What role should the G Fund really play in your TSP strategy? In this episode, Tommy, John, and Ben tackle one of the biggest questions federal employees ask during uncertain markets. You’ll learn what to consider before making changes, how to rebalance your TSP effectively, and why trying to “time the market” often does more harm than good.
Listen in to learn how interest rates, inflation, and upcoming 2026 TSP changes may impact your strategy. Plus, you’ll hear why financial planning is always situational and how sticking to your process through volatility is key to long-term success.
Listen to the full episode here:
What you will learn:
- What you need to know about the G Fund. (7:00)
- Why everything in financial planning is situational. (9:45)
- The importance of diversifying your portfolio. (15:45)
- Why there will never be the perfect day to get into the market. (20:00)
- Why we make financial plans to last a lifetime. (27:00)
- How to rebalance in volatile markets. (34:10)
- How TSP allocations change over time. (45:00)
- Which fund is the best fund. (49:00)
- Two changes to be aware of for next year. (54:00)
Ideas Worth Sharing:
- “The Fed influences interest rates. They do not set our interest rates.” – Mason & Associates
- “It’s not about timing the market, it’s about time in the market.” – Mason & Associates
- “How do you rebalance in volatile markets? You follow your process and you don’t deviate from your process or system. Don’t overthink it, don’t get greedy, and don’t get fearful.” – Mason & Associates
Resources from this episode:
- Federal Employee Listener Mail – Survivor Benefits, IRA Rollovers, and Small Pensions
- Lifcycle Funds
- Mason & Associates: LinkedIn
- Tommy Blackburn: LinkedIn
- John Mason: LinkedIn
- Ben Raikes: Website
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Read the Transcript Below:
Congratulations for taking ownership of your financial plan by tuning into the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast, hosted by Mason & Associates, financial advisors with over three decades of experience serving you.
John Mason: Welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. In this episode, we’re discussing the Federal Employee Thrift Savings Plan. We know it’s your favorite topic, so of course, we have to do some episodes on it. Specifically in this episode, we’re discussing should you move to the G Fund, how do you rebalance during volatile markets. Which TSP fund is best for you right now?
Today is September 16th, 2025. We’re talking lifecycle funds versus DIY allocations, and we’re also going to be discussing 2026 changes like the mandatory Roth catch up contributions, as well as the launch of end plan Roth conversions. Folks, you know you’ve been with us for a long time.
Unlike many content creators, we’re financial planners first, and we do this second. In each episode of this podcast, we share real-life experiences from decades of helping federal employees just like you navigate the complexities of your benefit package and all areas of their financial plan. In each episode, we hope you leave more educated and empowered to make positive changes.
Quick update on Mason & Associates. Are you interested in becoming a client? If so, we typically work with federal employees in near retirement with 1 million or more of investible assets. Our process is thorough, it’s intentional, but it does take a few months to get fully onboarded.
As of this recording, September 16th, we will stop new onboarding relationships in November and pick those up again in January. We’re strategic about onboarding new clients for one reason: To make sure we’re protecting existing client relationships. And number two, making sure that you have a phenomenal onboarding experience with our firm. So we’re protective and we’re strategic about when we onboard new clients throughout the year. The process begins@masonllc.net or 757 223 9898 with that public service announcement out of the way. Tommy, Ben, welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.
Ben Raikes: What’s going on, John? It’s been a minute, man. It’s been a minute since I’ve been on the podcast, but it feels good to be back here with you boys. Lots have happened since February when Elsie was born. A lot of sleepless nights, a lot of learning, a lot of, yeah, I mean, you guys know even better than I did with your young ones, but it’s really good to be back here and now it’s crazy how time flies. She’s seven months old and she’s in daycare right now. It’s wild, man. It’s been a ride.
John Mason: Well, I think it was all those sleepless nights why we didn’t invite you onto the podcast. We didn’t know what you were gonna say. We didn’t know if you were ready. Just kidding. Audience, he’s been delivering really good financial planning all year.
Tommy Blackburn: I was gonna say.
John Mason: Even through the sleepless night. So that’s just a joke.
Ben Raikes: Disregard everything Ben said for the last seven months.
Tommy Blackburn: Let’s paint an image of confidence, guys. Not of a concern here.
Ben Raikes: It’s been really, really, really, it’s been great and I do thank you guys, given the new dad a little bit of time off to rest and adjust, but like I said, happy to be here with you guys.
And as you said, John, thrift savings plan is always something that we get a lot of listeners on and there’s certainly some changes coming down the pike. So I’m looking forward to this.
John Mason: Well, today’s September 16th, Tommy, and audience, thank you for being on this journey with us. We started doing this podcast, we believe, back in 2022.
That’s also when we kind of launched our YouTube channel. All of this was in coordination or conjunction with radio advertising that we were doing back then, but as of this date, I think yesterday we released our 100th episode of the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. so this will be like 104 or 105, whatever it ends up being.
Pretty remarkable. And our sound guy, an audio guy, Drew, has done awesome. Our backend team, who has helped us publish these, write descriptions, get transcripts, has been great. The three of us, plus Mike, being dedicated to producing this level of content, I don’t know how many podcasts out there have a hundred episodes, but we know that most of them don’t make it a year.
So we’ve certainly exceeded expectations and, audience, you’ve been the reason we keep doing it. A, positive comments, emails, questions, but B, more importantly, the folks who have now trusted us to be their financial planners. Guys, I mean, it’s remarkable how many people have become clients because they listen to this podcast.
Tommy Blackburn: It’s been a fun journey. I’ll try not to dwell on it too much like you said. Yeah, a hundred, what a milestone. And also kind of odd that it was on a tax deadline day of September 15th. So I guess everything was lining up there. Not that we do tax returns. Yeah, John, I’m just reflecting for a moment, thinking back to the days of radio and to the days of when we were first figuring out how to launch this thing. A lot has changed. We’ve come a long way. We hope to continue to grow and go further, so it’s, yeah, it is a moment, I guess, to pause and thank back to the ground that’s been covered and hopefully the ground ahead of us. Which may be one public service announcement, which we’ve mentioned before.
So we are accepting clients, as you said. We’re also growing our team. The firm is doing well, thanks to you, our clients. And as such, we need to expand our ability to continue to serve a growing client base. So we just, I think, actually yesterday yet another monument day, right? So a hundred episodes, as well as the new job posting, just went live. So we are hiring for a new financial planner, and I think there will be more hiring to come.
