Normally, federal employees have to take sick leave for preventive screening, such as mammograms or prostate cancer screens. However, if the employee has less than 80 hours of sick leave, they can ask for up to 4 hours of excused leave each year for health screenings. This small benefit can be particularly helpful for people who have used up their sick leave, such as new parents who have recently returned to work.
The path to deciding the amount of the annual pay raise for federal workers is long and winding, but a major milestone was passed today when the House Appropriations Committee approved a 3.9% raise in the markup of the 2009 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. This matches the raise being proposed for the military and exceeds the 2.9% being requested by the White House. The bill also contains a one year moratorium in A-76 competitions, which is the process that allows public-private competitions for federal work.
If you lived, say, on a hill in downtown Seattle, would you need flood insurance? That seems like a silly question, but the answer might be yes! A onetime boss of mine owned a multimillion dollar house in Seattle that was well above sea level. However, one extremely rainy month his house slid down the hill and collided head on with his neighbor’s house. None of this was covered by insurance as the damage was caused by the movement of water.
A coworker asked me an interesting question: if he were to receive an inheritance equal in amount to the outstanding balance on his mortgage, should he use it to pay off his mortgage? My advice was no, unless he has a mortgage with a high interest rate, which surprised him.
The second wave of the credit crisis is hitting the U.S. banking system, affecting even well managed and conservatively financed banks, even credit unions whose membership is made largely of federal employees. The first wave, of course, was made of institutions, like Countrywide Financial and Bear Sterns, who were caught up in the subprime lending fiasco where money was loaned irresponsibly to people who were unlikely to pay back the loans in a tough economy. In the second wave, banks who did not engage in subprime lending are being hit, and hit hard. You’ll want to take a close look at your bank and double check that your deposits are properly insured by the federal government.
For many working parents, scraping together leave and money for maternal and paternal leave is one of the more difficult tasks of bringing a child home. As many federal employees find out the hard way, the voluntary leave transfer program (VLTP) is the only practical way to get enough paid leave to cover the the 3 or so months that it takes to get the child and parents ready for daycare, and it’s rare that people get more than a few days of donated leave. We’ve certainly witnessed coworkers forced to put their infants into daycare at 6 weeks to keep the paychecks coming, and this can be hard on both the babies and parents, especially given the number of viruses floating around the average daycare facility. It’s questionable whether these stressed out, sleep deprived, and sick workers benefit the government.
The New Jersey newspaper Ashbury Park Press has updated their federal employees search so that it now lists most 2007 federal employee salaries. It might be surprising that many federal employee names and salaries are public knowledge, but it’s been the long standing policy of our government that this information be made available to taxpayers. It’s certainly fascinating to see how much coworkers make when mapping out a career path.
Peter Lynch, the famous stock analyst, famously said that you should spend as much time picking a stock as much as you would spend buying a refrigerator. What are the characteristics of a good stock?
A surprising number of feds don’t know about FSAFEDS, the flexible spending accounts administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). These accounts let you pay for health and child care with before tax dollars, resulting in savings of 20-40% over after tax dollars, yielding savings of up to $4000 per year depending your tax rate. There are two kinds of accounts most people use:
It’s become a major industry to steal people’s identities. By impersonating you, these thieves use it to obtain credit (destroying your credit in the meantime) and to empty your bank accounts. What can you do to stop them?
