I'm just beginning Pralana, so maybe this should be obvious, but I cannot figure out how to enter my starting pension $amount as a variable based on my wild card (R) retirement date. The longer I work, the larger my pension will be and the amount depends on when I retire, but it seems I have to enter the actual $amount by hand, This make it to difficult to estimate when I can retire and other time-dependent scenarios. I would think this would be an obvious and easy. Pralana does this for my Social Security.
Is there some way to insert a simple excel formula to calculate my starting pension based on my retirement date?
@rwnelson39 Pralana does not currently have this capability, but it has been on our enhancement list for a long time. Obviously, it would be a great feature but it's not as straight-forward as Social Security because every company has its own formulas for calculating pensions. For my information, would you mind sharing the formula for calculating your pension? My guess is that it's a function of your retirement date, your final salary, and your years of service.
Thanks!
Stuart
Thanks. Sure, its the FERS formula. High 3-year salary x number of years x 0.01 (or 0.011 if 20+ years of service.)
Since Pralana is excel based, I thought I should be able to calculate this in a cell myself, with my retirement date as a variable. No?
@rwnelson39 We would explicitly have to allow for a field to contain a user-specified formula rather than you simply typing in a formula instead of a data value. You may or may not have noticed, but the data entry fields all contain formulas which refer to the location of the data in the PRC database; they don't contain your actual data. That's what enables exports to run quickly and why you cannot enter a formula in a field rather than data.
Anyway, thanks for the info on your pension formula. My thought was to build a function that accepted as inputs these things: years of service, number of years used to calculate your best average salary, multiplier for first n years of service and multipler for remaining years of service, and multiplier based on the type of annuity you are choosing (i.e., non/lump sum, 50% survivor, 100% survivor, certain and continuous, etc). It's kind of messy but would definitely have value when trying to compute the optimum retirement date.
Stuart
@smatthews51 Hi - just signed up for Online yesterday and this was the first item I tried to model correctly - and I hit the same roadblock. The variables you listed are reasonable - the only one I'd like to add is something to indicate the date each year where a "year" is recognized - in my case its after 1000 hours. I'm salaried so roughly July 1 for me. We accrue at 1.5% so this is one of my R decision points. When might this make it into the Online version? I'm personally not going to need it for <checks calendar> at least another year 🙂
@refugio I think you're basically referring to your anniversary date and that's a good idea. I'm currently prototyping this in Pralana Gold right now and then we'll use that as a reference for Pralana Online. Hopefully we can get it released in the next several months.
Stuart
@refugio I think you're basically referring to your anniversary date and that's a good idea.
Well - that is interesting - on the front end I did get credit for a "year" when I started in March and hit more than 1,000 hours that calendar year. And - again - I get credit for another calendar year after I hit another 1,000 hours. So for me, it's kinda like an anniversary date but not quite - in my (very particular) case I hit 2 years of "vesting" after only 15 month. Each year after that though takes me...drumroll...another 12 months (totally fair).
There's also the restriction that you have to have 5 years to "vest". With the notable exception being if you "retire" (which you are able to do at age 65) you still have to wait for 5 years from hire date to collect.
My scenario may be an outlier and not worth modeling - if it's common to credit years of service based on start date that would probably be worth solving first. And I can probably get close with "anniversary date" if I can backdate the start. Thank you for looking at this @smatthews51.
I will have a local pension and spouse will have a Federal. Each scenario has a different "R" date, and I calculate the estimated pensions for that date and input them.
Pralana makes absolute sense for what I'm using it for. I imagine it would be pretty hard to code for all the variable calculations that affect pensions to include it.
@mtn101 As we go about this implementation, we'll take into account separate retirement dates for you and your spouse and we will be going with a solution that is flexible but that will definitely not model every conceivable pension variation out there.
Stuart
