mistakes that I I see people make, unfortunately, is they think of their investments is just a bank account that they can go and take money out of whenever they would like, and that could be a little devastating for retirement.

Tammy Flanagan  16:27

Yeah, it’s a lot of freedom you have because that’s what’s we always say about the TSP. It’s flexible. You have control of it. But, you know, sometimes we don’t want all that control ourselves. We’ve got to still have a plan. We have to have kind of a roadmap of where this is going and where we want to end up. And I think that’s an important part, in my opinion, of trying to figure out to make sure we have enough money to really retire when we’re planning on it. You know, the other thing too, besides that, is these things that reduce your retirement, your FERS pension, you got to understand what those are, because those also reduce your taxable income. And there’s really about four or five of them. If you’re looking a spousal survivor benefit, it is 10% of your income, but it reduces your taxable income by 10% too. If you work part time, if you didn’t always work full time, if you had a lot of leave without pay, make sure that’s been accounted for in your retirement estimate, because that can squeeze your FERS benefit to be a little smaller. You may not realize where that came from. And then the other big one is if you have a former spouse or the court order, you know, make sure you understand what the court order says, how much of that marital share of your retirement is going to be paid to the former spouse, and did they get survivor benefits? I had somebody who worked at OPM in the retirement section who realized kinda right when they were planning to leave, that their former spouse was getting a bigger share than they thought, and they ended up working another three years just to make sure they had enough for themselves to live on comfortably. So even those of us who know what we’re doing, ,sometimes we surprise ourselves.

Micah Shilanski  18:02

And that’s one of the homework assignments that I would give all of our listeners, Tammy, is you should always have someone else, right? That’s not a spouse. I’m not ragging on anyone’s spouses here. We need someone outside of the relationship to take a peek at what you’re doing and does it pass a straight face test. And by the way, I do the same thing. I do a mastermind with other financial advisors, and we all put all of our stuff out there, and it gets created and critiqued by other really good financial advisors on what we’re doing and not, it’s a it’s a good experience, because I have my own biases when I look at my own personal finances. And I need, even though I do this for a living, I helped hundreds of people with this, right? But I need someone else to help hold me accountable. You need that same thing. Let’s make sure it passes a straight face test and the court order, we see this all the time. When clients come in with a court order like, no, no, my God, they don’t get that much your calculations wrong. I’m like, I don’t think it is. I was like, I hope it is. But OPM unfortunately agrees with us and not the client, because we tend to read things the way we want to read them. Whether you’re talking about tactics, we’re talking about court orders, these can be very detrimental things to make mistakes on.

Tammy Flanagan  19:09

Absolutely, yeah, you really have to to understand that and and get that information beforehand. You know? We do that ourselves, like you say, with the financial planners you get together, we have a group of benefits specialists with, you know, put together, we probably have 200 years of experience because, you know, we were talking before about some of the rules and really specific to certain jobs or to certain agencies. So we’ll bounce that off of our specialists and make sure that we’re given the right information so I understand what an employee is a little bit fuzzy about, is this really what I’m going to get, or am I looking at this correctly? Because even those of us who do this for a living, we still need some support. We still need to find out where the law says that, and are we interpreting the law correctly? Because sometimes you read the law and you don’t really know what it says, at least how OPM is going to say, what that law is saying.

Tammy Flanagan  20:04

Exactly. And I’ve seen people do this like they come to come to realization that, hey, there are going to be those big expenses. Even though I bought a new car when I retired, even though I put a new roof on the house, there’s still things that are going to come up. It’s just life. And so I found people who really weren’t financially ready to retire. They’re really looking into that part time job or going back and doing some consulting, and it’s really when you work for yourself and doing that sort of thing, and you’re controlling the hours, it’s really not as unpleasant as when you were punching the clock nine to five. So sometimes that’s the easiest and best solution. It can get you active as well.

Micah Shilanski  20:04

And that’s really important to know, right? So that outside opinion coming in is really important. All right, Tammy, I know there’s another thing, and I know our time is getting long. We want to respect all of our listeners, but I’d love to bring up one other thing, so when we’re in retirement and we overspend, right? When that happens, not if it happens, what’s the plan? What are things that you see? I’m happy to share kind of how we work with clients on this, but that’s definitely when unforeseen expenses come up. It’s definitely something we need to plan for.

Micah Shilanski  21:05

I like it, yep. So bring in more income, right? Is a good one. Other thing, sometimes, when this comes up, I always like to ask my clients, how would you have sold this when you were still working? Because they’re retired and they have a paycheck coming in. It’s called a retirement check. And versus when they’re working, they have a paycheck coming in, but they’re still living on fixed income in both scenarios, right? If you’re on a salary position, you know, and you you’re working, how do you get more money? How do you solve for those big expenses? What would you have done when you were working? It’s the same solutions we need to look at when you’re retired as well. So sometimes not over complicating it is really good. The mistake that people make, in my opinion, is saying, Oh, this is a one time thing. I’m gonna reach into that TSP and pull up 50 grand. I’m gonna reach in and pull out 100 grand, and then just this one time, ah, the camel knows in the tent, right? That whole camel’s coming in eventually, now that you’ll let the nose in. So we gotta have a good spending plan to check ourselves and not get into bad habits into retirement. So on the car thing, it’s a great example. I like all of my clients to have a car payment. That’s either paying off a loan or paying into a bank account. I like the latter better, right? But we should always be having money set aside for a new car. We’re living longer. We want another car with safety features on it, etc. In 10 or 15 years, you’re still going to want a different car than your car. Where does that money come from?

