Exactly right. That’s why this is such a big deal.
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Reserve Retirement Fairness Act
- Thread starter Python
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Exactly right. That’s why this is such a big deal.
To play devils advocate, I’ve been active duty since I was 18 and will retire at 44. A reservist who was active half as long as could get retirement only 6 years later than I do. Is that considered equitable compensation for work provided?
Sure. You'll get 65% of your high three, and they'll get 25% of their high three.
Definitely. It’s not apples to apples.
On the flip side of devils advocate,
A sailor that does *ten years active duty* then transitions for ten years in the reserves collecting a pension at 60. (Example: a SAU IP that doesn’t Mob or go on long term orders)
Or
A sailor that did reserves for 20 years, with several 90+ days of orders sprinkled throughout, gets their pension years earlier (conceding that it has a lower points value).
Even though I’ve worked with reservists for a long time I admittedly don’t know a lot about how their retirement actually pays out monetarily, Thanks for the clarity.
Maybe. If they are are deployment junkies and/or pick up an ADOS or STAT tour or two, they could earn a similar amount of points as you (if you come over to the ANG and don't really do much more than what you have to do, keep your quals up, and split a 6 month deployment with someone else every few years). USERRA has cap at 5 total years for Title 32 orders, but there is no cap for Title 10 orders as far as reemployment and when your employer can terminate you.
It's more common for airline guys, or people that work for the big defense contractor primes or a company like Striker or GE, or professionals like lawyers and paralegals, or folks in a GS job, than it is for folks working for a smaller company. But some people do it to where they can almost split time between the two jobs. Maybe they have no home life?
Start with the baseline that high-3 under active duty works out to 2.5% per year.
Reserve is a proportion of that, generally broken down 1:1 for each day of duty, which are called points. Each series of 360 points work out to the same 2.5% multiplier.
You get a point for each day on active duty orders (for annual training, schools, mobilization, ADOS, or anything else) and for each day of your previous active duty time prior to the Reserve.
For weekend drills (also known as inactive duty training) you get a point for any four hours of duty (e.g. four points for two full weekend drill days) and get the drill pay as promulgated on the DFAS charts.
You can also get points for unpaid drills from correspondence courses (which are much less common for now, but are still lucrative for JPME) or for weekdays where you're doing admin but aren't receiving drill pay.
Finally, for most of a reservist's career, they get an annual 15 gratuitous points for being a member of the Reserve, and are required to earn 50 points annually to stay in good standing.
So if you did 10 years on active duty and 10 years in the Reserve averaging about 100 points per year for a total 20 years between the two components, it works out to (10*2.5%) + [(10*100)/360]*2.5%, which works out to about 32% pension multiplier instead of 50% if you'd done a straight 20 years active duty.
Make sense now?
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