Delivered on: Tuesday, December 9, 2025

To Watch on YouTube, CLICK HERE

The Top Regrets of Federal Employees in 2025

Your “do-over” list to regain control in 2026

• UNCERTAINTY: Uncover the financial decisions you've been avoiding
• LACK OF CONTROL: Regain control so you're not at the government's mercy
• PREPARATION: Get clear about your numbers and all of your options
• READINESS: Ready yourself to step into retirement with everything you've earned

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Prefer to read instead? A Transcript of this Webinar is Below:

Hello, and welcome everyone to the FedImpact webinar on the top regrets of federal employees in 2025. I was thinking, what is the webinar that I need to do to round out this crazy, hellacious year that many of you have had?

And the idea of talking about the regrets might not sound all that exciting, but we have to look back into this year and say, how would things have felt different had we done things differently?

The Top Regrets of Federal Employees in 2025

I do want to take an opportunity to rewind, revisit this year, as much as we'd love to just put it in our rearview mirror, but to look back and see what kind of learning that we can pull forward into 2026 so that we can have a do-over. Keep in mind, a do-over is way different than redoing the year.

Nobody wants to redo 2025, I assure you. Of course, we work with tens of thousands of federal employees every year and being able to listen to their stories about how hard this year was for so many of them, I would certainly not want to redo this year.

We're ready to put it behind us. But the idea that the learning that can come out of this year can fuel future good things for us, that's really what I want to focus on today.

Real quick, you guys know me. I'm Chris Kowalik, the founder of ProFeds. I have just recently visited with all of our speakers who go out and deliver our retirement training workshops.

And each year we go through the slides, we look at the message that we are giving to federal employees and how we can continue to do better to be able to serve all of you in a way that helps you get the knowledge base that you need to be able to make great decisions as you plan to retire.

And throughout that exercise of going through all the slides and seeing what changes we're going to make for the new year, it's always so interesting to hear the comments from our speakers of the kind of feedback they get from employees.

The difference in the appearance of federal employees this year, many are not feeling quite as optimistic as they used to about what things could look like, because their world was really rocked in 2025.

And so if that's you or you know people who experienced that very thing, you can appreciate that for a lot of people, there were tons of regrets this past year. And don't worry, there's still opportunity to make things right.

It's one thing to talk about regrets and just talk about the negative things. You're going to find that in the material today that I'm going to really focus on the do-over. How can we regain control in 2026?

What's the positive spin of what we can do to overcome some of the negativity that happened in 2025 to make this better?

Agenda

Our agenda today, we're going to talk a little bit about uncertainty. Some of those financial decisions that you've been avoiding that left you feeling quite uncertain when things started shifting in the federal world.

Next, we'll talk about lack of control, how you can put yourself back in the driver's seat so that you're not at the government's mercy. That's what many of you felt like your jobs, your income, your future, all of those things were really in the government's control.

And many of you felt very uncomfortable with that. How do we regain that control so that you feel better and back in the driver's seat?

Next is preparation. Thinking about all of your numbers and the choices, the options that you're going to have as you exit the federal government.

Presumably you're retiring, but perhaps some of you have chosen other paths to be able to leave government service or are considering that if you're not eligible, but how do we get all those numbers together to make that make sense?

And then lastly, readiness. Thinking about how to prepare and ready yourself to step into retirement with everything that you've earned. We don't want you to feel like you've left something on the table because you didn't understand what to go look for.

The 8 ProFeds Planning Principles

We are going to start our session talking about the eight ProFEDs planning principles. And for those of you who have been on webinars with us before, you might remember us reviewing these principles.

And I think they're absolutely critical when we're looking backwards into 2025, and this sets a good framework for us to be able to think about what could be done differently.

Principle number one is it's never too late, too early, or too often to plan. It is super easy to look back and say, “I feel like I am too far into my career to make some of these decisions, or I'm too close to retirement, or I just haven't done enough.”

And there's validity in all of those statements. Of course, we know it's better to plan early. Put time on your side. All the things that we at the core know, but it's never too late to begin.