Tammy Flanagan  22:26

Yep, that’s, that’s what I was going to say as well, because, just an example, my husband’s fully retired. But we started these habits when we, I shouldn’t say we. He started these habits while he was still working. I’m the spender, of course, in the family, but he’s the saver, which is really good, because he always had that separate bank account. And every paycheck, a certain portion of this paycheck would go into that bank account. So we never, almost never, I believe, once we had a car loan, but, you know, we always had that savings ahead of time, like in not wanted a new car when the latest model came out, but I wasn’t enough to get it yet. The other one’s still working, and sometimes would stretch it out for another three years, then we get the new car and another 10 years. I mean, right now he’s driving me a 20 year old truck, but it still looks like maybe takes care of it. So sometimes being a little bit more tight, you know, is not such a bad thing, and get used to it. And if you need to pull in the purse string. Sometimes that’s a good habit to start to get used to.

Micah Shilanski  23:25

I like it,  it’s a muscle, right? We have to exercise that, and we don’t exercise it. It becomes harder and harder when we need to use it, and all of these things, when you put those together, that’s when we see people have great retirements, right? They know what their net income is going to be. They know where their income is going to come from. We have a plan for the unexpected things. We don’t know what they are. We don’t know how much they’re going to cost, and we have a general idea of how we’re going to approach those problems into retirement and Tammy, a lot of my clients, when we put those little pieces together, they’re all little things, right? There’s nothing major in these you put all of these little pieces together, they move into that next chapter of their life, and they’re doing the things they want to do. They can travel, they can have fun, they can live within their means in a very positive way, because they made the little decisions correctly.

Tammy Flanagan  24:10

Right. And I also, when I work with someone who is planning to retire what I consider a relatively young age, 55, or 60, I always want to do a second estimate, usually a third estimate to say, what if we did two more years? What if we waited till 62 and I’m not telling you, you have to do that. Look at the numbers, just for fun. And sometimes they’re really amazed, because there is a big difference in many cases, if you just say, two more years in the thrift and it’s not just the savings, it’s the compounding, your compound bigger bigger pot of money than what you were 20 years ago. And that really make a difference. You know, just to put it off for two years or three years, maybe for some people, that’s the solution.

Micah Shilanski  24:53

And you’re not pulling money out, right? The compounding is the big part, but then you’re not pulling that money out as well. So those, those couple years on the tail end, with that much bigger snowball, right? I’m with it that can make a big difference. And while it might seem like a long time now, in the end, it probably won’t.

Tammy Flanagan  25:10

Yeah, and I think a lot of people underestimate their life expectancy, because a lot of people think if I worked till 62 I only got four more years to spend it. Well, hate to tell you, but you probably have maybe four more decades to spend it, and that can be scary. You know, I always, I worry personally the risk of longevity, because, you know, I’m like, I’m one of those people. I see it, I want it now, so I have to really push myself to think ahead. So I always think, Okay, I’m willing to be 105 and if I don’t, I won’t know the difference. But if I do, at least a plan for it. So, you know, I have long term care insurance. I have, you know, I haven’t touched my retirement savings yet, because I know how I am, so I put it off as long as I can. Maybe keep working a little longer. I love what I’m doing. So why not those, those things kind of help. You know, you have to figure out what it is for you that you need to do? You know, whether it’s spend less safe, more work longer, and there’s always a solution.

Micah Shilanski  26:05

There absolutely is. All right. So the big part about this podcast is our goal is to help another 1 million federal employees with retirement. So click the share button. Send this information out, send the podcast out. Share this information. We want you to be well educated and informed about your financial matters. We talked about some a couple other action items from this as well. Tammy, I’ll say kind of the first one is, I’ll take the easy one, know your cash flow, right? How much do we really spend a month? How much do we think we spend? How much do we really spend? Remember, test for three to six months. Find out if that’s the real number. 

Micah Shilanski  26:37

right.

Tammy Flanagan  26:37

Right. And I think also make sure when you get that retirement estimate, make sure you understand what’s on it, because it has data on there. It has your date of birth, it has your high three, it has your length of service. Look at all of that. And if something doesn’t make sense to you, it may not make sense to OPM either. So ask questions, because if that’s not right, all the financial planning in the world is not going to help you, because you got less to start with than what you were planning on.

Micah Shilanski  27:04

Perfect. Third action item I’m going to throw out there is look at a timeline, I like to say, the next 10 years, the first 10 years retirement, the next 10 years, wherever you’re at in the spectrum. Don’t go further than that, because we get a little lost in the weeds in my opinion, but the 10 years where’s your income going to come from? What’s your growth so get that estimate that Tammy was talking about, but what’s the real net? That may or may not be, what says on the estimate. And I’m not knocking HR for this. There’s a lot of variables in there, so know what the gross is. Know what your real net is, and how does that compare with how much you want to spend a month? Where’s that money going to come from? And then once you kind of have that outline, it’s you got a lot more confidence sailing into retirement.

Tammy Flanagan  27:43

That’s right. And just remember, you’re not alone. I mean, I’m the first one to tell you I struggle with the same things that we’re talking about. So, you know, I always say, my pastor at church always says, I preach sermons that I need myself, and I we tell people things that what’s the stuff I wish I knew whenever I was younger, whenever I was doing different things. So yeah, you’re not alone. But there always are solutions, and sometimes they’re not as bad as what they sound when you first realize you got to do something different.

Micah Shilanski  28:12

I love it, so share this podcast. Get this information out there. If you get stumped before you retire, before it’s too late, pick up the phone and give someone a call. It doesn’t have to be me, it doesn’t have to be Tammy. We’d love to talk with you, but call someone. Make sure they understand the situation that you’re going through. They understand your benefits, so you get the best information, Tammy, as always. Thank you so much for being here and until next time, happy planning. 

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