TSP Report Home Page

Member's Alert - the April edition of The TSP Report has been posted to the member's area of the website and e- mailed to subscribers. Special Bulletin was e-mailed on 9 March, and posted in the member's area of this website, with a change in our portfolios.

The Thrift Savings Plan

This website is for current and former Federal Government employees who have money invested in the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), the Federal Government’s 403(b) defined contribution retirement plan.

If you seem to be frequently invested in the wrong Thrift Savings Plan fund at the wrong time or have been afraid to make changes in how your TSP money is invested, then

a subscription to The TSP Report may be for you!

Mission

Our mission is to provide our subscribers (members) with professional quality investment information, specific to the TSP, which is designed to outperform buy-and-hold techniques while maintaining a lower level of risk of losses in the value of the portfolio.

Our Service

For $99 per year, our subscribers get access to 12 monthly issues of The TSP Report, available both on-line and e-mailed to you. Additionally, if we make changes to our model portfolios between monthly issues of the newsletter, we will issue a Special Bullletin that is both e-mailed to subscribers and posted in the member's page on this website. Contained in The TSP Report are:

analysis and commentary on the stock and bond markets,
three model portfolios tailored to three general categories of investors,
specific recommendations for each of the three model portfolios which advise you on what percentage you should have invested in each of the TSP funds,
and key recommendations on when to move money into or out of TSP funds based on the changing outlook for each of the five base TSP funds.

Why you need The TSP Report

As you may know, TSP investors have only a few options where they can obtain quality investment information. The available options generally consist of:

1) paying an investment advisor an hourly rate (at several hundred dollars per hour), several times a year, to keep your portfolio invested in the appropriate funds;
2) obtaining a professional money management service;
3) finding and subscribing to a financial advice newsletter focused on the Government’s TSP, such as The TSP Report; or
4) go it alone.

Option 1 is going to cost you hundreds of dollars a year or more with the distinct possibility of under performing the market. Option 2, if your account is even large enough to attract a high quality professional, is going to set you back several grand a year. If you choose option 3, you need to look at the track record of the investment advice and the cost of the subscription. I think you will find that The TSP Report compares favorably in both of these categories.

Although the above mentioned options are available, tragically, most people default to the “go it alone” approach. In a long term study, updated in 2004, Dalbar Financial found that individual investors that go it alone had dismal performance. According to Dalbar, over the past 20 years, while the stock market (as measured by the S&P 500) returned about 12 percent per year, the average individual investor in the stock market earned less than 4 percent per year! A separate study by the Vanguard Group found similar results, although Vanguard also found that their investors with the highest income actually under performed their other individual investors.

The long-term effect of underperformance is catastrophic to your portfolio. The above graph compares the portfolio values of two investors, the individual investor who matched performance as his peers (according to Dalbar Financial), and another investor who matched the return of the S&P 500). Both investors started with $10,000. As you can see from the graph, this type of long-term underperformance is tragic, especially for the government employees who are relying so heavily on their TSP account for retirement income.

Take a critical look at your own performance. How have you really done? Can you afford to continue to grow your TSP nest egg at the same rate as you have in the past? At only $99 per year, a tiny fraction of the value of your TSP account, a subscription to The TSP Report is a tremendous value. We even offer a full refund for cancellations within the first 90 days.

The performance of our Growth portfolio was 24.9% in 2006 and it has beaten the S&P 500 for each of the three years we have been in business. Our most risk-averse portfolio, the Conservative portfolio, has beaten the S&P 500 in two of the three years. This performance has been accomplished with only four interfund transfers per year.

Subscribe to The TSP Report, leave the market analysis and tough decisions to us, and put your TSP account on cruise control.

Our Strategy

Our strategy uses a combination of fundamental macro-economic factors and stock market technical indicators to keep money invested in the TSP fund(s) that have the most favorable risk vs. reward outlook. Followers of our recommendations will need to conduct about two to five interfund transfers per year, based on recommendations in The TSP Report. Past editions (previous 12 months) of The TSP Report are available for free by going to the “Newsletters” link in the menu at the top of this page.

Refund Policy
If you are not satisfied with the service in the first 90 days of your subscription, we will provide you with a full refund.

Privacy Statement
The TSP Report does not provide names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail address, or any other personal information of our subscribers to any entity. Subscriber’s credit card information is not retained on our website.

Disclaimer
The TSP Report is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the US Government’s Thrift Savings Plan or tsp,gov. The TSP Report does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of this report. The TSP Report provides information for education and information only and does not give individual investment advice. As such, The TSP Report and Manzanita Mountain Associates, LLC cannot assume any liability for the result of any actions taken by any entity based on information contained in this report. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The information contained in this report may not be republished, broadcast or otherwise distributed without prior written consent from the publisher of the TSP Report, Manzanita Mountain Associates, LLC.