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