John Mason: And it sounds really cool. But this is our first like national hiring campaign that we’re doing. We’ve hired people before based on proximity to the main office in Newport News, Virginia, or because I was friends with Tommy, and Tommy was friends with Ben, and we’ve been pretty lucky in that the friends in the local team have worked out as well as they have.
With the expanded need, we’re probably going to need to go a little more outside our radius and a little bit outside of our friend group to get the team members in that we need. But boy, I mean, I never thought that we would be launching a national hiring campaign using a recruiting firm, having a coach. I mean, it is, Ben’s at work. He’s designing a case study so that we can put these people through actual financial planning criteria to see how’s their mind work, how do they deliver advice. That way, as we grow our client base, we’ll have a lot of confidence in these folks.
So let’s dive in, guys. Let’s talk about the TSP episode here. So again, maybe we just go right to the beginning. Today’s September 16th, the market’s up quite big this year. I don’t know the exact–
Ben Raikes: Bigly?
John Mason: It’s up bigly this year. C fund is up. Small caps not up as much. International’s done well. G Fund is solid because interest rates haven’t moved.
And then I would imagine, although I haven’t pulled it up, traditional bonds like B and D or the F fund has been a pretty good place to be invested this year. So we have the CSI GNF and then of course, you have the lifecycle funds, guys, that are just a combination or prepackaged of those funds.
So should we move to the G Fund? And we can answer this in a couple ways. “I’m retiring at the end of the year. I’m worried that we’re heading to a recession. Should I move to the G fund?” “The market’s up big. Should I move to the G Fund?” “I’m 32 years old and I’m trying to time the market. Should I move to the G Fund?”
Let’s just kind of unpack this G Fund a little bit. What are we, what advice are we giving?
Ben Raikes: Well, John, I think you kind of laid out maybe the answer to your question with the questions themselves, just a little bit, right? At the end of the day, this is all going to depend somewhat on your personal financial situation.
So as you started, “Hey, I’m about to retire. Should I move into the G fund?”
“The market’s super high, should I move into the G fund?” “I’m 32 years old and I’m just fresh, starting. Should I move into the G fund?” All of the G fund and those scenarios is going to return the same amount for each of those individuals.
What’s not going to return the same amount is how much those individuals’ situations will depend on having something as stable as the G fund and whether or not that fits their goals and their own personal scenario. G Fund, typically for younger folks, probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You got a lot of room to grow.
You have some room to retire. You can let your account drop by %20 or even 30% and still have 20 years to make up the difference. Now, for someone who’s getting really close to retirement, who maybe is worried about the market, who needs to start taking distributions, maybe their answer is different. But I’m sorry if this is a non-answer answer, but should you move into the G fund or not? It depends.
John Mason: Well, thank you for saying that. Because I was reading through some of the comments on our survivor benefit video, which has over 20,000 views, by the way. So thank you to everybody who’s seen that. But one person accused me of speaking in absolutes, and they were like, “This guy speaks in absolutes. You absolutely can’t trust him.” I think he used, I think he’s spoken in absolute. So thank you for mentioning, and we always try to say it is situational, you don’t plan in a silo. We do have things, audience, that we’re very passionate about, and when we’re passionate about taking survivor benefits, that’s like almost an absolute, but there are situations why you wouldn’t take it.
So, I’m 37 years old and I just bought my first set of bonds earlier this year. Specifically like municipal bonds because I was kind of sick and tired of sticking money in cash and sticking money in a money market mutual fund. So I did buy some municipal funds, which are providing tax-free income at the federal level, but they’re taxable in Virginia.
I’m kind of having fun watching those, but the big piece of my investments is a hundred percent stock. I’m like 99.7% stock or something, because I need that. I need that growth. So it is situational. If you’re young, you probably don’t need a lot of G fund. G Fund, guys, is going to pay similar to the interest rate that you’re getting on a 10-year treasury, right?
So as of today, we’re somewhere between four and four and a half on a 10-year interest rate. That’s about what your G fund is going to pay, Tommy. So that’s been a nice place to be for the last couple years. But going forward, what do we think is gonna happen?
Tommy Blackburn: Well–
John Mason: And I say think and that we don’t really know, but–
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, I hate to speculate on that ’cause I already get a chip on my shoulder when people tell me where interest rates are gonna go, as if they have a crystal ball.
And yes, we all have, I think, the same general outlook of where interest rates are going to go, but it moves notoriously fast, and can change very quickly. I’ll just say, I gotta go down that rabbit hole for a second. So interest rates, everybody’s been saying like, “Oh, the Fed this, the Fed that, the Fed this.” Like the Fed influences interest rates. They do not set our interest rates. They have a bigger influence on the shorter, short term interest rates. And I say all this too, ’cause everybody’s like, “Oh, the Fed’s gonna lower rates and like that’s gonna set off this and that and mortgage rates and that.” Well, guess what? The Fed has done nothing as of the recording of this podcast, and interest rates have come down a bit.
My whole point there is that the market is looking ahead of what the Fed is thinking and the market is also looking at what’s happening in the economy. It feels that the most recent news that’s come out has shown an economy that is more at risk than robust. And so as such, interest rates would drop and that inflation has been moderating is what it’s seeing.
I’m not saying inflation is certainly still a thing, people are feeling it, but compared to where it was, so I say all of that, we would imagine, John, interest rates are gonna come down, which means with G Fund is paying, it’s gonna come down. But that brings me back to your B and D question, which would be equivalent of the F fund inside of TSP.
And I just pulled up B and D on Vanguard’s website and as of September 15th, it has a year-to-date return of 6.6%. So that is dividends as well as price appreciation. So when interest rates go down, our bonds usually go up in value. So as interest rates have been coming, so B and D got hammered, right, couple years ago, but now as interest rates are dropping B and D or F, our bonds at aggregate are doing better. They’re benefiting from that as well as they’re still getting those coupon payments from higher interest rates.
So F, arguably, if you think rates are gonna go down, would be a better place to have your bonds position. All of this, I would come back to, even if we’re going into retirement, that’s certainly a riskier time and a time to think about what your comfort level is. We’re probably still planning for 30 or 40 years.
So to be all in G or even F, we still need to have, we need to have our plan and a plan that we’re comfortable with. But we have a long horizon ahead of us. So we probably need exposure to many different asset classes and some with more risk and growth potential than fixed income or essentially cash B and G.
