Jughead135

Did it. PITA, but not truly "hard," aside from the information gathering. Do you have a sizable tax-exempt balance in your TSP? That's why I rolled mine over--to get that money into a Roth. Since you can't rollover just the tax-exempt portion, I closed the whole thing. Otherwise, as others have noted, the TSP has about the best cost structure you'll find, so unless you want to expand beyond the limited options it has, you may wish to stay put.

Rollover into TSP was a paperwork exercise, made painful by TSP rules (need multiple notarization, to include your spouse saying it's OK (and it doesn't matter if you were married all, part, or none of the time you contributed to the TSP).

Once that's done, rolling the money out into IRAs (plural) is easy enough--once again, you have to roll ALL of it to get all of the after-tax money, so after-tax goes into a Roth IRA, pre-tax goes into a traditional IRA. Rolling the traditional IRA (to which you just rolled all of the pre-tax portion) right back into the DPSP will let you use (continue to use) the "back door" Roth IRA. (Note, if you intend to do this and have any pre-tax money lying around in traditional IRA(s), now would be the right time to do that in one shot.) This part is the painful part, and this time Fidelity is the culprit: they insist on a paper check to issue the distribution from the traditional IRA, and on a "medallion" signature on the paperwork (I never heard of that before--it's like a super-notary). Fortunately, that's only one-time pain if you do it correctly.

So, as I say, PITA, but if you have any significant after-tax money in retirement funds, getting it into a Roth should be a priority--and, fortunately, our plan (DPSP) allows for all the maneuvers necessary to do so.