Expert's View

By Reg Jones

 

When was the last time you checked to see who would benefit from your Federal Employees Group Life Insurance (FEGLI) policy or Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) account if you were to die? If you haven’t done that in a long time, you need to go to your servicing personnel office, look in your Official Personnel File (OPF), and make sure that those you designated then are still the ones you want to receive the benefits in the event of your death. Far too often, the names in the OPF aren’t the ones you would pick now.

 

Unless your designations of beneficiary are up to date, the name or names you put down then (or their heirs) will be the one(s) who will get those benefits, not the ones you would want to get them today. Over my career, I’ve seen too many cases where an unmarried employee put down "mom" as the beneficiary and forgot to change that after getting married and, even worse, having children.

 

To change a previous FEGLI designation, you’ll need to fill out a Standard Form 1823. The form for changing a TSP designation is the TSP-3. Both forms are available from your personnel office or you can simply download them by going to OPM’s web site at www.opm.gov and clicking on Forms or TSP’s website at www.tsp.gov and clicking on Forms & Publications.

 

If for some reason you never fill out a designation of beneficiary form for either FEGLI or the TSP, the benefits usually will be distributed according to the standard order of precedence: your spouse; your child or children in equal shares, with the share of any deceased child distributed among the descendents of that child; your parents in equal shares or the entire amount to the surviving parent; the duly appointed executor or administrator of you estate; and, finally, your next of kin under the laws of the place you were living at the time of your death. Of course, if you are divorced, what happens to those benefits may already have been settled by a court order – or it may not. You’ll have to find out which.