John Mason: Wow. A lot to unpack there. I love that you said that the Fed controls short-term rates, not long-term, so they control the short-term rate. The market dictates these longer term rates, so I think that’s good to remember. Also, if we do think that interest rates are going to come down, like you said, G fund rate of return would come down and probably look a lot more like the historical average that you see on TSP website.
But also, you’re gonna get a boom or at least a positive return on bonds as interest rates come down. Generally speaking, Ben, as we design TSP allocations for folks, we do use G Fund almost for everybody. We don’t work with a lot of young professionals, so our clients enter near retirement, million or more of investible assets, they’re going to have G Fund.
Overwhelmingly, the most normal allocations that we see is probably somewhere between a 50 stock, 50 bond, a 60-40, or maybe even a 70-30. Of course, there’s people that fall outside of that range. But on the fixed income side, I think we like somewhere between 50% and 70% of the fixed income side and G fund and then the remainder and the F fund.
So, we don’t wanna slam everything into G and abandon F. I think that’s a mistake that people have made since 2022, when we saw that spike in rates and F fund really got hammered. And having some in G and some in F is typically where we stand on that, you know, liking to have both.
Ben Raikes: No, I completely agree, John, and I just, I think a lot of people over the last year or two, or even three, have really fallen completely in love with the G Fund and it’s all they want to use for the fixed income allocation, their portfolio and oh, how we have short memories, right? I’m looking at historical returns. In 2020, we returned under 1%. In 2021, we were at 1.38%. Again, the F fund had its own issues when we saw interest rates start to spike. But there’s a reason to have a mix of both of these types of fixed income allocations in your TSP.
They essentially balance each other out. And again, we’ve fallen in love with the G fund ’cause we love seeing that guaranteed 4% or 5%. But let us not forget that this was under 1% for some time.
Tommy Blackburn: Well, let us not forget that inflation was also probably running 4% or 5% while you were earning that amount.
So you basically, or maybe even higher, you may not have even kept up with inflation. It’s not to say that inflationary period wasn’t painful for all of us. But as we joke, and maybe, John, that’s what you were thinking about a lot of times we call cash or G, we joke, guaranteed to lose money. Not to say that those don’t have a place in your plan or your allocation, but risk-free essentially, or very low risk, is it’s not gonna keep up with the broader spectrum.
I think, Ben, too. Oh, how we have short memories, client, we’re all guilty of being emotional about things and I feel like I see just as much of I was in love with G and I felt like G was great when I was scared, but meanwhile I’m seeing that if I’d have stayed in the S&P500 the past five years, I’d be up a hundred percent.
And I’m realizing that maybe, so you get it on, people’s immersions, flip flop, they love G for a minute, and then I think they kind of look and like, “Man, I should have probably been invested more aggressively.” Which, usually, that’s the story of history, right? When things are scariest, tends to be right before you get really good returns.
Ben Raikes: Yeah.
John Mason: So the G fund, the guaranteed to lose money fund, is kind of fun to talk about. And I think, Tommy, one time you said that it just doesn’t carry any statement risk, meaning you’re always gonna see it go up. It doesn’t carry any, like, “Oh my gosh, I’m down, you know this 90-day period.” So there’s no paper risk or statement risk, but there is a lot of risk that you’re gonna lose to inflation and know how we forget from like 1980 through 2000 and whatever it was, 9, 10, 11, 12. Interest rates went down like every year for three decades.
And everybody that was really jazzed about their 60-40 portfolio making a killing. You give up some of that in 2022 and it’s like now all of a sudden, bonds are horrible. Well, if you were gonna abandon bonds, you should have done it back in 2020 when interest rates were at one. But you didn’t.
So abandoning bonds now, where interest rates are at 4%, probably not the place where we need to be. The G fund’s a stable value fund, guys, and some 401Ks have those too. And it’s just nice, kind of echoing again, to have that nice stable value fund paired with a good quality fixed income fund, whether it’s an active, managed or just a B and D or F fund, aggregate bond index fund.
So we’ve unpacked what G Fund is and I think we’ve talked a little bit about interest rates and where that’s gonna go and speculating. But psychologically, I think we would be mistaken if we didn’t talk about the huge risk that people run when they try to slam in or slam out of the G Fund. For instance, in 2017, when President Trump won the first time, everybody thought the market was gonna go down.
And we had like a record day the day after he was elected. Similar, we thought tariffs were going to impact the economy in a very negative way. And since, it wasn’t Judgment Day, what was it? Liberation Day.
Ben Raikes: Judgment. That would’ve been amazing. Pulling it from the Terminator movies.
John Mason: Yeah. So it was Liberation Day, and the market was volatile. It was like, “Ouch, that hurt.” And now, wherever we are up 13, 14, 15%, depending on the asset class you’re looking at, if you’re trying to slam in and out a G fund, you’re exposing yourself to a tremendous amount of risk. Since we have been doing this, me 2010, Tommy 2010, Ben, 2012? 13?
Ben Raikes: Got it. 12.
John Mason: So that’s a lot of years and almost every year that we’ve done this, the world has told us about all of the negative things that were gonna happen.
There was the tsunami, there was the S&P500, downgraded US debt. We’ve had tariffs, we’ve had Brexit, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had, you know, piled on to the list of negative things. We’ve had the Russia and Ukraine War. We’ve had a lot of things here that would tell you the market is going to crash. The risk is when you move to G Fund, it’s very hard to ever get back into the market again.
Because if you turn on the news, they’re gonna tell you every single day about why the market’s gonna go down. And because you’ve missed out on 10, 20, 30, 50, a hundred percent return, now you start to get really picky about your entry point and you just continue missing gains. And the reality is, even when the market drops 20%, you’re still gonna be picky ’cause you’re like, “I think it could go further.” And then it’s gonna rebound and then you’re gonna be like, “Dang it, I missed it again.” So if you’ve made the mistake of slamming into the G fund, set up a rule, right? Dollar cost average back into a prudent allocation, do it over 12, 24, 36. Guys, I don’t think we care as long as you just somehow have a rule that you get back in.
But waiting for the magical day that the moon and the stars and your confidence all align, that’s the risk that you run. And we’ve seen it happen countless times.
Tommy Blackburn: We have. You gotta have a system, a process, you gotta stick to your philosophy. Ours is certainly not trying to time the market, which is essentially what you’re describing there, of going to G.
