The Thrift Savings Plan website — a midyear review of functionality

Its website provides the front door to the Thrift Savings Plans for most federal employees. The board that runs the TSP has contracted for many updates and improvements. Last year the new portal had a rocky start. How’s it doing now? TSP millionaire Abe Grungold joins the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with his take.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: You’ve tried a number of functions recently just to see how that website is working and tell us what you found. Let’s start with changing withdrawals, something people need to do regularly.

Abe Grungold: As Tom, you know, I don’t usually go on the TSP website very often, even though I’ve been a participant my entire, you know, federal career and beyond. But I’ve been hearing about some new changes and I said, I’m going to take a very close look at the TSP website and see what I can find.’ And the most amazing change is the change with the withdrawals. Finally, after two years, the TSP board has gotten it right. Before, the website was changed several years ago. It would take some effort to make a change in your withdrawal. When the new website came into play, you basically had to call them. You had to call the TSP on the 800 number, tell them that you wanted to cancel your withdrawal and then create a new one. That, in theory, would take approximately two weeks to do. But now, this very month, I went in and I made a change to my TSP withdrawal without calling anyone. I was on the website. I canceled my withdrawal, and within minutes, I created a new one and I got it approved within two days. So, that is a tremendous plus that the TSP has accomplished, right?

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Tom Temin: And just a reminder, if you cancel your withdrawal, don’t forget the second step of creating a new one because if you are in the minimum withdrawal zone, you could be in trouble with the IRS.

Abe Grungold: Absolutely, you have to take everything into consideration. And the only delay that I had is that my wife had to approve the new withdrawal. She didn’t have to approve the cancellation, but she had to approve the new one. So, two days is nothing to get that accomplished where prior, would take several weeks and you would hope it would take only several weeks. No, this is a big, big improvement.

Tom Temin: Your wife is not like the one that lost her credit card to a thief and you didn’t cancel it because the thief spent less than your wife.

Abe Grungold: But I love that story.

Tom Temin: Yeah, it’s old and it’s always funny, all right. And what about changing interfund transfer and contribution allocations a little bit more complicated in some sense.

Abe Grungold: Yes, the old way of doing this was each step, whether it was a interfund transfer or a contribution allocation, you had to go into a separate module and make that change. Now, there is one module where you can make either change or both changes at once. You don’t have to click out of that module menu. You can do it within the same view on the TSP website. And that is very important because people usually make one change and they forget to make the other. And it’s very important if you want to be consistent with how you’re managing your TSP to make sure that you’re not forgetting either step or, you know, one of the other. This is also a very big plus that the TSP has done. They made it very easy for the TSP participant to do either one of these steps,

Tom Temin: Right. That idea of being able to do everything within one view or one drop down or one module really helps with confidence to know that the changes you made took somehow.

Abe Grungold: Yes. Actually, I recently did this with one of my clients who wanted to make the change, and I was somewhat surprised to see that this was now developed, and it makes it really super easy for the TSP participant to make these changes super easy.

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Tom Temin: We are speaking with retired federal manager Abe Grungold, now owner of AG Financial Services, and the historical information on one’s account, the TSP board was saying that they weren’t going to put that onto the main website simply because of how much data storage it required and the fact that people tended to not look at it very much anyway. What did you find there?

Abe Grungold: Yes, unfortunately, you know, the TSP has been very volatile in the last few weeks and I just wanted to see what my TSP balance was two weeks ago. You can’t do that now. You could do that in the old TSP website two years ago. You could look at your balance at any day in the year and going back many years. Today, you just cannot do it. You can go back and look at the last quarter or the last six months or whatever. The TSP unfortunately got rid of this information because they felt that it was too costly to maintain it. And this actually was a nice view that I always enjoy because you know, you always experience a downward trend in the market. And you want to see how much did your account go down in this downward trend, or an upward trend in the market, how much did it go up? And to take a look back a few weeks, a month, two months, was a really ideal way of seeing the effect of the market on your account. Unfortunately, you can’t do so.

Tom Temin: You might have to buy a nice sheet of yellow line paper, draw columns on it and just jot them down every week, and then make your own little old-fashioned spreadsheet.

