Here’s a surprise that catches a lot of federal employees off guard: updating your will doesn’t automatically update who inherits your TSP.
Your Thrift Savings Plan operates on its own separate instruction, a beneficiary designation you filed at some point, possibly years ago, and that form, not your will, decides where the money goes. FEGLI works the same way. If you’ve rewritten your will since a divorce or remarriage but never touched your TSP-3 or FEGLI beneficiary form, those older elections are still what’s legally on file, no matter what your current will says.
Why This Catches People Off Guard
Most beneficiary designations get filled out once — often in someone’s first weeks on the job, before marriage, kids, or a dozen other life changes that reshape who they’d actually want to inherit anything. The form gets filed away and never revisited, because nothing forces you to look at it again. A will feels like the document that governs everything, so people naturally assume it does.
It doesn’t, for these specific accounts. And the mistake is almost always discovered by someone else, after it’s too late for the person who made it to fix anything.
What Happens If You Never Filed One at All
If there’s no valid TSP beneficiary designation on file, the plan doesn’t default to your will either — it follows a fixed order set by federal law: your spouse first, then children, then parents, then the executor of your estate, and finally your next of kin. That order applies regardless of what you actually intended, so silence isn’t a neutral option here — it’s a default you may not have chosen on purpose.
Your Will Still Has a Real Job — Just a Different One
None of this makes a will unnecessary. A will still names your executor, directs how probate assets get divided, appoints guardians for minor children, and generally shapes what happens to everything a beneficiary form doesn’t cover. The two documents aren’t competing — they’re handling different jobs, and both need to be current for your actual wishes to hold up.
A Few Minutes, Three Documents
Since August is National Make a Will Month, it’s a natural prompt to check more than just the will itself:
- Your TSP beneficiary designation
- Your FEGLI beneficiary designation
- Your will, power of attorney, and advance healthcare directive
If it’s been years since you’ve looked at any of these, especially if marriage, divorce, a new child, or the loss of a loved one has happened since, this is worth ten minutes of your week. The goal isn’t just having documents. It’s making sure they all agree with each other and with what you actually want.
