Eight calculators, and a pointer to the Social Security Administration calculator, for North Jersey households with a pension, a large retirement balance, or beneficiaries who are not children. Each applies published figures from the retirement system, the statute or the agency, and each names its source and the date the figures were checked.
They are ordered deliberately, starting with the decisions that shape the whole plan. Calculators for Medicare, required distributions and Social Security come later. Only the life insurance calculator asks you to choose a return, and it treats that as your assumption rather than a projection. None of them projects what an investment might be worth.
The calculators
What income would my balance buy for life?
What a balance is actuarially worth as lifetime income, under eight payment options. The same arithmetic that sits behind a pension lump sum offer.
What would a Roth conversion cost me this year?
Federal and New Jersey tax on the amount you convert, the bracket room before it, what it does to the retirement income exclusion, and the Medicare bracket two years later.
How much life insurance do I actually need?
The shortfall after the pension survivor benefit, Social Security, the survivor’s own income and existing assets, answered three ways.
What will my pension be?
PERS and TPAF. Your tier from the date you enrolled, the annual maximum allowance, what one more year of service is worth, and what going early costs. Tier page: Tier 5.
What will Medicare cost at your income?
Part B and Part D by income and filing status, and how far you are from the next threshold.
What is my required minimum distribution?
Which year distributions begin, the Uniform Lifetime divisor, and the amount.
Are you over the New Jersey pension exclusion cliff?
Whether your household keeps the retirement income exclusion, how much of it, and how close you are to losing it in full.
Who pays New Jersey inheritance tax on what you leave?
The rate by beneficiary class, what each one receives after tax, and what gifts made in the last three years add.
Social Security estimates
The SSA runs a calculator on your real earnings record. We point you at it and explain what it does not decide.
How these work, and where they stop
Seven of the eight apply a published rule to figures you supply. The life insurance calculator is arithmetic on your own figures and the return you choose, and the annuity calculator also shows an estimated market range drawn from published research. That makes them arithmetic rather than prediction, and it also means the answer is only as good as what you type. Service credit is what your system has credited you rather than the years you have worked, final average salary is defined by your tier rather than by your last payslip, and modified adjusted gross income includes tax-exempt interest.
Where a rule is genuinely unsettled, the calculator says so rather than quietly picking a side. The required minimum distribution page does this for anyone born in 1959, and the Roth conversion page does it for whether New Jersey allows conversion income into the retirement income exclusion, which we could not find settled in a primary source.
Check this against your own numbers.
A number is the start of a decision rather than the end of it, and in New Jersey the year you act can matter more than the figure itself. We can cover it in a short conversation, at no charge and with no obligation.
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