And yeah, there’s another saying out there, certainly not my saying, but it’s a good one, which is time in the market. It’s not about timing the market; it’s about time in the market. So trying to get in and out is usually a fool’s errand. Perhaps you get it once, you get it right, occasionally, but consistently, I don’t know that anybody really has a consistent track record.
And the other one is you gotta get it right twice. Each time you do that, you gotta get out and you gotta get in at the right times, which is just very difficult. Time is on your side, right? Let’s put an investment allocation that’s gonna, we heavily weighted in your favor over a long-term investment horizon.
Ben Raikes: Sorry, John. Well, last piece and just reiterating what you said was there’s always another, essentially boogeyman peering as you peer over that next corner, right? If you get out, there’s always a piece of financial news that you’re gonna come across. There’s always going to be some global conflict that’s happening or some piece of data that you don’t like, that you can continue to justify the reason that you don’t get back into the market.
And we’ve seen it happen time and time again. And just reiterating what you all said, have a rule for yourself that says, “Here’s when I’m gonna do it and I’m gonna stick to this plan regardless of what I see.” There’s always a reason to talk yourself out of something.
John Mason: Volatility is on our side. I think when people hear the word volatile or volatility, they just think like something very negative.
But at the end of the day, the reason volatility is on our side, because a market goes up six or seven out of 10 years consistently throughout history, maybe even more and consistently 8, 9, 10, 11, 12% annualized rate of returns depending on the periods that you’re looking at. So for the volatility, you get compensated pretty nicely.
Volatility all of a sudden becomes not your friend when you start trying to plan against the volatility or prevent the volatility because things move fast. Like if you missed March 15th, I think it was, of 2009. I think that was the low, or March 9th. Somewhere there.
Tommy Blackburn: Somewhere in there. Yeah.
John Mason: The market rebounded a tremendous amount within like 30 days.
Tommy Blackburn: COVID.
John Mason: If you miss that. Yeah, and COVID. And if you miss that, you like never catch up for the rest of your life, you never make it. So volatility becomes your enemy when you’re trying to prevent it. Volatility becomes your friend if you just understand that it’s going to be there and you embrace it.
Tommy Blackburn: Well, you just said embrace investing carries risk. I mean, if it didn’t carry risk, it wouldn’t reward anybody anything. And as I think about one other date, the most relevant one, John, was this year, Judgment, Liberation Day as you call it. Maybe it was judgment of well, you stick to your guns or not. And yeah, I mean we saw nine to 10% on that one day where it snapped back.
I mean, imagine being on the wrong side of that. And of course, we’ve had a run since. There’s always some emotion involved. We acknowledge that. It’s not like we don’t feel some stress or feel some emotions when we’re watching things happen and we care about our clients. So we know beyond our own stress, we’re thinking about our clients.
So we certainly internalize that stress, which we, who knows, maybe we feel more about it than they do, ’cause most of them seem to have a lot of confidence in the plan and the process. But we just have to stick to a long-term plan, make some adjustments as you go, but can’t be knee-jerk reactions.
John Mason: So we’ve really talked about this quite a bit, and I think we could probably have three episodes just on this topic or more. I’m thinking in my head right now that it’s also important then for clients to have what we call an all-weather portfolio or something that they’re always happy with.
Meaning, the reason we add G Fund or F Fund is they provide a little more stability at de-risk the portfolio. So let’s say that on average a 60-40 portfolio, and it’s kind of worst times. And, audience, I’m not saying that this is the worst that you would experience. I’m just saying, historically, maybe a 60-40 portfolio would go down 15% to 25% in a bad market.
Well, if that’s what you experience, you should be okay with it. You’re not gonna love it. You’re not gonna be like, “Woo hoo, I lost 25%. Let’s party.” But if the market’s down 30, 40, 50 and you’re down 20, we should be happy with our performance. We got what we expected. And then on the flip side of that, if the market’s up 20 and you’re up 10, we should be good with that too.
Because if we’re limiting some of that volatility on the downside, we’re gonna be limiting the volatility on the upside. So the reason that we have fixed income in our portfolios is because not many of our retirees, Ben, wanna see a 50% drop in their accounts.
Ben Raikes: No.
John Mason: Right? So we add some fixed income for that reason, because it is, emotionally, we have to keep returns in a certain range to keep people happy
Ben Raikes: There’s a difference between the portfolio allocation and the allocation of stocks to bonds that will make your financial plan work versus what are you going to be able to be invested in that helps you sleep at night, that helps you feel comfortable in your retirement, that helps you say, “Hey, I don’t wanna worry about this anymore. I’m on the beach putting my toes in the sand and letting the water come up. The Mason & Associates guys have developed that portfolio for me so that I don’t have to freak out and go turn on the news and try to move everything into one account or the other,” or as you said, I think, Tommy, “Make a knee-jerk reaction.”
So part of that all-weather portfolio, again, is not just making the financial plan work, it’s making an allocation that’s you can stick with, not just for a year or two in the good times or a year or two in the bad times, but we want this to be essentially for the entire life that you’re going to be investing.
Not that we don’t make small tweaks, not that we don’t make changes, not that we can’t adjust, but we really want there to be a comfort level, that you are not panicked in the middle of the night with any allocation that you’re in.
John Mason: So let’s go to rebalance. First, whoever wants to define it, what is a rebalance? And then the question is, how do I rebalance in volatile markets?
Ben Raikes: Tomm, go ahead. You want me to take it?
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, go ahead.
Ben Raikes: Typically, we see a rebalance as, it kind of goes with y’all weather portfolio that we had just discussed. If we’re aiming for 60% equities to 40% fixed income for you, and we know that’s a comfort level for you and a portfolio that you can maintain over a long time horizon, we don’t want that portfolio to sway in one direction or another over time.
We want to keep that same allocation, mostly to keep your risk level the same. So typically, the way that works is if you’re in a 60-40 and we’ve seen the market do really well the first quarter of the year, maybe now you’ve gone up to a 65-35. So what we’ll do is we’ll essentially take that 5% of growth that you’ve had from your equities, and then we’ll buy 5% of fixed income to maintain that 60-40 balance.
Sometimes people don’t like selling equities when they’re doing well, but we also have to remember what’s one of the very first rules of investing that we have. We wanna buy low and we wanna sell high. And that’s essentially what that rebalance accomplishes while keeping you at that same risk allocation.
