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Twenty years in, and nobody has written any of it down.
The Decision Record does.

A ten-section document covering the four decisions you cannot take back once your papers are in — in writing, with every figure sourced and every assumption listed, including the ones it had to make for you.

  1. Whether you can afford to go when you planned to
  2. What your family keeps if you die
  3. Whether your TSP should move, and where
  4. Whether you will have to work again anyway

There is no Snapshot to carry across on the veterans page yet, so this one starts empty — three answers is still enough for a real figure. The Record is yours to print whether or not you ever speak to us.

Your answer so far

The Decision Record prepared in your browser · 10 sections
  1. Terms of this document
  2. Understanding your circumstances
  3. Identifying and selecting goals
  4. Analysing your current course
  5. Alternative courses of action
  6. What the arithmetic shows
  7. Implementing
  8. Monitoring and updating
  9. Information still required
  10. Assumptions, estimates and sources

The order is the CFP Board's seven-step process, which is also the order a licensed adviser is held to. Sections 4 and 5 — your current course, and the alternatives — are the two most plans skip.

In your words

Where every number here comes from · Disclosures

About your retired pay. This page does not work out military retired pay. You type the figure DFAS gives you — and if you are separating short of twenty years of active service there is no retired pay to type, so put a zero in and the plan runs without one. Then put the yearly rise in. Retired pay is raised every year to follow prices, under 10 U.S.C. § 1401a, by the change in the CPI-W from one third quarter to the next. Leave that field at zero and this page carries your pension flat and understates you for every year you are retired. Yours is the one pension on this site that the arithmetic fits exactly: one benefit, one rise, and the rise follows inflation. One assumption you should know about. Your retired pay itself is free of New York State, New York City and Yonkers tax. The rest of the plan — what you draw from the TSP, a 401(k) or an IRA — is worked out as though you settle in New York. If you are settling anywhere else, that part is wrong for you, and it is the one thing this page cannot infer. Tell us the state and we will run it again against it.

Everything here is worked out on your own device. There is no account, nothing is sent to us, and we never see what you enter. Your answers are kept in the web address of this page, so bookmarking it or sending it to your partner brings the figures back — which also means anyone with the link can see them.