How to add TSP to the FI tool

As @Roberto wrote, @sheryldeer, in the early 2000s the TSP was one of the world's largest collection of funds with the world's lowest expense ratios, but since then they've piled on a bunch of features that tend to drive up the expense ratios-- especially when those fixed expenses are spread across a smaller civil-service workforce and a smaller military. Today there's a bunch of ETFs with lower expense ratios.

The TSP is a great way to execute a backdoor Roth IRA contribution. However once you stop your earned income (or at least get below the Roth IRA income contribution limits) then you have far better options than the TSP.

And yes the TSP is actively hostile to beneficiaries-- if your beneficiary designations are even still on file after the TSP's "upgrade" of 2022.

Military Financial Independence | Reasons To Keep Your TSP Account (or NOT)

I love TSP’s low fees so am not rolling the funds out until I retire.

This common wisdom has been outdated for a while now. Twenty years ago, yeah, hands down leave it in the TSP because everybody else fees that were 10x or even 20x the TSP. Today, it's not so cut and dry.

Here are the expense rations among the big providers and the TSP for comparison. These are all for the S&P500 mutual funds (or C fund in the case of TSP, which is tracking the S&P500):

• TSP C fund: 0.036%
• Vanguard VFIAX: 0.04%
• Schwab SWPPX: 0.02%
• Fidelity FXIAX: 0.015%

TSP is close to being the most expensive option. So, if your only reason for sticking with the TSP is the low costs, you might want to re-evaluate that. I'm not saying to definitely ditch the TSP, but rather to consider that they are no longer cost competitive. For example, if your private sector 401(k) has Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity funds available (and they aren't charging some weird account fee), then it might make sense to consolidate the TSP into the 401(k) or into a Traditional IRA that you already have so that you have one less account to manage.

The other reason to consider rolling out of the TSP is that if your heirs are not themselves eligible to be TSP participants (i.e., because they are current or former military or US federal government employees), then the inheritance process is rather unfriendly. Heirs who are not eligible TSP participants in their own right will have 90 days from your decease to find a new home for the funds. Depending on your particular situation, you might not want to put your heirs in the position of having to go through the process of grieving you and also figuring out a somewhat major financial life decision.