Tommy Blackburn: I was going to, what I enjoy about rebalancing conceptually, yeah, just the philosophy and the systemization of it. It’s a forcing mechanism or another way to hold ourselves accountable of, as you said, when we wanna sell high, buy low, vice versa, so when things get outta whack, we just say, “Hey, it is time to trim.” And it takes away a lot of the arbitrary thoughts around a portfolio is just, “Hey, this was the philosophy that we laid out. Let’s follow it and let’s stop, let’s not overthink it.” So it’s just a very good forcing mechanism to make those adjustments. And it’s, yeah, it’s great because if you were a hundred percent stock, which I actually, as we’re talking, wonder, it’s like, “Will I ever not be a hundred percent stock?”
I don’t know. Maybe that day’s a long way off. But the nice thing is when you’re not a hundred percent stock, when you have bonds inside of your portfolio, it gives you that weighing mechanism there to make periodic adjustments.
John Mason: People by nature do just the opposite of the standard rule, which is buy low, sell high.
Most people do the exact opposite. I saw a meme or something the other day on YouTube or Instagram or somewhere where it was like, “If cheeseburgers go down in value, people are excited.”
Tommy Blackburn: Oh, Warren Buffett, right?
John Mason: Yeah. “When cheeseburgers go up in price, everybody’s upset.” But for whatever reason, with stocks and investments, as the market’s marching to all-time highs, people are like, “Yeah, I wanna buy more.”
It’s like, it’s just off. It’s just for whatever reason, people just cannot get this correct. Tommy, I do want to correct you really quickly. You’re not a hundred percent stock, ’cause I’ve seen your financial plan. You’re pretty conservative with your cash.
Tommy Blackburn: Oh, outside of my investment portfolio. Yes, you are correct. And that’s what allows me to have, I mentally separate them, but I do have a very healthy, thank you, very healthy cash cushion.
Ben Raikes: I’m glad you said it, John. I was going to call him out, too.
Tommy Blackburn: That’s, you guys make a good point. So because I have a healthy cash cushion, my investment portfolio and my perspective is a hundred percent stock.
And if you’re gonna throw me under the bus, I gotta also at least acknowledge, dig myself out of that. Some business owner, we, you know, there’s a little bit more risk involved in that and needing to make sure we have adequate liquidity if called upon. So I heard there are some reasons for my behavior there.
But you are correct. I have mitigated. I’ve given myself liquidity so that I can be long and everything else.
John Mason: So thrift savings plan, guys, does not have an automatic rebalance feature like many 401k plans do, where you could set it for monthly, quarterly, annual. The only way you’re gonna get a rebalance in TSP is if you do a lifecycle fund.
And maybe we’ll touch on this a little bit, too. We do quarterly at Mason, and I don’t remember all the research, but we work with our outsource chief investment officer who provides us a lot of research. Then we take it internal, analyze it and say, “Do we agree or disagree?” We were originally thinking we were gonna do an annual rebalance, but we’ve just recently, I say recently, we’ve committed to a quarterly rebalance and it’s a little bit unclear which rebalance timing works the best.
It’s pretty clear that never rebalancing is not the best. And we would even say like, not only doing it once a year may not be the best, so somewhere in between never and sometimes is the answer. We like quarterly. So the reason, how do we do it during volatile times? The answer is you have to just commit to the rule.
And we, in January, stocks were marching higher January of 2025, and we intentionally sold and repositioned clients back to target. That didn’t necessarily feel right. It felt like, oh man, you really would like equities to run. Then tariff hit, volatility’s hit. First quarter wasn’t great. We’re leading into tariff day, liberation day.
Market is down big at that point, and our next quarterly rebalance comes up. We trim equity or fixed income. We buy equities just in time for it to go up whatever it was, Tommy, seven to 10% the following day. So, because we followed our rule, how do you rebalance in volatile markets? It’s you follow your process and you do not deviate from your process or your system.
You don’t overthink it. You don’t outthink yourself. You don’t get greedy, you don’t get fearful. The research indicates that a quarterly rebalance is prudent and it works. So that’s what we’re going to do. And volatility has been there. Black Friday or whatever it was in 1987, or Black Monday, whatever it was, that huge drop, like we’ve seen volatility throughout our lifetime and quarterly rebalances have worked.
So commit to it and don’t outthink yourself or overthink yourself. Another way of saying it, guys, is there are some things in life where. You have to constantly like re-litigate or like reconfirm that you’ve made the right decision. I don’t think we’re gonna need to reconfirm or re-litigate the decision to quarterly rebal.
Once you’ve made that decision one time, I think you can kind of just continue down that path.
Tommy Blackburn: I agree. A caveat there for just the technicality, for anyone listening, we have what are called non-qualified accounts of brokerage. So when things are bought and sold in those, there are tax consequences from those movements.
Those we try to do more like once a year to manage the tax consequences, we can do quarterly. So those, we probably baby those accounts a little bit more of looking at them to see, does it make sense to do annual or quarterly? Generally, it’s annual to, again, just try to get more preferential tax treatment.
And there is some, I think, all right. And it’s not to go against anything. You just said, John, ’cause completely agree. This is the system that we follow. We think it works well. We’ve mentioned we make some small tweaks. If market goes down 20%, we will be looking to think about opportunistically, do we do another rebalance?
It maybe doesn’t fall in the cadence right now. That one, again, we’re still coming back to our system, which was here’s our target allocation and it’s way out of whack all of a sudden. So maybe we need to introduce another rebalance. Generally, quarterly is fine, and we’re not gonna deviate from it. There could be circumstances where it’s just opportunistic, but it’s to still follow the same philosophy.
John Mason: That’s a good point. And as you were just mentioning that, it also occurred to me that a rebalance for our audience could also include changing your risk profile from a 70-30 to a 60-40 or to a 50-50.
We probably don’t wanna do that during a volatile market. We don’t really want to change your risk profile based on, or we don’t wanna rebalance you to a different strategy based on your hunch of where you think the world’s gonna go. We rebalance your portfolio based on data, based on the fact that says, “Okay, what rate of return do we need so I don’t run outta money before I die? What level of risk am I comfortable with? Has my goals changed? Has my life changed?” That’s a reason to rebalance your overall allocation or change your risk profile, not because who’s elected president, not because what’s gonna happen with tariffs, but because something’s materially changed.
So we talked about one set of rebalance rules, which is like, we’re just out of whack a little bit. The other rebalance could be a material change or deviation in strategy.