You can always make better decisions moving forward. And I hope that if you are feeling behind, if you feel like maybe you've put your career ahead of your own future in an ironic way and you think, “Man, I pour so much into the work that I do and I haven't even thought about what's next,” it's not too late to do that.

Principle number two, when you know your numbers, your financial decisions become obvious. You guys hear me say this all the time, because when you know the numbers, it puts everything into perspective. You can start connecting the dots and see how all of this works.

Principle number three, you are free to choose, but you are not free from consequence. As you step into retirement, you are going to have a number of decisions to make.

Of course, the retirement date being one of them, which is an important one, but what about all of the benefits that you plan to carry in retirement? How is that going to work?

And there are a lot of consequences that come with those choices that you have and those decisions that you are going to be making as you approach that retirement window.

It's super important that you understand the depth and breadth of the decisions that you're going to be making so that you feel really confident as you make that leap into retirement.

Principle number four, if you don't make a decision, someone will make it for you. Most of the time this is the government, with respect to federal employees.

If you fail to make certain elections as you step into retirement, don't worry, the government has a default election, but it might not be the one you want.

I would rather you feel comfortable and confident with the decisions that you're going to be making so that you are ready to make them and there is no ambiguity. You're not leaving anything to default or someone else to make a decision for you.

We're on the back eight of these eight principles.

Principle number five, it's okay not to like the government's solution to your problem. All these government benefits at their core are really quite wonderful, at least at certain moments in your life, certain stages in your life.

Most of the time, these benefits are pretty incredible while you are working, while you are younger. They don't always look the same way as you step into retirement and age.

I want you to feel empowered to make objective observations about the government's solution to the problems that you have and recognize that just because you don't like the government's solution to your problem sometimes doesn't mean there's still not a problem that needs a solution.

Principle number six, the hard conversations are always worth having. Always worth having. And what I mean by this is sometimes these conversations are actually with yourself.

What should I be doing? How can I put myself in a better position? Should I be saving more? Should I invest more in TSP? Should I make a decision about XYZ benefits?

Whatever it might be. But oftentimes these hard conversations end up happening with your family, most often your spouse, sometimes your children, but being able to get really clear on what the needs are of other people who depend on you is important.

Principle number seven, retirement is complex. Seeking professional help is admirable. We kind of go back to something that many of you have probably heard at conferences and things like that, thinking about coaches.

The best athletes in the world have coaches. If you think you're all alone on an island as you prepare for retirement, there are people who, for a living, help people plan and connect all the dots and put all the pieces in place so that this all works.

These are financial professionals who do this as the thing that they're committed to professionally in their life. And you have an opportunity to tap into that wisdom and that experience and don't feel like asking for help is making you less of a good planner.

In fact, it actually elevates the ability that you have to do the right things because you have a coach on your side who has the awareness and has done this many, many, many times with other federal employees.

They know the roadblocks, they know the weird things that happen for feds as you step into retirement. Don't be afraid to ask for that kind of help. We'll talk a little bit more about help in today's session.

Principle number eight, nobody, and I mean nobody, should care more about your retirement than you do. I save this one until number eight, save the best for last here, because this is something that I really want to drive home with federal employees.

It's really easy to point to the government, to your HR department, to your supervisor, and put the onus on them to make sure that you have a great retirement. And that's not how this goes.

You're the only one that cares about how things look for you in the future. You're the only one. Once you retire from government service, you are a number to OPM and you are out of the radar of your federal agency.

It behooves you to own these decisions and realize if it's up to me, it's up to me. How can we put you in the driver's seat and own the decisions that you are making so that you get to plan the retirement that you want and not one that someone else has planned for you?

That is the framework for the eight ProFeds planning principles. I think you're going to see some threads of this throughout today's material that you can appreciate.

DO-OVERS

We are going to talk about the do-overs for 2025. We have a total of 10 of them. I'm sure there are some that I'm missing, and I'm going to lump some of them together that I think has some common threads, but here we go.

