Insights

If you have spent your career working for the federal government, you already know that your health insurance through the Federal Employees Health Benefits program is one of the most valuable parts of your compensation.

Most people have heard both terms; fewer can explain the difference. Medicare and Medicaid sound similar, they both deal with healthcare, and they both involve the government, but they are entirely separate programs built for different purposes, funded differently, and created to serve different groups of people.

If you have access to a health savings account and you are treating it like a medical expense fund, you are leaving one of the most powerful tools in retirement planning almost entirely on the table.

For many Americans approaching retirement, Social Security represents one of the largest sources of lifetime income they will receive. Yet when couples begin planning their retirement strategy, many focus almost entirely on their own retirement benefit and overlook the rules surrounding spousal and survivor benefits. That oversight can be costly.

Federal employees have access to one of the best retirement packages in the country. Between a guaranteed pension, generous TSP matching, lifelong health coverage, and Social Security, it's an enviable foundation. And yet, a surprising number of federal employees arrive at retirement with less security than they could have had, not because of bad luck, but because of avoidable mistakes made years or decades earlier.

Most people think of Medicare and Social Security as two separate programs that happen to arrive at roughly the same stage of life. In practice, they are quite connected. The decisions you make about one will directly affect how you experience the other. Here is what that relationship actually looks like and why understanding it before you retire is worth your time.

Most people understand, at least in theory, that they should have an estate plan. They know they probably need a will and they may have heard the word "trust" mentioned in a financial article or across a dinner table. And yet the majority of American adults have never actually sat down and done the work.

If you earn a strong income, you may already know the sting of the Roth IRA income limit. You sit down to make your annual contribution and discover that the IRS has effectively locked the door due to your income being too high to contribute directly to a Roth IRA.