Ben Raikes: And just for sake of clarity, I might call that a rebalance versus a reallocation, right? Rebalancing, we’re going back to the current plan that we have in place. A reallocation is just as you said, John, “Hey, I don’t like where things are going. I’m at a 70-30 now. Let’s go down to a 50-50 because X, Y, Z is about to be president.”
John Mason: And that’s the same issue as slamming into the G fund.
Tommy Blackburn: It is. Yeah, it is. I guess, well, you say slamming into the G fund, that feels very emotional versus maybe changing the weighting, some of like, are we targeting a growth portfolio or a balanced portfolio? But to your point about slamming in G, my thoughts here too, that I know we do as a firm, is when clients come to us with those type of situations of like, “Hey, I want to have less inequities overall,” or, “I want to dial it up.” One is kinda like, what market are we in right now?
Because if we’re in that very volatile market where things are moving very quickly each day, this is not the time to make that change. The time to make that change is when we’re in calmer markets. So usually it’s, “Hey, you really need to weather this.” Unless you’re at a point where you’re moving everything to cash and this is just some type of compromise movement to still keep you as invested as possible.
Outside of that, during the middle of a storm is not the time to make those adjustments because it’s probably emotional and it’s usually one of the worst times to do it. Wait for calmer winds to prevail, to do those type of movements.
John Mason: So, TSP does not do an automatic rebalance unless you’re in a lifecycle fund and then it rebalances and it does the thing that we just said, rebalance and reallocation. So we’ve used lifecycle funds historically. Clients, if you’re in them, we’ve reviewed it and we understand what’s going on with them. So just understand when we say we don’t really love lifecycle funds.
What we don’t like about them, we manage around when we use them as well, so they rebalance daily, guys, so every single day it’s looking at C fund and F fund, and it’s saying, “Do we have too much C?” And every single day, it’ll trim positions based on target allocation. I think daily rebalance is probably overkill.
I don’t remember our research, but I’m pretty sure that daily was not recommended for a variety of reasons. So that seems like overkill. But then the second thing, and Ben, you used the word reallocation. Every quarter, these lifecycle funds get more conservative. So has your goal changed from every 90-day period?
Probably not. Has your risk profile changed every 90 days? Probably not. Are we, do we still need the return, you know, projected on January 1st that we needed on April 1st? We probably needed the same return. And if we’re scaling out of the market, it’s gonna be harder and harder to get that. So we don’t really love the L funds for those two reasons, and I think people often overlook that.
And if I’m not mistaken, and maybe one of you guys could fact-check me, I’m pretty sure that the lifecycle funds changed the international allocation not that long ago. I don’t remember if it was an increase in international exposure or a decrease, but that’s one of the things you have to watch out for, too, is when lifecycle funds make these big changes, do you agree with those big changes or do you want to be rebalanced that way?
So we don’t typically do that. We would typically do a customized allocation, long story short.
Ben Raikes: Yeah. And I think it’s worth saying that we do recommend those lifecycle funds on occasion, and there’s certainly a place for them, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing that they get less aggressive as time goes on.
That’s typically the trajectory of your portfolio. But certainly there are some, I think, mechanics there that we can’t necessarily control with those funds, where we have a little bit more control and maybe even flexibility with a more customized allocation. My last piece on this, going back to rebalancing versus reallocating, I think we hear a lot that, “Hey, I want to reallocate and then just see how that goes.” See how that, “Hey, I’m at a 60-40, I wanna do a 70-30 and see how that goes. Let’s see how that goes for six months.” To me, that is completely missing the point of investing for the long term. If there is a reallocation in your portfolio and you’ve either increased or decreased risk, that should follow some fundamental change in either your thinking of your financial plan, the goals that you want to accomplish, or your overall financial situation.
We don’t necessarily want to be jumping in at 10% increments of either equities or fixed income, higher or lower, because we just wanna try on a portfolio for a certain amount of time.
Tommy Blackburn: Well, it’s funny you would say try it on. I suppose that’s, I think of, so when I hear it, usually what I’m thinking is going on is–
Ben Raikes: Sorry for the rant.
Tommy Blackburn: That’s good. I think what probably what has happened is fear and greed. When you hear that kind of comment of, “Hey, I just went through a rough market and like I realized like I am not able to stomach this risk,” and so not so much try it on as in yeah, you discovered your risk tolerance and we need to perhaps dial it back, or the other, yeah, perhaps you’re being, you’re letting fear of missing out drive you and we should probably have that conversation. Hopefully, it is interesting, just as an aside, as you think about it with as volatile as markets are regularly, like when you sit here and think, John, rattled off like five catastrophes that have happened recently.
We’ve all gotten a taste of what those markets feel like. You would think you should know by now what you’re comfortable with, but I suppose it hits everybody at different moments in time. Going back to the lifecycle funds, we do think they’re appropriate in situations and they’re designed.
Maybe for not paying as much attention. My big thought there is it’s not customized to you. I think, as you both were saying, this is not a customized allocation to you and your plan. Big critique of them, for example, would be, according to lifecycle funds, we get to retirement and all of a sudden we’re like heavily in G and F, which for many folks we laid out earlier, you’ve got another 30, 40 years of retirement.
Don’t know that level of conservative makes sense for you. And kind of like asset allocation funds. So we’re not against those either, particularly for like low dollar amounts. So we, those can be, what are some, some iShares, some Vanguard funds do these things, where it just says like, “Hey, here’s a fund that’s 80% stock and 20% bonds. We’ll rebalance it, but we’re not gonna change the allocation just because we’ve gone through time.” Again, that’s not as customized to your individual plan. But that one at least isn’t dialing it down just based on time elapsing. Not that that’s a bad thing, like we, I think everybody on the podcast and in our firm gets the design of the L Funds and any of those target retirement date funds is to say, like, “If you really gonna be uninvolved, do nothing here, fine. We will try to be prudent and dial this back.” And maybe that’s really not the best answer for you, but it’s better than you retiring and all of a sudden going from a hundred percent stock to a stock crash.
John Mason: So I looked in the tsp.gov website, and if you go to like the Lifecycle 2030 and then you click on composition, it gives you a nice kind of graph on how TSP allocations change over time, guys.
And in 2019, it looks like international exposure went from 18% to 21%. So there was a material tick up in international exposure that happened in ‘19. That may be, you know, hindsight’s 2020. That was maybe a little early. Internationals had a pretty good year, but what’s interesting now is in July of 2025, I’m just gonna give you one fund right now. TSP G fund, G as in golf, 34.5% of your portfolio.