Do-over #1: Know Your Options

Here's what I mean by that. In January of 2025, the new administration took office and shortly after that made an offer to federal employees that they had never, ever seen before, to go ahead and drop your retirement papers.

You can walk out the door, you're going to be paid till September 30th. There were some exceptions to that, but generally that was the offer. And everyone freaked out.

They didn't know. First, is this legitimate? That became a common thread of what we heard federal employees asking about.

But the other side was, okay, there's this offer on the table. Is this in my best interest? What choices do I have to make? Not just yes or no, am I going to take this or not?

But all of the other choices that you're going to have. And without that knowledge, you didn't know how to respond because you're unsure about maybe your own eligibility for certain benefits.

Things like, am I eligible to retire? Do I meet the age and service requirements with or without an early out? The VERA was part of that initial offer and that added a layer of confusion because people who had never gone through this kind of downsizing had not experienced an early out before, and so they didn't really understand the rules.

Things like, is my military time going to count? I don't know. Did you make a deposit for it? What kind of military service was it? That's all going to play a factor in all of this.

And if you are at that point in time in January, February, early on, you're trying to figure that out, you might not know whether you qualify to be able to take the offer because you're unclear about the status of some of your service.

And then the question is, okay, if there's service that you have that might count, is it too late to make sure that it counts? Who's going to do all that work?

We saw HR departments all taking the DRP and leaving agencies with no way for employees to get questions answered. This became really tough very quickly for a lot of agencies.

Things like, can I keep my health benefits under FEHB? And what do I do about my FEGLI decisions when I decide to retire? Who's going to help me figure all those things out of what I should do?

And keep in mind, any time you're asking a question that starts with, “Should I,” HR is probably not the place to go to get that question answered. We'll talk about where to go to get that answered here shortly.

But they're able to tell you what the rules are, not which thing you should do. But there were tons of questions. I mean, this is a small subset of questions that we got, but in the underlying, the underpinning of the frustration that people had early in the year was that they didn't know what they qualified for, and so they were paralyzed to make decisions.

Do-over #2: Know Your Numbers

When you know your numbers, your financial decisions become more obvious. That is our training motto. That is why we do what we do to help employees to be able to see this in perspective and connect those dots, connect the number dots together.

Asking yourself questions like, how much does it take to run your everyday household? If you were to step into retirement, what does it look like? Forget your pension for a second and all that, but just what does it take to run your everyday household if you were to step into that place?

When we think about retirement, it's not just our everyday household. We want to go do things. We have eight extra hours a day to spend money.

What does that part look like? That's another layer of what it's going to take to live the retirement that you want. But what a lot of people couldn't figure out is if I left government service today, how close would my pension come to meeting the need that I have? Not the want of the fun stuff in retirement, but just to pay the bills.

And then are there other sources of income that might fill the gap? All of you FERS employees would likely either qualify for the special retirement supplement if you're a little bit on the younger side, or if you're 62 or older, we're looking at that Social Security decision of what you're going to make. It might make sense to take it right away. It might not.

But January of 2025 wasn't the time to start thinking about it. We have to start thinking about it earlier so that when these opportunities come up, and it might not have felt like an opportunity in January, but in hindsight, there was an opportunity for a lot of people to take advantage of an offer that was really aligned with what they wanted to do.

But if you didn't know all your numbers to know if this is a good choice, it left you in that paralyzed state that was really, really tough to shake off.

For many of you, the opportunity to take the DRP ended up going away. It expired. And then once you finally started to getting the numbers clear in your mind about what things could look like, there were a lot of you that looked back with a tinge of regret, thinking, “Oh gosh, had I known then what I know now, I would've taken it.”

Knowing these numbers in advance of things like this offer coming down earlier this year would've put you in a different head space to be able to make those decisions.

And this is true whether we're talking about an offer like this or you're simply preparing for your own normal voluntary retirement. Knowing your numbers, super critical.

Do-over #3: Know Who To Ask For Help

When we think about asking for help, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, many federal employees asked the question like, “Well, where's my HR department? Why is nobody helping me?”

