Fantasy TSP – Are you in?

It\'s like fantasy football, only with your retirement plan. Learn about fantasy TSP.

By Olivia Branco Internet Editor Federal News Radio

Many people are gearing up for the start of football season. They’ll spend their weekends on the couch watching their beloved teams and maniacally refreshing their Internet browsers for their fantasy team scores.

Not a fan of football but looking to get that fantasy fix? You’re in luck.

You can now check out fantasy TSP. It’s a web application that allows you to track allocation performance, talk with other TSP investors, and compete for a spot on the leaderboard.

Bill Green of TSP Center (and a federal employee himself) joined the DorobekINSIDER to talk about the project and how you can get involved.

“You sign up and you get an imaginary $100,000 balance and you can trade or make your allocation decisions using the same rules that TSP does,” Green says, “They have some trade restrictions that this application models and follows. We’re not in any way trying to push hyper-trading.”

Green said the reason he decided to start the fantasy TSP was for his friends.

“I really created it so that (my friends) could basically compete with each other and their retirement accounts. And once this thing got matured, we realized there’s four-million TSP participants. 1,800 members is nothing. What if 20,000 people were using it? You would obviously just by the laws of numbers you’d get some really good people in there.”

Green says the benefit of participating in fantasy TSP is the lack of risk because you’re not using your actual money, but the knowledge you gain that you can apply to your real TSP account. He also called the program a “collaboration tool.”

“What really kicked this off was a friend of mine and myself did some reading and we applied a seasonal investment strategy to the TSP family of funds. This seasonal strategy basically says make six allocation changes every year; the exact same six every year. When you apply this model over the past 22 years of TSP availability, you achieve a 16% annual rate of return.”

Green noted how using this sort of seasonal strategy can be beneficial in the long run.

“If you started with a $100,000 balance in 1988, made no contributions and just applied these same six trades every year, you’d have $2.5 million as compared to $700,000 if you stayed in the C-fund for 20 years.”

For more information on how you can start participating in fantasy TSP, click here.

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