So this is, let’s pretend you’re 55 right now, and you’re gonna retire at 60 in 2030. Over the next five years, your G Fund exposure is gonna go from 34.5% to 64.75%. It’s gonna double the G fund allocation over the next five years. That’s what we’re talking about. Does that work in your financial plan?
That’s, for a lot of folks, that’s too conservative. This is, by 2030, you’re sitting at 70% fixed income if you sit in the 2030, 70%. And oh, by the way, that I fund exposure that we dialed up from 18 to 21 is now down to 10% again. So it just feels like it just doesn’t feel right to me. I’d rather have an allocation that we can commit to for a long haul. I don’t see people’s risk profile and goals changing that drastically over five years.
Tommy Blackburn: No, it’s really designed for, if you’re not gonna be involved at all, this is our, like, least risky thing we can come up with for you so that it doesn’t implode on you. It’s interesting. I’m glad you shared that, John, ’cause just even looking at the visual, it is striking how fast that allocation is changing over that time period. I mean, because it kind of was like very gradual and then it’s like we’re five years out from 2030, like let’s just dial it way down very quickly, as you said, double our fixed income. So I don’t know, just drives some of the point there.
Probably not, it’s not an individualized investment plan. Probably not gonna make sense for the vast majority of people. It’s really, I think it’s just designed to protect you if you’re gonna put your head in the sand and not be involved at all.
John Mason: I’m gonna get a little crazy here and try to share my screen. Audience, bear with me as I try to do this for everybody. So let’s share screen. Let’s share window and then let’s go ahead and hopefully, we can see this is the chart that we’re talking about. And I’ll give hopefully a little zoom in here. So in the top, I think that’s orange. I’m colorblind, so bear with me if that’s red or something.
But that’s your G fund exposure. And we can see that if we zoom right in to 2025, we’re at 34.5% G. And then look how this just falls off. Look how much more orange we have and a five-year period. And then when we went back over to here, this is where we can see that uptick in the international exposure.
And then again, the subsequent decline of equities as the orange just becomes a hugely massive, likely unnecessary component of your portfolio. So hopefully, that’s helpful. Guys, we’ve covered quite a bit now. I think next on our list, we’ve talked lifecycle funds versus DIY allocations. Which TSP funds are best right now?
I’m interested because we didn’t prepare for this at all. So, Ben, which TSP fund is best right now?
Ben Raikes: Well, you gotta go with the lifecycle funds. No, again, I’m gonna give a non-answer, answer. Obviously, it depends exactly upon your financial situation. It depends on the funds that you can stick with in the long term.
It depends on the funds that are gonna give you the return that you need in order for your financial plan to be successful. So I don’t have a spicy take on this one, that there’s one that’s better than the other. There’s probably, if we’ve talked to a hundred different clients, we’ll probably get different answers from each and every single one of them on what is their favorite fund. And I think that’s probably normally what people are asking when they say, “What’s the best fund?” When you get that from a client, like, what is your favorite fund? And it’s funny ’cause favoritism seems to fall in and out of, “Hey, what was the best fund last year?”
Or, “What’s the best fund right now?” So again, when the market’s tanking, everyone really likes the G fund. When the S&P 500 is taking off, everyone really likes the C Fund. Way back, many moons ago, people may have even liked the S Fund for a certain amount of time.
Tommy Blackburn: Some people still do, apparently.
Ben Raikes: Some people still love it. It’s gonna take off anytime now, but sorry–
John Mason: So, Tommy, what’s the best?
Tommy Blackburn: Oh, man, you know it, it should be, we should have probably exposure to all asset classes, which would be all of those funds. It should be a prudent, thoughtfully put together. Is IBIT yours, or what do we got there?
John Mason: I was doing my, I don’t know if Carl Rove is still a guy. I don’t watch a lot of Fox News, but he has his whiteboard. I don’t know if you can see that. It says all the funds are the right funds. You gotta have all of them and you gotta have all of them just in the percentage that makes sense for your plan.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah. I mean you can’t, chasing returns essentially is what I think what Ben was going for. There is not a strategy that’s going to be a losing strategy of just seeing what did best recently and continuing to plow into those. Interestingly enough, everybody has hated international for a while. It’s apparently crushing it this year.
The I fund is up as of this recording, 21.5% year to date. So that has been, although, but usually, past 10 years, it hasn’t done much of anything positive, or it’s lagged quite a bit. So again, this is why we shouldn’t just do favoritism. It should be a well-developed portfolio that has exposure, thoughtful exposure to all asset classes.
And when I was thinking about John, I was thinking, man, he’s gonna be like mutual fund window. Gimme some of that, IBIT.
John Mason: So, audience, I will let you know. I did recently, after however many years of ignoring it and missing the boat and could have made a lot of money and have recently added some Bitcoin into my allocation.
I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like long term. Maybe 3%, maybe 5%. I’m treating it as an asset class, not as a speculative trade, so similar to owning an S fund or an I fund or a C fund, having a little bit seems like I’m doing it and we’ll see how it works. I’m not convinced that it’s going to drastically change my portfolio, positive or negative, but I have enjoyed watching it over the last few weeks. A lot of movement to make no money so far.
Tommy Blackburn: So I had to go out there and say for clients as well as those thinking about being clients, the firm’s position is Bitcoin is not a part of our portfolios. John is dabbling on his own. Part of it is just to experience it. And we may all, just to, again, get a little bit more insight as we continue to monitor it and just understand where those who are interested in it or have it are coming from.
Also to put it in perspective, John, outside of his, I think hefty cash reserve as well, since he wanted to critique me there. His investment portfolio is, I believe, pretty much a hundred percent stock. He has some municipal bonds in there as well, but anyway I’m going with that is you’re talking about a heavily aggressive person or portfolio who has introduced just a teeny tiny bit at that aggressive level of a Bitcoin fund, which, so put that in like if you’re going into retirement, that’d be way scaled down if you were to scale it to like a 60% stock. And again, this is not something we’re introducing to client portfolios. Currently it’s more of a I think just an experimentation.
Like you said, you’re just enjoying, kind of watching, seeing what happens with it. It is, makes no material difference to your investment portfolio really in the scheme of things.
John Mason: Disclaimer, this is not a portfolio investment recommendation. We’re not saying you should go buy Bitcoin. We’re not saying you should do anything.