And I think that was fair with respect to the options that someone had. Not whether you should or shouldn't do things, that's not HR's job, but what are the choices? Do I qualify? Is my military service in good order?

A slew of other questions. It was easy to say, “Where is HR in all of this?” And they were facing the exact same personal decisions that all of you were of trying to figure this out for themselves, plus thinking of how they have to help all of these other employees figure this out too.

Have you ever called the Thrift Savings Plan or the Social Security Administration or maybe even the IRS to ask for retirement strategy help? I hope you haven't. And if you've tried, you're going to be met with some good laughter because that is not what either of those organizations are designed or prepared to do.

They're not there to give individual strategy or talk about alternative options that you should consider or looking at your whole financial future and situation.

That is not what any of those organizations do. We had a whole webinar on the five entities that you shouldn't be asking for help from. OPM was another one of those. I could have them on this list as well. But that's not where you go to get strategy.

Now you might say, “That's all great. I actually have a really smart person in my office that we all stand around and we talk about this stuff. They're super smart.

They tell us all what to do and it's been amazing so far.” We call that person the water cooler expert. They're the ones that like to give unsolicited advice, even if they don't think it's advice, and they also don't know very much about you.

They know about the person that you show up to work as. They have no idea what your financial situation is. Are you drowning in credit card debt? Are you upside down in your house?

Do your parents live with you because of some long-term care needs that they have, and so now you're a caregiver? What is the situation that you are in?

And all of those things matter to the person that is giving you advice. We want to be super careful taking advice from people who are not licensed with no oversight to be able to give you that advice.

The reason that these people, these entities are not the right people to ask for financial planning help from is because they're not financial planners.

If you want that kind of advice, the kind of professional guidance on what to do based on how the rules work and the consequences that you are likely to face if you make different decisions, you need to be working with a financial professional who is licensed to be able to provide that type of guidance.We have a network of them here at ProFeds.

They are our partners. They do not work for us. But these are people who have dedicated their financial practice, their professional work in life to serving federal employees and making sure that you all know what you're doing as you make these decisions so that you can live the retirement you want and have all of the benefits that you've earned in the way that serves you and your family the best.

That's it. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that, but I think oftentimes federal employees look to financial professionals and say, “I'm weary of someone who makes money off of giving me advice about my federal benefits.

Shouldn't my own agency do this?” No, they shouldn't. That's not how any of this goes. That's not your agency's role. And like I said, it's not TSP's role. It's not the Social Security Office's role. It's not the IRS's role either.

You need to be working with someone who looks at your entire financial picture and the goals that you have, the end result that you want, to be able to develop the plan to get there.

Do-over #4: Have Access To Cash

This is a really, really important one and specifically with respect to the shutdown that happened. Not only did everything happen at the beginning of this year with the DRP offer, we also had the longest shutdown in history.

That put many of you in a real bind with respect to cash flow in your bank account so that you could pay bills. And the irony is many of you had several hundred thousand dollars in the TSP that you could not easily access.

Without spendable cash hitting your bank account, there becomes a domino effect of other problems that you have. Many of you took out loans.

Many of you racked up high interest credit card debt during that time because there was no other cash to dip into. And I don't mean cash in your mattress, I mean accessible money at the bank that you could get to if needed.

Because frankly, for most federal employees, the TSP is not easily accessible while you're working. And if it is, it's with some pretty serious consequences that many of you don't realize.

Two of those big consequences are hardship withdrawals. This is the ability to access money from your TSP if you are under 59 and a half. It is a permanent depletion of your account, so you're not allowed to put the money back in, which might sound great, except that when you take the money, you are going to have a 10% early withdrawal penalty in all the money that you took.

Right out of the gate, you're already down on your luck and now you're going to have a 10% penalty on the money that you take. Not a great way to make this happen.

The other option that some turned to were TSP loans. If you've come to our webinars, if you've come to our workshop, you know our take on TSP loans. We want to use these very, very sparingly and only when absolutely necessary because you are double taxed when you take TSP loans.

