New military retirement law creates big decisions for many troops

LTC Adam Janczewski - You have described personal finance management. There are many studies that show if someone doesn't know how budget their finances, even if they make more money, they are still living paycheck to paycheck. My current peer group smashes the median income in America. Consequently, many of them have higher tastes than they should, and they live paycheck to paycheck. No one taught them to make fiscally smart decisions. So military personnel that are bouncing rent and car payment checks to pay for baby formula, would still be unable to manage their finances at a higher wage. Maybe they should have settled for a less desirable apartment and chose not to buy a mustang or camaro. (Which tends to be the main problem with newer service members...) This is a teaching moment, not only how to set and maintain a budget, but also to direct them to different programs to aid them. But but mostly you complaint is entry level wages vs hrs put in is another topic for your "living wage".
This once again this comes down to poor choices of the individual, and a failure to disseminate appropriate financial direction to young personal. It is such an important factor that the MCI (Marine Corps Institute) manual Personal Finance Management, and subsequent written exam is required for all junior enlisted for promotion. Now many young Marines just pencil jock the test. Which is why the leadership needs to take the initiative to provide followup instruction. Such as explaining for the cost of a couple cases of beer, a night out at the bar, one "date night", etc per month, they can have $1 mil in their retirement accounts. (If you follow retirement planners the pension is not enough to live off of adjusted for inflation.) Here calculate you retirement needs with this free calculator, it has several adjustable variables. https://www.chase.com/investments/retirement-calculator
Roughly 75% of enlisted personal are one contract and done. Instead of losing the training money spent and experience gained, this gives a viable option to retain those assets instead of 20 or nothing. But it's also a spot for great failures in leadership, by not strongly encouraging participation (lack of tsp participation) and smart financial planning. Leaders need to prepare their people for war. That is a given. Just as that everyone will leave the military some day. That means, it's up to good leaders to prepare their people for post military/retirement.

I agree with you on leadership, but the first part of that leadership is that you have to advocate for a wage for your subordinates that in addition to taking care of day to day expenses, allows them the ability to save without undue hardship. When that retirement savings was included in the guaranteed pension that approach of making the individual responsible was justified. Now as a leader I feel responsible to advocate that at least some of the realized savings by DoD should be passed on to the service members, if we shifted a substantial burden for their retirement to the individual. You seem to be in a fortunate situation, but my experience has been that family needs trumped retirement savings every time, regardless of how much financial education was provided to the individual soldier or resources we directed them at(i.e. Army Emergency Relief) And yes we did that, but also we at times reached into our wallets, so our people's babies did not lack for formula. A soldier should not be in a pay status that would allow for his baby going hungry, regardless of who made the mistake.

SPC (Join to see) - Good for you. I've seen senior NCOS and officers retire without a pot to p... in because of their toy payments and other vices. I'm hoping the financial planning they're talking about gives service members a sound foundation for financial planning. I gave my Soldier's a financial planning briefing prior to each deployment because I'd heard of to many coming back broke or in debt instead

LTC Adam Janczewski - I was fortunate that my father, a Korean War Veteran with an 8th grade education, taught me to live within my means and save at an early age. As a PV1 earning $293 a month, back in 76, I was able to save 1/2 of my pay. I finally opened an IRA when I became aware of them and maxed out contributions every year. When the TSP became available I was able to make the maximum contributions and max out my ROTH as well. The military along with the NCOs need to do a better job of educating our subordinates in financial planning!

No. It allows service members who don't make it to 20 years (the majority) an opportunity to transfer retirement savings to a civilian 401k when they leave the service and instills a discipline of saving. I support this change.

The fact is the folks who retire at 20 draw a pension right away...why else would you stay for 20+. People who don't stay have the option of investing in an IRA or other retirement funds....i disagree with the govt taking away the pension. If government employees such as your congressperson has a pension so should a retiring military member.

PO2 Kirk Flowers - The pension still remains for those who stay for 20+, it's just reduced by 20%.. If you invest in your tsp with them matching, you will make up that 20% reduction and then some by the time you can touch the funds.. Plus you can take loans from your tsp and pay the interest back to yourself

SSG (Join to see) - according to the article, the traditional pension will be phased out with new recruits starting in 2018.....this is BS. Phase it out for Congress then!

Don't forget the 15Mil illegal aliens and of course the POS refugees from Syria