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Things to know about federal retirement and taxes

February 3, 2016

[Photo credit: Lending Memo]

If you are a servant of the federal government, then there is nothing you would look forward to more than achieving your federal retirement and enjoy the benefits that follow. The road towards retirement isn’t always an easy one but if you follow the right procedures and fund the right account then when the time comes, you normally have what you would hope for. Here is a list of things that we believe every federal retiree or future retiree should know:

Things to know about federal retirement:

The federal income tax will purpose all of the incomes that you get out of retirement. This is inclusive of TSP, Social security and IRAs etc. So, this entails that the amount you will lose to federal income tax will be dependent upon the marginal tax bracket within which the income lies.
It doesn’t matter if you are getting a CSRS or a FERS pension, it won’t be fully taxable. The reason being that you made the contributions from dollars that were already taxed. This does make sense because otherwise you would be taxed twice.
The deductions because of TSP don’t affect the retirement income either. This is because retirees can’t make TSP contributions.
The payroll taxes will not be deducted from your retirement income but only from your earned income. So, you won’t be parting with any money pertaining to your Social security tax or the Medicare tax.
Around 85 percent of the Social security benefits are taxable. The specific amount is based on the provisional income. This is a very important keyword and to find out the figure, you can add ½ of your social security, some non-taxable income and all of your taxable income. This provisional income will then be compared with certain thresholds meant for joint and single filters.