When you take money out of the TSP for a loan, there is a domino effect of a tax issue that you are going to face. And it is something that a lot of people don't realize. They think they're paying themselves back even with interest and it sounds really great.

And at the end of the day, it is counter to the very thing that you need the TSP to do for you, which is to be there in the long run and have a pool of money that you can pull from when you need it in retirement.

Here's my plea to all of you, is to build your emergency savings. We ideally want you to have about six months of expenses that are easily accessible to you.

Why six months? Well, there's a lot of reasons for six months. One of the most important ones, aside from a shutdown and aside from the craziness that's happened this year, is it's going to take a while for OPM to finalize your retirement claim and get all the numbers right.

And in the meantime, you might be getting a little bit of a check, but we want to make sure that you have the ability to pay all your bills when you step into retirement too.

How crazy it would be that you've spent 20 or 30 years or more working for the federal government and when you retire, you can't pay your bills because everything takes so long to get finalized. That's where your emergency fund comes in really handy.

You can also use a natural financial planning mechanism that planners like to see because it allows you to stay on track, to stay on the course that you have charted for yourself when things like the hot water tank needs to be replaced or you need a new transmission in your car, or fill in the blank, whatever it might be.

Six months of expenses in the bank is pretty standard out there. I don't normally like rules of thumb, but this is a pretty good one to be able to have easily accessible to you to allow you to weather storms, whether while you are working or in retirement.

Do-over #5: Make Important Decisions Early

We know the early bird gets the worm. Well, when it comes to retirement decisions, there were a lot of hasty decisions made during the DRP offer.

When there are decisions that you make without appropriate amount of thought because you're rushed, trying to make a decision, trying to get paperwork turned in on time so that you beat the deadline, it rarely leads to a happy outcome, and that's especially true when you can't undo the decisions that you've made.

Here's the mindset I would love all of you to be in just moving forward, stepping closer to retirement. You want to have a pretty good idea of all the decisions that you are going to be making on your retirement application right now.

You don't want to wait to get to that point where now you have a piece of paper in front of you or you're filling out something online and it's like, “Well, what would you like to do for the survivor benefit decision?

What do you want to do with all the parts of your FEGLI, that life insurance that you have?”

You don't want that to be the first time you're ever thinking about these decisions because most of the time there's planning that goes around these decisions.

It's not just checking a box. It's perhaps looking to the private sector to see, can the private sector solve my problem in a different way than the government can?

Can I have more flexibility or control than what the government program is offering to me? Remember, just because you don't like the government solution to your problem doesn't mean you don't have a problem.

Now is the time to be looking at that planning to make those decisions. And you're not technically making the decision like the election that you are making on your retirement application, but if you are five years, 10 years from retirement and you're doing that planning now where any private sector options that you want to explore, that you've done that, you've made your decision, put anything in place, what happens is the decision that you make later on your retirement application becomes somewhat of a formality.

That's just the moment in time that you make it official that you're making that decision, but you really made the decision many years ago in the planning phase.

And that's where getting into the details of how these benefits work really comes in handy when you do it in an earlier stage of your career because you have time on your side to be able to give you more options. And options give you freedom.

Options give you freedom. But if you wait until the very end and you're rushing through decisions, you are going to make the decision that off the top of your head feels like the right one without any of the proper planning that should have gone into those decisions along the way and probably long ago.

The earlier you make those decisions, the better. It's never too late to start making good decisions, but the earlier you do them, the better off you are.

Do-over #6: Keep Copies of Everything

Everything. I don't necessarily mean paper copies, but that's not a bad idea either because we know technology and the cloud and file storage and there's all sorts of things that cause us to lose access to those types of things.

But when you lose access to government systems, that might make you feel pretty vulnerable because you're thinking, “Oh man, there was all this important information or these documents or that one email that I got from HR that confirmed that I did the thing that I said.”

When you're locked out of all of that, it puts you in a really bad spot because something that you had natural access to for decades, you no longer have access to and the likelihood that you are going to be able to regain access to those documents or that information is probably pretty low.

