Always review your paystubs and financials

Friday, March 30, 2018

Always make sure you pay and contributions and matching are done correctly. No one cares about you more than you and I had discovered that they missed a FERS TSP Roth contribution one time.

The TSP is like a 401k for government employees that invests in index funds that track things like the Dow or all United States stocks, bonds, international stocks.

So, when I was reviewing my balance, I normally am just going through a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of net worth for the month and how my balance has gone up or down to see how much closer I am to retirement. I think it is fun and is a motivational tool to help me focus on keeping track on retirement. I only play with the spreadsheet about once or twice a month. So, this week I was just clicking around on the site and noticed one of my contributions was smaller than the others and much smaller than normal…

See the image below and keep reading.

[Image: Courtesy of savvywealthmedia. See what happened above?!]

When I clicked on that day’s recent transaction I also noticed the agency didn’t match my contributions. What “agency matching” is means that when you put some money into your retirement plan the company gives you free money by matching what you contribute up to a certain point. Who doesn’t want free money? Well in this case, not only did they miss putting money in but it was also causing me to miss out on any stock gains I would have for that period. I mean I could be earning interest on that money too!

So, I made sure to contact payroll and the TSP and let them know something was wrong. They followed up with me through email and the TSP contact to let me know that yes this was an error that affected not only me but other individuals and they were going to post an alert article to affected employees. But the article still didn’t tell people that while your pay statement is going to look the same, the only way to see this was if you were reviewing your statements and transaction histories. Basically, if you were a zombie and not paying attention you would never know that you were having funds not given to you. And I suspect most people don’t review their statements. I just happened to be lucky I caught the error the week that it happened. Had I not been eagle eyed I would have missed the discrepancy too.

Have you ever had an error of some kind? How did you find out about it and did you get it corrected? Write us below if you would like.