If you are currently working with the federal government, you can use these two ways to make changes to your TSP investments. The first way extends into your retirement period, while the second way does not. The first way changes your contribution to allocations. The second way makes an inter-fund transfer when changing your TSP investment.
The majority of people are confused about these two options because they are not familiar with the TSP, and they often have a misunderstanding about these two actions. The total amount you contribute to your TSP and your mode of contribution influence your contribution allocation. These factors apply to civilian employees and service members because they are the only class of people that can make contribution allocations. Once you make changes to your contribution allocation, you can do the following two things.
Firstly, you can change your TSP contribution. For example, you can decide to increase the amount you contribute to the TSP from 10% of your salary to 13%. When you increase the amount you contribute to the TSP, you are raising your percentage contribution allocation.
Secondly, you may decide that you want to change the type of fund you are putting your TSP contributions into. If you are currently making your contributions to the F fund, you can move your contributions to the G fund if that makes sense to you. When you do this, you do not alter the amount you contribute to the TSP; you only change the percentage of your contribution to each TSP fund.
On the other hand, if you choose the second way by making an inter-fund transfer, you reallocate the fund you already have in your TSP plan. For instance, if you have a 100% C fund in your TSP in January, you may decide to move your investments into the G fund in March. Your reason for moving your investment can be because of the economic meltdown that you foresee. You can quickly transfer your fund using the TSP website.
Suppose you want to change your contribution allocation, or you want to make a transfer between different types of TSP funds. In that case, you must log in to your details through the new TSP website, but you may be required to do the two-step authentication if you have not set it up before. Immediately after you set up your account, you will be redirected to the TSP website. Now you can change your investments using either of the two ways.
If you change your investment by 10:00 a.m. Eastern time, the changes will be processed and implemented on that same day of submission. Just as with many processes of the TSP, it’s faster to make changes to your investments.