Here's my ploy to you. I would encourage you to make a plan. If you've got some time before you plan to retire, each year, start now, but each year, go into your electronic official personnel file, or your EOPF, and download a copy of it for your records.

Just make it something that's a habit for you. You can see some of the instructions by going to fedimpact.com/eopf of how to get the whole record and some of the breakdown that we have to make sure that you get everything saved.

The other piece is saving copies of documents like civilian or military service deposits, any of those receipts that you're getting for that, beneficiary elections, those types of things that might make it into your EOPF, but might not.

These are things you want to have a copy of for you and your family so that you are in control.

Do-over #7: Trust (But Verify)

And what I mean by this is not to have an untrusting nature about you, but I want you to recognize that your agency may very well give you access to a system to let you run estimates of your federal retirement.

OPM is the final determinant of those numbers, but your agency may give you access to some different tools to be able to use. Some agencies don't give that access to their employees, but systems like GRB, many of you are familiar with, and there's lots of different ones out there. Your agency might have something different.

But oftentimes they allow the level of access for the employee to go in and play around and say, “Well, what would it look like if I retired December 31st of '25? What about March of '26?” You can go in and do those different estimates.

Here's the deal. Those estimates often make huge assumptions about your service history, and those assumptions can greatly alter your eligibility to retire and the calculation of your pension.

Let me give a good example. If you had four years of military service and you looked at making a deposit many years ago and you decided, “You know what? I don't think I'm going to do that,” right or wrong, whether that made sense or not, doesn't really matter.

That's just a decision that you made. When you look at your retirement estimate from your agency's system, many of them make an assumption that if there is an outstanding deposit, you have paid it.

In a situation like that, you had four years of time that will now count for eligibility purposes and in the calculation of your pension, but unless you make that deposit, that estimate won't be true.

It's important to get your estimates. And I love that employees have more access to these things these days, but don't blindly believe what you're looking at on these estimates.

So you want to verify your creditable service, the time that counts for retirement purposes, by going to fedimpact.com/certify. You will see the two different versions of this form, whether you're in CSRS or FERS, so that your agency can look at your actual service record and tell you what of your service counts for retirement purposes.

Very, very important. Any employee at any stage of their career can utilize these forums. It's not just when you retire.

Another option, and this is maybe my favorite one, is the FedImpact Retirement Report. This is a report that is available to every federal employee who attends our workshops. It follows all that workshop material where we've really laid the foundation of how all these benefits work, and then we're tying all the numbers together in this FedImpact report.

And here's the deal. You bring that estimate with you from your agency. Now we're able to see the FedImpact reports side by side. And if those numbers match, we're in pretty good shape.

If they don't match, that's a red flag. Somebody's report's wrong. And our job is to help you to see where some cracks are in the agency's estimate so that you can go explore and advocate for yourself to make sure that you know exactly what you are entitled to.

Again, those FedImpact reports are available for every workshop attendee. You can find those workshops by going to fedimpact.com/attend.

There is a two meeting process following the workshop that allows you to be able to develop that and review that front to back so that you are really clear on your numbers.

Do-over #8: Know What's Next

When you leave government service, you're often looking backwards and saying, “The two or three decades or more that I have served this country, I am grateful for the opportunity for my service. I have enjoyed the work that I've done.”

Hopefully you enjoyed the people you did it with, all of that good stuff. The question is, what happens after that? What happens next?

When the retirement timeline was accelerated for a lot of people in '25, especially if they weren't close to being normally eligible to retire, they hadn't really given a lot of thought to what next looked like.

And it felt, I think for many of them, that they were just lost. They were losing a little bit of their identity because they're wrapped up in the work that they do and the professional side of their life and hadn't really given much consideration to what happens after government service.

Getting really clear on what that next stage of your life looks like and maybe dream a little bit, like if you didn't have to go to work every day and you had the money that you need, what would you do?

And that's going to look different for everybody. Somebody wants to travel, somebody wants to just be close to their grandkids, somebody has hobbies that they want to do.

There's all sorts of things. But paint that picture for yourself so that you know what you're retiring to.

