CNA's Retirement Choice Calculator

CNA’s Retirement Choice Calculator provides information that
allows for informed retirement planning by men and women
in the military services. 

Members of the military who entered the service after July 31, 1986, must choose between DoD’s High-3 retirement plan, which bases retirement pay on the highest average basic pay for three years of a career, or the REDUX plan, which provides a $30,000 upfront bonus with smaller retirement checks over time.

Which choice is best for an individual’s needs? The upfront bonus is appealing, but the trade-off in decreased retirement income over the long-term can be costly. With CNA’s calculator, service members now more accurately weigh the competing options.

To use the calculator, service members need to enter just five pieces of information: their age at retirement, years of service, retirement pay grade, tax rate, and an estimated age at death (given current life expectancies, a good age to use is 79). The calculator then computes the amount of money to be earned under each plan, the difference between those totals, and the interest rate needed to make up that difference.

View CNA's report Retirement Choice: 2012. View CNA's briefing 2012 Retirement Choices.