FERS+CSRS Retirement Estimator 4+

This has saved me from a very bad decision. I wanted to retire as soon as I was eligible. With this app, the graph showed me the highest potential earnings if I stayed a little longer. Along with maxing out to your specification, social security. There’s even one to include your spouse’s social security earnings if you want to include in the total retirement pay, along with other annuities such as rental or stocks.

The app shows the annuity you’ll receive, but it doesn’t account for life insurance or health care insurance to get a better picture. You may have to adjust your high 3 to compensate the discrepancy. Otherwise, this is one useful tool to decide when to retire and how to adjust your contributions to TSP, which should be the max with catch-up contributions.

The application works flawless and it is a great tool for planning your retirement as a federal employee. I would like to recommend one change however. I think you should modify the TSP calculation to allow a rate of return that can be modified during retirement. So, have one rate of return during employment and then a second option to adjust it during retirement. Many employees tend to invest more aggressively while employed and then may make more conservative moves in their tsp during retirement. For instance, it would be nice to forecast a 8% return while employed and then a hypothetical 3% during retirement years. It would provide a more accurate prediction at withdrawing from the TSP during retirement.

App is user friendly and simple and gives accurate representation of all facets to consider for retirement as federal employee. Only downside is you cannot scroll to the right to see more years. I am 28 years old and it only lets me see 50 years to 78. I plan to live past 78 so it would be nice if I could see to 95. This would allow me to see if the rate at which I say I will remove my 401k is good.

The 401k feature could also be updated to account for pre retirement interest rate and post retirement interest rate as these will be different and then if it just let you chose an age when you would want the account to be gone. Then is could calculate how much per a year you should take out and make it easier.