And that brings me to this concept called freedom from versus freedom to. This is actually coming from my business coach, Dan Sullivan with Strategic Coach.

And the concept is sometimes when we have an opportunity, whatever it might be, yours happens to be retirement, right? We retire from something.

Maybe you hate the commute, your boss is a jerk, you don't like your coworkers, the mission has changed, they're requiring you to move, whatever the thing is that you don't like that you are retiring away from. You say, “Get me out of here because of these reasons.”

And there's validity to that because a lot of that goes into your own mental health and the happiness that you bring home to your family and all those things. Those are valid.

But if we do that and not have the freedom to, the freedom to pursue other passions, the freedom to move closer to your children, the freedom to fill in the blank, whatever yours is, this decision can feel very lopsided.

If all you're doing is quote running away from something, but you're not running to something wonderful, you can feel this imbalance when you leave because you lose some of your identity and your purpose that you have on a day-to-day basis.

I love this concept, always have enough freedom to, which is the next thing that's coming.

Do-over #9: Be In The Driver's Seat

This is a phrase you'll hear me use a lot because I think everybody instantly gets it, that you're the one in control.

One of the most concerning feelings that Feds had this past year is that they felt they lost control, and they didn't lose control of one thing. They lost control of lots of things. Their own job security. Am I going to have a job tomorrow? Is my job going to be abolished?

Next is their professional identity. Many of you ended up changing jobs within your agency because certain positions completely went away or they were consolidated or fill in the blank, whatever else might have happened at your particular agency.

The next is their financial future. They lost the control of that because now things were accelerated for them, right? The DRP was a voluntary choice that people could make if they wanted to go ahead and retire, but it was met with the threat of a riff and that involuntary action that if they didn't get enough people to voluntarily leave, that they were going to start slashing jobs, right? And this isn't political, this is just what is happening out there. That financial future became unstable.

And then the employee's prospects for a rewarding retirement. When you're trying to throw all these numbers together and figure this stuff out, how do you know you've got it right?

Am I going to totally regret this decision to go ahead and take this offer, or I was just riffed and I don't have a choice and what's retirement going to look like for me now?

And so that confidence takes a nose dive and that doesn't feel good. Being back in the driver's seat, being back in control, and we can do that by doing the first eight do-overs.

Knowing our numbers, knowing our options, putting ourselves back in the driver's seat and owning our future, which really goes to do-over number 10, our final do-over, and that is own your future.

Do-over #10: Own Your Future

If you remember, planning principle number eight was that nobody should care more about your financial future than you do. Owning your future, taking responsibility for it, is something that will allow you a lot of freedom later.

So asking yourself, what can you personally do right now to fortify, steer, and protect your future? And all of you are at different places in your career, in your financial life, on your financial journey to retirement.

This is going to be different for everyone. For some of you, you're like, how can I contribute more than 5% into the TSP? For others of you, it's how can I max the TSP?

Survivor benefit decisions, life insurance, like, what can I do to put myself in control of my future? Because here's the deal, and you've probably seen this quote out there on social media and probably at conferences that you've attended and things like that, but we all get to choose our hard, whatever that is.

We have the pain of discipline, which is doing things now that might feel heavy and hard and that stretch us in ways that maybe we don't feel we're ready for.

When we think of financial planning, it's saving more and not spending as much. And you're like, “Gosh, I know, but I just can never get ahead and I feel like I'm living paycheck to paycheck. How can I save more when I need to spend this money for my family?”

Those are all very natural, normal things that people experience, and that's where the discipline comes in to do the things that give us options later.

We also have the opposite of that, which is pain of regret. Later down the road, when you look back on the decisions that you've made, specifically the financial decisions that you've made in your life, you may look back with not just a tinge of regret, but an enormous amount of regret and really believe like, man, I blew it.

I could have totally made different decisions that would have set me up for success later and I didn't, and now my future self is paying for it.

We get to choose our hard. What are we willing to do? What are we willing to do now? What are we willing to put up with later?

And we get to make that choice, but we have to own that. We're the only ones responsible for our own future and we have a chance to make that decision ourselves.

