Categories: Expert's View

Who Will Benefit?

Do you know who will benefit from your Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance (FEGLI) policy or Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) account if you were to die? When did you last check? If you’re like most federal employees, you designated your beneficiaries when you were first hired by the government and you haven’t checked back since. If that’s the case, you need look in your Official Personnel File (OPF) to make sure that those you designated then are still the ones you want to receive the benefits in the event of your death.

If you haven’t changed your designations since you came on board, the name(s) you put down (or their heirs) will be the one(s) who are going to get those benefits, not the ones you would want to get them today. When I worked at OPM, I ran across too many cases where the names in the OPF weren’t the one(s) the deceased would have picked if he or she were still alive.

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. You can get copies of both forms from your personnel office. You can also download the Standard Form by going to www.opm.gov, click on Forms at the top of the page, then click on Standard Forms on the left side. You can download the TSP form by going to www.tsp.gov and clicking on Forms & Publications.

If you never filled out a designation of beneficiary form for either FEGLI or the TSP (or your original designee(s) are no longer living), the benefits usually will be distributed according to what’s called 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.

However, if you are divorced, what happens to those benefits may have been settled by a court order – or not. It’s up to you to find out which.

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