For Your Benefit

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 [email protected] .

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.

This week on "For Your Benefit", host Bob Leins welcomes Dwayne Jackson, CPA, CFP and principal at Rembert, Pendleton, Jackson into the studio. Tune in as we discuss:

*Current strengths and weaknesses in the U.S. stock market and commentary regarding these areas of strength and weakness

*An overview of the international stock market

*Interest rates and the Federal Reserve including two burning questions in the minds of investors: ?"What will happen to my portfolio if interest rates rise?"

?"Should I change my fixed-income allocation because of the potential change in interest rates?"