And I hope that you will look at that pain of discipline, of planning, of getting a little bit uncomfortable with looking at numbers that maybe don't tell you quite the story that you had hoped, but so that you can do something about it, so that you can take action. Y

ou guys know, I mean, if you've listened to any of these webinars or come to our workshops or our podcast or any of those things, you know that we're always talking about taking action.

And it is super, super important to me to help you to be able to do that and not wallow in other people should have done things differently, and where was HR, and why did the government do this, and this administration or that administration, like all those things happen.

And at the end of the day, when you're in retirement, retirement doesn't care who was in office when you made that decision. They care about the decision that you made and what things are going to look like in the future.

I hope that you will look at that and take a positive spin from that and say, “All right, today's the day. I'm going to make this happen.” And your future self will thank you for it.

Wrap-Up & Next Steps

Here's our wrap up. Your financial mindset influences your financial outcome more than you know. This is some of that discipline that we're talking about of really getting things straight in our minds and doing the hard things now.

And when you know your numbers, your financial decisions become obvious.

When people in January, February, March, really early in that whole process this year with this offer and the subsequent DRP and all of that that was offered by many agencies, those people who knew their numbers when the offer was made knew exactly whether they should take that offer or not.

There wasn't a lot of questions. They maybe had some procedural questions, but they knew their numbers. The decision of whether to take the DRP or not was super obvious to them, either yes or no. And I want you to have that same clarity in your own financial life.

Next, choose your hard, pain now or pain later. And I think that the pain now is sustainable for us. We can get through that knowing that it's for a better purpose later because later when we look back with all that regret, there's not a whole lot that we can do to change our situation at that point.

Here's my parting comment to all of you in our wrap up, and that is being in the driver's seat is way better than being a handcuffed passenger in the trunk. T

hat's what a lot of you felt like this past year because things were just total chaos for so many of you and being right there in the driver's seat because you've done the work, you've done the planning, you know your numbers, you've connected the dots, you've figured this out, puts you in a way different space to be able to make this work.

Anytime we talk about getting your numbers and figuring all this stuff out, naturally we talk about our retirement workshop. Our job is to help you retire with confidence.

We want you to be the hero in your own retirement story. Because you're the one who has to care most about your own retirement, but you can ask for help to be able to do it.

These workshops are all over the country. These are in person retirement training sessions. There's no cost for you to attend. These are sponsored sessions.

They are open to any federal employee who wishes to attend. And in those workshops, these full day sessions, we cover all of the federal benefits topics and those decisions that you are ultimately going to need to make as you fill out your retirement application.

And even further, we think of Medicare and those types of things that come down the road typically after you've retired. But all of those things will be laid out for you. A

nd now the question is, are we ready to be disciplined, to take the action necessary to put us in a situation where we fill out that retirement application years from now as a formality because we've already made all the decisions and put all the other pieces in place that were really necessary?

Like I mentioned in the getting help do-over, one-on-one help is available following our workshop. Every workshop participant has an opportunity to get a FedImpact retirement report.

You'll have two meetings where you're able to develop that and review that top to bottom so that you feel really good and take that back, compare it to what your agency is telling you, and be able to advocate for yourself to get the answers that you need. 

And at the end of that meeting where you have this report and you've talked through like, “Well, what do you want retirement to look like?

What's your ultimate objective,” when you start to see some gaps in there, that's where the financial professional can help you if you're asking for that kind of help to solve those issues, to get to the bottom of it and get those dots connected in a tighter way so that you are fortifying the retirement that you have in the future.

You can find the details of all of those workshops by going to fedimpact.com/attend.

Thank you all so much for joining us. Again, I so appreciate the opportunity to pause and reflect on 2025 for today's session and give you some good thinking tools to process this year and make sure that 2026 is the do-over that you hope for with all the right pieces in place to help you to win.

Remember, you can find a workshop by going to fedimpact.com/attend, and to register for the next webinar, you can go to fedimpact.com/webinar. Thank you all so much. We'll see you next time.

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