Letters to the Editor

Following are responses sent to tsp@fcw.com from readers commenting on the Thrift Savings Plan online services launched June 16. These comments were received June 18. More comments will be posted in the coming days.

I accessed my and my wife's accounts the night of 6/17/03. Everything was very slow but I understood why. I did not make any changes to the accounts but checked the balances. I like the looks of it so far.

John Harkey

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I have used the new system. Faster? Very slow right now. It will get better as time goes on and people get used to it. So many people are logging on that it takes a long time. I waited maybe three to four minutes to log on then the same amount of time to move around.

Jim Beliveau U.S. Postal Service

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This is what we waited six years for? I have been trying since Monday [June 16] to get access to my account and have not been able to. Everyone I have spoken to has not been able to get into their accounts either.

Didn't the company who designed this understand the number of people who have accounts and would want to access their accounts? This is really pathetic!

Richard Crosby Defense Contract Audit Agency

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The TSP Web site is nice, until I tried to access my account balance. I get a warning message to access my account information. The warning message takes a few minutes to read completely. Why don't you make this message shorter? I read and understood the message, but then got a error when going to the page. That was frustrating.

Please either have the page up and working or put a message that reflects the status of the page in four sentences or less.

Marilyn Davis U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services Office

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My main concern with the new TSP system is now that we can make changes daily, a lot of participants will try to play the market timing game. That's a sure way to lose money.

With the old system we had no choice but to act with long-term results in mind. If too many participants lose too much money, the entire TSP program could lose credibility. When that happens who knows what kind of machinations will take place that will injure those of us who know better than to play the market timing game.

MacArthur Eld Hammond, La.