I know we have a bunch of military folk on here, it looks like DoD just updated all the retirement income calculators to coincide with the more recent average of 1.3% average AD pay raise and added a month option to the time in service. http://militarypay.defense.gov/Calculators.aspx big ol' thank you thrown out to the DoD for the update, there are also a few other really good calculators they just put out too, the High 36 and CSB comparison one was interesting.
Man, am I glad to see those. Thanks, Mishmash. DoD has been about five years overdue on this overhaul, and I hope they don't let it languish for another decade.
I've been told by servicemembers that the calculators on your service's website (behind a CAC login) will link to your service record for a more detailed retirement estimate. This is especially helpful to Reserve/Guard for the tracking of their good years and their point count. Of course it also helps to have a CAC, which is not the case for many Reserve/Guard members. If you're getting 404 errors on the links in the lower part of that calculator page, it might be because those URLs are behind a login.
I don't think you need 3 years to retire at a grade. For pay, it's based on the average of your 3 last/highest years. So if you do 2yr as an O-6 and the get out, your base rate is based on the average of those two years with one year of O-5 pay. So you still get credit, financially, for the time you did at the higher rate. That's how it was explained to me, at least.
(And the responses of other posters with similarly imprecise vocabulary.)C'mon, guys, you all know better than that. I see this way too much on the Facebook spouse's groups and nobody seems to know where to look it up.
Here's an excerpt from Title 10 Section 1370 (
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/1370):
(1) Unless entitled to a higher retired grade under some other provision of law, a commissioned officer (other than a commissioned warrant officer) of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps who retires under any provision of law other than chapter 61 or chapter 1223 of this title shall, except as provided in paragraph (2), be retired in the highest grade in which he served on active duty satisfactorily, as determined by the Secretary of the military department concerned, for not less than six months.
(2)
(A) In order to be eligible for voluntary retirement under any provision of this title in a grade above major or lieutenant commander, a commissioned officer of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps must have served on active duty in that grade for not less than three years, except that the Secretary of Defense may authorize the Secretary of a military department to reduce such period to a period not less than two years.
This is just an excerpt. There's a lot more legalese at that link.
So if you're an O-5 and you want your retirement certificate to read O-5, then you either have to tough it out for three years or get a waiver down to two years. The military will not ask Congress to cut it shorter than that. If you retire after 23 months as an O-5 then your retirement rank is O-4.
But none of that has any relation to the size of the pension. For well over 90% of those retiring from the military today, the size of the pension is calculated from the average of the highest 36 months of pay. It doesn't matter whether that's three years of pay or only one month-- it's the high-three average. That O-4 from the last paragraph still includes 23 months of O-5 pay into their high-three calculation.
As a side note, does anyone have any blogs or other resources about transition jobs, particularly for those in military jobs with no clear and direct civilian equivalents? I told DH I would try to find stuff for him. He'll have a lot of semi-generic leadership/management kind of experience, and has a few other things going for him, but there's no direct tie between what he does and a civilian gig. That could change a bit with whatever comes up in his assignments, but I'd love to point him in the direction of some advice on the subject. (I checked Nord's blog and could find anything, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.)
There's a ton of them in the military groups on Linkedin, and they all go into much more detail than I do.
I have a half-dozen threads from readers and from what I've learned. The "related links" at the bottoms of these posts go into more detail.
http://the-military-guide.com/2011/01/24/the-transition-to-a-bridge-career/http://the-military-guide.com/2014/09/04/eight-reasons-worry-military-retirement/(The civil engineer mentioned in this post has an update in this thread:
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-web/green-tiny-house/)
http://the-military-guide.com/2015/05/28/making-the-transition-federal-civil-service/http://the-military-guide.com/2012/06/11/making-the-leadership-transition/By the way, you can almost always spot a veteran:
http://the-military-guide.com/2012/06/06/observations-on-a-military-transition/The very basic skills that we learned in the military will pay off at least as well in a civilian career.
Getting back to your spouse, Villanelle, he's falling into a very common trap among military veterans: thinking in terms of what he used to do instead of what he can do. He should stop trying to translate his military career into a civilian career (unless he wants to go into the federal civil service). Instead he should dig into those assessments and discovery surveys and figure out what he wants to do. Then he can figure out what companies would benefit from his problem-solving skills and his ability to generate revenue.
I was a nuke for 20 years. By the time I was ready to hang up my uniform, the last thing I wanted to be was a mid-level manager at a nuclear utility. Your spouse can probably come up with a few more creative ideas too. At the very least he should start networking among the veterans in his specialty who have their own civilian bridge careers, but then he should branch out from their initial answers to other contacts beyond that.