Abe Grungold: Yes, actually, you can do that and it takes a little bit of effort on an Excel spreadsheet. Yes, you can track it and you can look back to see what the share price was on these given days. So yes, you can create your own look back. It wouldn’t be that difficult. Takes a little effort on your part, but you can do it on your own if you really want to.

Tom Temin: And again, the new website that came out, I think it was in middle of 2022, at this point, has been worked on and improved ever since. What’s your sense of how it looks the layout and finding items in general now?

Abe Grungold: Well, Tom, I gotta be honest with you. The website looks nice with the fonts and, you know, the enhancements that they have made, but there’s a lot of wasted area, a lot of open space on the website where they could fill it in with something, and there’s a lot of information on the first view of the website that is really kind of not necessary. You don’t need to start looking at videos when you first log in, etc. I think what the TSP needs to create is an index, an index of topics that people are interested in getting information on. And when you click on the index, like say you want interfund transfer. You click on that hyperlink, you immediately go to that page. Now, the website is filled with menus and submenus, and it is very difficult to navigate when you’re looking for something like I just wanted to know how many total shares that I have in a particular fund. It takes a lot of effort on my part to try to find that and that’s a very simple piece of information that I should be able to find that easily.

Tom Temin: Yeah, I think web designers do a lot of things because they can and so everything comes out looking like sort of a diner menu, you know, and somewhere I can’t find breakfast.

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Abe Grungold: Exactly. You see the pictures of the eggs and the bacon and all the dishes and when you actually get the meal, it doesn’t look like that.

Tom Temin: That’s the case, too.

Abe Grungold: An index, I think the old website was really more driven on an index and that type of a principle, which really worked, and it was easy to find information. But now, I think they’re just too many things going on the TSP website when you first log in and it’s very distracting for the user. That’s just my feeling. And again, I’ve been using it for many, many years, both the old system and the new one, so they need to do some improvements.

Tom Temin: Yeah, since the Dow was 10,000 is when you started using it, probably, and I started using the when the Dow was, you know, 5,000 or 3,000, I forget one. And with respect to the mobile app, I mean, more and more people like to do things on the phone. What’s your sense of how that looks?

Abe Grungold: Yes, the mobile app is an interesting feature that TSP participants can look at their balance and do some transactions on the phone. Personally, I think this is a very dangerous thing for participants because, somehow, if your phone falls into the wrong hands, you could potentially lose your retirement. And who wants to really walk around with their entire retirement nest egg in their pocket available for someone to take from them. Now, in the event that this would happen to a TSP participant that somehow any portion of their TSP account was lost due to the lack of security on their mobile app, the TSP board will blame the participant for not properly securing their account on their phone. They will not do anything to make it right for the participant. So, they will put the full blame on the participant for not properly securing their phone.

Tom Temin: But doesn’t the site offer two-factor authentication or can’t just set your, I mean, you can set your phone for face recognition? I mean, phones are incredibly hard to crack if you know, you use two-factor and you can also render your phone dead by making, you know, going to a website and killing it.

Abe Grungold: Yes, I totally agree with you, but they have been many crimes committed on people that have had their phones taken away with them. And even with facial recognition, they just hold the phone up to the person, and they have access to their bank accounts.

Tom Temin: So, your phone in one of the criminals’ hands and a gun in his other hand?

Abe Grungold: Yes. Unfortunately, that is happening out there, and I’ve read many cases on this. So, I think it is a very dangerous thing to walk around, say you have 500,000 in your TSP account. Why would you want to walk around and have that readily available in your pocket? And I don’t see the reason to immediately be able to access your account on your phone. I do maybe one or two transactions a year, and I don’t make them hastily. And to have that ability on your phone is just going to cause someone somewhere, some serious problem.

Tom Temin: All right, so don’t do TSP transactions in the parking lot of Publix, is what you’re saying?

Abe Grungold: Exactly. I don’t do anything on my phone other than Venmo and I only do that for my clients. But as far as banking applications or any type of brokerage, I do not do any of that on my phone. It’s just a security thing.

Tom Temin: Do you ever make a phone call?

Abe Grungold: Yes, I do.

Tom Temin: They still work for that. All right.

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