You served. Your benefits should serve you back.

Slow down first, because you rarely have to do anything immediately, and the TSP's extremely low costs make it worth keeping in many situations. The real comparison covers costs, investment needs, withdrawal flexibility, and your whole plan. Anyone whose first answer is roll it over is answering their question, not yours.

Because the TSP's costs are among the lowest anywhere, and a rollover is usually permanent, so the move deserves a reason better than a salesperson's convenience. Sometimes a rollover genuinely serves the plan. The point is that it should be a conclusion, not a reflex.

As a foundation of reliable, inflation-adjusted income that most civilians would pay dearly to own, which changes how everything else should be invested and drawn. A household with a pension floor can afford a different strategy with its flexible money. We design around that advantage instead of ignoring it.

It is the election that determines whether your pension continues for your spouse after your death, made at retirement and essentially permanent. The analysis weighs the cost against your spouse's needs, other assets, and insurance alternatives. It is one of the most consequential decisions in a military career, and it deserves numbers, not folklore.

A deliberate choice among conversion options and private coverage, made while you are as insurable as you will ever be. The default path is not automatically the best value, and waiting narrows your options. We size what your family actually needs first, then shop the path that fills it.

As reliable income that changes your planning math in your favor, and as a benefit worth coordinating with the rest of the picture rather than leaving in its own silo. Pursuing and documenting a claim is its own process with its own experts; putting the result to work in the plan is ours.

A cluster of one-time elections: annuity options, survivor choices, insurance continuations, and TSP strategy, most arriving together and several permanent. Federal retirement rewards people who start the analysis a few years out. Bring us your timeline and we will sequence the decisions before the deadlines sequence you.

BRS trades some pension for matched TSP contributions, which shifts more of the outcome onto your own saving and investing decisions during service. That makes early planning matter more for your generation than the one before it. The match is free money; the plan makes sure the rest is doing its job.

With systems that travel: savings that continue automatically through moves, deployment income assigned a job before it arrives, and a document trail that survives six addresses. Military life punishes improvised finances and rewards mechanical ones. We build the mechanics.

Deliberately, or wastefully; those are the options. The pension floor, the old TSP, the new employer's plan, and the timing of each income source deserve one coordinated strategy, and the tax picture across them rewards planning. Double-career households are some of the strongest plans we build, when the pieces talk to each other.

You are earning two retirements on two different clocks, with the military piece typically arriving later than an active-duty pension would. The planning question is bridging the gap and coordinating both with your civilian accounts. It is a genuinely underserved situation, and one we are glad to untangle.

Tennessee has no state income tax on wages or retirement income, which is part of why so many military retirees settle here. It is a real planning advantage, and it makes coordinating the federal side of the picture the main event.

Name it as a plan goal, first of all, because most families feel it and few fund it. Catch-up looks like prioritizing the spouse's accounts, using spousal contribution options, and letting the pension floor free up risk capacity in their portfolio. It is very fixable with intention, and it is one of our favorite assignments.

Use the free resources; they are genuinely good at what they cover. Where a planner earns a fee is in the coordination the classes cannot do: your specific elections modeled against your specific family, both careers planned as one, and follow-through across years. If your situation is simple, we will honestly tell you the free help is enough.