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A Financial Checklist For New Federal Employees
Your onboarding packet covers your badge and your ethics training. It barely touches your money.
I remember sitting through new employee orientation with a stack of forms I barely understood. TSP enrollment. FEHB options. Something called FERS? A five-minute mention of life insurance with some forms due by the end of the week.
Nobody sat me down and explained what actually mattered in that stack, or what I should be doing with my first few paychecks. I figured most of it out later, sometimes months later, and there are things I’m still learning today.
With some new civil servants being hired recently (congrats!), here’s the checklist I wish someone had given me instead of a folder of acronyms.
1. Get Your Full TSP Contribution Match
Your agency automatically enrolls you in the TSP and will contribute an amount equal to 1% of your basic pay each pay period to your TSP account. A cool thing about this is that these 1% automatic contributions are not taken out of your pay and do not reduce your pay for income purposes¹. It’s free money!
You can get more free money by contributing up to the match. Under the Federal Employees’ Retirement System (FERS)…
