dods-retirement-calculator-debuts-lets-troops-compare-traditional-and-blended-options

The long-awaited Defense Department retirement calculator has arrived, designed to help service members choose between the existing and incoming retirement systems as they plan their long-term financial future.

The calculator, labeled a "beta version" but available to anyone at militarypay.defense.gov/Calculators/BRS/, asks for basic information such as age, years of service, rank and estimated years of service at the time of separation and retirement. It fills in the blanks for items such as expected rate of investment return, life expectancy, Thrift Savings Plan contribution percentage and career progression, but users can alter those fields, and others, to tailor their results.

After the user enters all the data, the calculator will offer a comparison between the plans. The BRS total includes not only pension and government TSP match, but also the service member's TSP contribution – a factor to consider when evaluating the results.

The traditional-system total does not include any TSP contributions made by service members, nor does the tool offer an option to include those contributions in the calculations.

Regardless of your findings, you can't make the leap into the new Blended Retirement System until 2018. And not everyone has a choice: Active-duty members with more than 12 years of service as of Dec. 31, 2017, are automatically enrolled in the legacy system, as are reserve-component members with 4,320 or more retirement points as of that date.

The old system offers a larger pension check after 20 or more years of service than the BRS, but the new system provides matching contributions to the TSP that service members could collect regardless of when they retire.