The Foreign Service Journal, September 2022

74 SEPTEMBER 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL RETIREMENT SUPPLEMENT John K. Naland is the AFSA retiree vice president. He is a former director of the Office of Retirement at the Depart- ment of State. ing in-depth presentations by subject matter experts may help you avoid major oversights in your retirement planning. The seminars are the two-day RV105- Early/Mid-Career Retirement Planning and the four-day RV101-Retirement Planning Seminar for employees retiring within the next 10 years. The courses are open to all Foreign Service agencies and are currently being presented virtually. For more information, see https://www. state.gov/career-transition-center-ctc/. Weigh Your Options. The FSI retirement planning seminars will explain the many options you face that will affect your retirement finances. You may want to make some of those decisions years before retiring, including whether to plan on retiring as soon as you are eligible, whether to take out long-term care insurance, and whether to have a living trust drawn up. Other decisions will come at or soon after retirement: how much life insurance to take into retire- ment, whether to elect a survivor benefit if you have a spouse, whether to pay for Medicare B coverage at age 65, and when and how to makeThrift Savings Plan with- drawals after retirement. L ong before your retirement date approaches, there are steps you should take to position yourself financially for a com- fortable and satisfying life after the Foreign Service. Below are a dozen of the most important ones. More information on these and related topics is available in the Retirement Services section of the AFSA website at www.afsa. org/retirement. Become Knowledgeable. If you have never taken any of the Foreign Service Institute’s excellent retire- ment planning seminars, you owe it to yourself to do so. Even if you took one sev- eral years ago, you might want to retake it since the dense information is difficult to fully digest in one sitting. Also, rules and procedures can change over time. Watch- Long before your retirement date there are steps to take to ensure a comfortable life after the Foreign Service. Here are the most important ones. BY JOHN K . NALAND Retirement Planning A Mid-Career Checklist Consider “What If” Scenarios. In our up-or-out personnel system, retirement might come sooner than we would like. Or family or other personal reasons might lead us to retire earlier or keep working longer than we currently anticipate. So, as a thought exercise, consider a range of potential retirement dates spread over several years starting with your date of first eligibility, and estimate your retirement benefits on those dates. You can find your Social Security benefits on the Social Security website. State Department employees can use the Employee Retirement Portal on OpenNet to estimate their pension as of different retirement dates. Armed with those estimates, con- sider whether your pension, Social Security and TSP will be large enough for you to stop working, or if you may need to seek post-retirement employ- ment. Consider whether you will still have large financial obligations such as a mortgage or kid’s college expenses on any of those potential retirement dates. To increase your financial cushion to protect against a possible early end to your career, you might act now to con-