We’re just hoping that this is educational and informative as you make changes in your financial plan. Guys, we’re 53 minutes in. Let’s wrap it with two changes that are coming next year. One is the mandatory Roth catch-up contributions, which we’ve had 75 different tax law changes over the last 15 years.
I think that this 2026 change, people are forgetting about the mandatory Roth catch-up contribution in light of the One Big Beautiful bill and the other changes that are happening. This one’s kind of flying under the radar.
Tommy Blackburn: Well, I think, was it initially like ‘23 that this was supposed to–I think that’s why you forget about it too, ’cause it’s been punted for so many years. Like, oh yeah. That is out there. And the punting, I guess, is coming to an end. Ben, I know you wanted to jump in, so I’ll let you jump in.
Ben Raikes: Just a small piece there. Maybe some people will notice that, maybe some people won’t. But those catch-up contributions are starting to get pretty big now, particularly, I can’t remember what the ages are, 60 to 63. You get the super mega catch-up amounts. I’m wondering if people will see a cash flow change that are doing catch-up contributions now, given that they’re all Roth and they’re gonna need more withholding on the same amount of pay.
John Mason: And I’m pulling it up now, hopefully we can trust ChatGPT or Google AI, whatever it is, to give us the answer.
But I think, Tommy, the number was 145,000, is where you switch from being able to pick pre-tax or Roth to having to do mandatory Roth catch-up contributions.
Tommy Blackburn: Yes. And I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be indexed for inflation and change. You would assume it should. Also something about like momentous days here.
Also, yesterday, the IRS released some final regulations around this. I was quickly trying to look this morning to see did they punt it yet again? I believe this part has not been punted, but there are nuances and things that needed guidance that they put those out there. That is not fully implementable until the end of 2026.
But for easy purposes, I just say all this just, I mean, stuff’s always evolving, getting punted, you have to pay close attention because it’s always in flux. But this purpose, yes, highly compensated Roth catch up, still taking effect beginning 2026.
John Mason: And then also exciting next year is the ability to do in-plan Roth conversions.
If you’ve been following our podcast, you know that we’ve been fans of Roth conversions for quite some time. We recorded an episode recently. Ben was not on that one, but Ben, we talked about how the calculation behind Roth conversions is changing with tax brackets being extended, the enhanced senior deduction, the One Big Beautiful bill, all the reasons why Roth conversions may or may not make sense going forward.
It’s interesting, when you’re a big behemoth like TSP, you’re the biggest 401k in the country, maybe the world, probably, the Roth conversion excitement started back in 2017, and now it’s 2025. And in 2026, 10 years later, we have conversions inside of TSP just at about the time that maybe they don’t make as much sense as they did before.
But yes, those are brand new next year. And what’s kind of neat about, or I guess neat to know, but also frustrating, is in an in-plan Roth conversion, which is similar inside of our 401k, is when you move $10,000 from pre-tax to Roth, that’s taxable income to you. TSP is not going to then withhold taxes on that conversion.
So it is something that you’re gonna have to really plan for as a consumer, is how are we gonna pay that tax bill if we’re doing these end plan conversions? Which is way different, right, than if you had it in an IRA.
Ben Raikes: Yeah, I’m already seeing the horror stories of somebody I read online, that I should convert all of my traditional TSP to Roth and they clicked the button and then they get the biggest 1099-R of their life. That for sure is going to happen to someone.
John Mason: And what’s interesting, I don’t remember when it happened, Tommy, but please correct me if I’m wrong. The strategy used to be that you would convert everything or convert however much you wanted to Roth January 1st of every year. And then if the market went down, you would unconvert it.
You would recharacterize it and say, “I didn’t really wanna do that.” But the government changed that rule to where we now can’t undo or recharacterize the Roth conversion. So Ben, to your point, if you do this conversion and then a day later you figured out it was an oops, I’m pretty sure there’s no exit strategy there.
Tommy Blackburn: Nope. I think that was back in 2017, right? That was TJCA; that Trump won tax law, I believe, got rid of that technique. It’s crazy. And I just say that, ’cause I think about it. I was like, man, it’s crazy. It’s 2025. We’re referencing, it’s just we’re starting to get dated guys. We’re talking about rules that are almost a decade old at this point.
Ben Raikes: Well, we can still recharacterize our contributions, right? But conversions, that’s long gone. So, yeah, John, there’s no magic button you can press if you make an oops on that.
John Mason: Well, what’s the old saying? Like the toilet paper goes faster as you get closer to the end of the roll or something.
It’s like, it’s certainly feeling that way 15 years into our careers that, you know, we say like, “Just the other day this changed.” And it’s like, “Bro, that was 10 years ago.” “Just the other day, the S&P downgraded the US debt.” And it was like, that was a decade ago.
And we stay up with the times, right? I mean, think about an advisor who’s been doing this 30, 40, 50 years and isn’t as committed to continuing education. It could be referencing rules from the 1980s. Things change fast.
Ben Raikes: It’s crazy how many people still think they need to buy a new house within X days and selling their old house. I mean, we hear that all the time. That was in the 80s.
John Mason: You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Well, guys, let’s wrap it. Any closing thoughts or action items for the audience?
Tommy Blackburn: I think we have, we’ve covered quite a bit. I say it out there and I know our podcast intro and exit also says this. Really appreciate the audience joining us on this. Really appreciate any thoughts, topics, questions, anything you’d like to hear from us, certainly welcome. And hopefully, this has been educational and really kind of shines a light on it’s about your plan. So there’s a lot of defaults out there. A lot of water-cooler advice really needs to be customized to you.
Ben Raikes: Yeah, I’ll echo that. Customized to you and certainly don’t try to chase returns within the TSP. There is no best or favorite fund. There’s a combination of all of them that’s gonna work best for you.
John Mason: Guys, thank you for another episode. And audience, thank you for being on this journey with us. Celebrate with us. I know this is a few days late, but we just released our hundredth episode on September 15th. So if you would, celebrate with us, continue to do all the things like, subscribe, share with friends, family, and coworkers, this journey.
One of the RV channels that I watch, guys, says, “It’s the journey of a lifetime.” And that’s how this feels, running a firm with you two, my mom, my dad, my uncle, the entire Mason & Associates team. As it’s growing, this has truly become a journey of a lifetime. And our clients, thank you. Our podcast audience and YouTube audience, thank you. Celebrate with us as we continue to produce all this awesome content for you and federal employees across the country.
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