The general rule is that if you are a reserve serviceman and you have accumulated a minimum of 20 credible years of service you qualify for the military retirement payment once you reach the age of 60 years. However, there is an exception introduced back in 2008 that allows those persons, who were either involved in national emergency or were deployed for war, to collect military retirement payments before the age of 60 with the condition that the deployment period started after January 28 2008.
Now how to calculate how many of so called credible years of service you accumulated? Let me remind you that only after this you will be able to know for sure if you qualify for the benefits and use the reserve military retirement calculator to find out actually the amount of those benefits. This can get confusing. What you have to remember is that one credible year of service is a year in which you accumulate at least 50 points during your retirement year. Now you can calculate the years, but do not forget also about the inactive points.
Now you can use the reserve military retirement calculator in order to estimate how much you can get per month as retired pay after you reach the age of 60 (do not forget about the exception).
The reserve military retirement calculator is based on two reserve retirement systems for those who were on active duty. These systems are the Final Basic Pay System and the High-Three System. The main difference in these two systems represents the date a person was first enrolled and became a member of the military service.
There are also several formulas through which the reserve military retirement calculator can estimate a retired pay.
So as I said above, the most important thing in determining which calculating system applies to you is your first day of enrollment. If you were enrolled and became a member of the military service before 8 September 1980 then you have to compute your pay by doing the following: multiply the amount of pay per month according to your grade at the time of your retirement by the “qualifying” years of active military service at the rate of 2.5% for each year from the whole year
of service. This represents the Final Pay system. You will get 50 to 75% for 20 years of service.
If you started your service on 8 of September 1980 and 31 of July 1986 then do the following: do the same as described above but instead use the average basic pay that you have got for your highest paid 36 months.
An estimation of a retired pay per month can be done by multiplying the retirement points that you accumulated by the approximate value of a point.
So once you determined if you qualify for a retired pay and used the reserve military retirement calculator to see the amount you are entitled to, do not forget to apply for it.