For Your Benefit

This week on ForYourBenefit, our hosts Bob Leins and John Elliott will discuss the SAMBA program with Executive Director Walt Wilson and Deputy Executive Director Pam Cummings.

This week on For Your Benefit, our hosts Bob Leins and John Elliott welcome insurance expert and author, Walton Francis, to the studio to talk about FEHBP open season.

This week on the For Your Benefit radio show, hosts Bob Leins and John Elliott welcome John Patrick, Director of Federal Health Plans for Kaiser Permanente and Dr. Bruce Wollman, one of Kaiser Permanente’s physicians, to the studio.

This week on For Your Benefit, join our hosts Bob Leins and Bob Braunstein as they welcome Tom Bernatavitz, Vice-President of Aetna Federal Plans to the studio.

There is a retirement planning option available in some agencies called “Phased Retirement”. Is phased retirement something you should consider and how will you be affected financially?

This week on For Your Benefit, join hosts Bob Leins and Tammy Flanagan as they welcome Bart Turney, from FSAFEDS, in the studio to discuss flexible spending accounts and why they are good choices to help with health care and day care expenses.

This week on For Your Benefit, Bob Leins and Bob Braunstein welcome David Santana, Health Insurance Specialist with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to the studio to talk about Medicare and open season.

This week on For Your Benefit, listen in as our host Bob Leins invites Federal Benefits Specialists, Tammy Flanagan and Bob Braunstein, to the studio to talk about the value of deposit and redeposit service.

This week on For Your Benefit, our host, Bob Leins, welcomes Marc Levine, Esquire, with Handler & Levine, LLC to the studio to talk about revocable living trusts. Once upon a time, the average Federal employee wouldn’t think he or she needed a “trust” at all, and certainly not while they were alive. Trusts were for rich folks, SES, or maybe your kids if you died early. Now there is someone, somewhere - on TV, the radio, giving seminars and writing books and articles - telling everyone they need to have a revocable living trust? So, do you?

This week on For Your Benefit, join our hosts, Bob Leins and John Elliott, as they welcome Lester Austin, Retired Senior Public Affairs Specialist for the Social Security Administration, to talk about Social Security and retirement. If you are wondering how you become eligible for Social Security, how to review your account to make sure your earnings are correct or how the payment cycle works, then tune in to today’s broadcast.

This week on For Your Benefit join our host, Bob Leins as he discusses the current state of the market. Co-host John Elliott and guest John Jilek, Certified Financial Planner, have a roundtable discussion about strategies during times of turbulence. “Hold the course” is difficult for some people. What will calm their concerns? How does one’s career status (beginning, mid, pre-retirement) during extreme volatility affect one’s reaction?

This week on "For Your Benefit" , listen in as hosts Bob Leins, Tammy Flanagan and their guest, Kristina E. M. Sturgis, CFP® CDFA™ Financial Advisor, NITP Seminar Presenter and Certified Financial Planner™ with Valenstein & Patterson, a financial advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc. discuss: -The reasons why volatility is a fact of financial planning. -Determining your personal risk tolerance and its impact on long term financial planning. A focus on the best laid plans can be subject to bad weather, traffic jams and scenic stops along the way. -While it is very difficult to predict your reaction to an investment’s decrease during a period of negative volatility there will also be a subsequent period of positive volatility. -Investments including the TSP will have a bad day (with the exception of the G Fund), but knowing how to understand and prepare is key. For questions or comments, email us at ForYourBenefit@nitpinc.com .

Back by popular demand! We have received feedback on how informative and insightful this program was and in light of recent events this week, it’s timely to air it again. Please tune in as Bob Leins and Dwayne Jackson, CPA, CFP and Principal at Rembert | Pendleton | Jackson, talk about the market for the second quarter of 2015, which was also featured in NITP’s monthly newsletter (July 2015 edition). http://www.nitpinc.com/July-2015-newsletter.php

This week on For Your Benefit, join host, Bob Leins and Michael Creedon, DSW, as they discuss the challenge of retirement for couples. Michael has been involved with federal employees on retirement issues since 1979. He regularly addresses retirement transition and the personal and family challenges that come with aging and retirement. Some couples really enjoy the tremendous increase in time spent together. Others find it an ordeal. Research indicates that the average American couple spends seven minutes a day in direct communication. Retirement therefore requires that couple recognize that a major change is occurring in the way they relate to each other. Today’s discussion will identify some of the issues that will come up and how to work through them.

Do you remember filling out some beneficiary forms when you joined the workforce? Somewhere in that paper pile there were a few beneficiary designation forms. Every retirement plan and life insurance policy requires one. Join our host Bob Leins as he talks with Megan Schaeffer, Esquire, who specializes in estate planning, and Karen Schaeffer, Certified Financial Planner, who specializes in financial planning for Federal government employees as they talk about the power of those forms and the blunders you will want to avoid.