TSP Sees Some Positive, Negative Trends in Investing

While the overall percentage of employees who save in the TSP is increasing, the average percentage of salary being saved is decreasing—a concern regarding FERS employees who are losing out on potential agency matching contributions. A TSP report, which focused only on FERS because the CSRS contingent is now relatively small, showed that the average FERS investment was 8.1 percent of salary in 2014, down from 8.4 and 8.2 in the prior two years and down from the 9.5 percent range in the mid-2000s—and lower even than in 2008 and 2009 at the worst of the economic downturn. However, 89.9 percent of FERS employees were making investments in 2014, up from 86.6 percent in 2010, largely due to the startup of default investing for newly hired employees in the meantime. Because of that, the percentage of those investing is now higher among younger and shorter-tenured employees, a reversal of what had been the traditional pattern when FERS investing was opt-in.