At Military Retirement Calculator, we respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal information. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your data when you use our website.
1. Information We Collect
Free Calculator Data
The free calculator does all of its math in your browser. None of what you enter into it is sent to our own servers. That includes
- Your rank or years of service
- VA disability rating or dependent information
- Monthly expenses or financial details
- Tax information or filing status
Your browser keeps your latest calculator inputs in its own storage on your device, so the worksheet and the plan form can use them. Google Analytics does receive a few of your calculator choices, such as the state you pick and the numbers in a shared scenario link you open. Those are listed under Analytics Data below.
If you buy the worksheet or the Retirement Plan and build your plan, the numbers you send for it are handled as described under Personalized Plan Generation below, and that includes a saved copy on our servers.
Analytics Data (Automatically Collected)
We use Google Analytics to understand how visitors use our site. This service may collect:
- IP address (anonymized)
- Browser type and version
- Device type (desktop, mobile, tablet)
- Pages visited and time spent on site
- Referring website
- Geographic location (country/region level only)
Google Analytics also receives the following from this site.
- The full address of every page you open. A shared scenario link to the calculator carries its numbers in that address, and can include rank, years and months of service, retirement system, VA rating, whether you have a spouse and whether your spouse receives Aid and Attendance, children, dependent parents, state, filing status, monthly expenses and expected civilian salary. Opening one sends those numbers as part of the address.
- The state you pick in the calculator, sent by name.
- Events that record what you did, such as changing a calculator field, finishing a calculation or clicking a button. They carry counts and categories, like how many fields you changed and which part of the form they were in, and never the numbers you typed.
- When you buy the worksheet, the price and the ID of your Stripe checkout. The address of the thank-you page also contains that ID.
Cookies
We use cookies for the following purposes:
- Analytics Cookies: Google Analytics uses cookies to track site usage and improve user experience
- Preference Cookies: To remember your settings (if applicable)
You can disable cookies in your browser settings, but this may affect site functionality.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect to:
- Understand how visitors use the calculator
- Improve website performance and user experience
- Identify and fix technical issues
- Analyze traffic patterns and popular features
- Keep a Personalized Plan you paid for so you can open it again on another device
3. Third-Party Services
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics uses cookies to help us analyze how users interact with our site.
The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States.
Learn more: Google Privacy Policy
Email Newsletter (Kit)
If you sign up for our email updates, your email address is collected and stored by Kit (kit.com), the email service we use to send newsletters and rate-change alerts. We use your email only to send the updates you requested. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list immediately.
Learn more: Kit Privacy Policy
Payment Processing (Stripe)
Purchases are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. Stripe collects the details it needs to take the payment, including your email address and billing country, and holds them under its own privacy policy.
When you start a checkout we attach a short record of how you reached the site to the payment: the first page you landed on, the site that referred you (for example a search engine or a link someone shared), any campaign tags in the link you clicked, the pages you viewed on our site before buying, and how long that took. We use this to understand which articles actually help people, so we can write more of them. It contains no calculator inputs, no personal details, and nothing beyond your activity on this site.
Learn more: Stripe Privacy Policy
Personalized Plan Generation
If you buy the Retirement Worksheet and choose to build the optional Personalized Plan, or buy the Retirement Plan and build it, the answers you type into the plan form and your calculator numbers are sent to our plan-writing service (which uses the Anthropic API) for the sole purpose of writing your plan pages. This happens only when you press the generate button.
So you can open your plan again on another device, we save a copy of each plan you generate with Netlify, the company that hosts this site. Each saved plan is filed under your purchase, meaning the Stripe checkout that paid for it. A saved plan holds the following.
- The plan text written for you. It was written from all of your answers, so it can mention things you typed.
- Your calculator inputs. That means your rank, years and months of service, retirement system, VA rating, the dependents you entered, state, filing status, and expected civilian salary, plus your spouse's yearly pay before taxes and your ages if you entered them in the calculator. The dependents include whether your spouse receives Aid and Attendance, which is health information about your spouse.
- The figures your plan was built on, worked out from your answers. These are your type of retirement, your guaranteed monthly income, your expected monthly expenses, the total of your TSP and other savings, your age and your spouse's age, your spouse's income if you file jointly, your Social Security estimate at the age you plan to claim, the years left on your mortgage and your expenses once it is paid off, and the tax, shortfall and savings figures calculated from these.
- How many plan generations you have left, and when the plan was made.
A Retirement Plan is saved the same way, with one difference. In place of the figures above it keeps the numbers its charts and tables are drawn from, worked out from your answers by our own code. They include the following.
- Each of your paths year by year to age 90. That means who works on it, until when and at what pay, the money coming in from each source, the taxes, the spending, and the balance of your traditional TSP, your Roth TSP and your other savings in every year, in an average market and after a bad first decade.
- Your SBP figures and the SBP choice you said you were leaning toward.
- Your VA pay as your children age out, whether you expect them to go to college, and the year each one turns 18.
- The state tax on your household in all 50 states, the states you said you are weighing, and the state and year of any move in your what-if.
- Your timeline dates, which are worked out from your retirement date. Also your ages and your spouse's, your type of retirement, your filing status, your Social Security estimates and the age you plan to claim, your monthly spending and the year your mortgage is paid off.
- Your spouse's first name and the name you gave a what-if, because the plan prints both, with the work, spending change and one-time amounts and their years that you gave that what-if.
A saved Retirement Plan does not keep your free-text notes or your questions as you typed them, the goals, worries and priorities you picked, your healthcare choice, your TSP fund mix, your itemized expenses, or what you said a one-time cost or windfall is for. The plan text was written from all of them, so it can mention them.
While you fill in the Retirement Plan form, your answers are saved in this browser as you go, so nothing is lost if the page closes. That saved copy can include anything you wrote in the notes. It stays on your device, never on our servers.
When your plan is written, that copy becomes a copy of the answers you sent, saved in this browser under the name mrc_plan_v2_last. It holds every answer on the form, your notes and questions included, so your next version of the plan starts from them and you only change what changed. It also stays on your device, never on our servers. Clear my answers on the form deletes both copies, and so does clearing this site's data in your browser.
The questions you type are sent to the plan writer once, when you build the plan. A copy of them stays in this browser, saved under the name mrc_plan_v2_questions, so your report can print each question above its answer. Clear my answers removes it, and so does clearing this site's data in your browser.
While a plan is being written, a short placeholder sits where it will be saved. It holds only that the plan is being written, when it started, which kind of plan it is, and whether one of your plan generations was used for it. The finished plan, or a note that it could not be written, replaces it.
A saved plan is used for these things.
- Opening your plan again on another device with your purchase.
- Printing your plan pages. The figures on them are these saved figures. The worksheet also reads your spouse's income, your ages and your type of retirement from them, so it figures the tax on your pension the same way your plan did.
- Warning you when the calculator on the device you are using no longer matches the plan. The worksheet compares the plan's saved figures and its state with that calculator.
- Checking that a plan was delivered. We may open a saved plan ourselves to confirm it arrived and that its figures add up.
We also keep counters filed under your purchase. One counts how many times the worksheet has been unlocked, and the others count the plans you have generated, one count for each kind of plan. Each records when it was first and last used.
For a worksheet plan, we do not save the plan form itself. Your free-text notes, the goals and worries you tick, your itemized expenses, your TSP fund mix, your work and healthcare choices, and your separate account balances are used to write the plan and are not kept on their own. A Retirement Plan keeps more of these, as listed above. Your browser also keeps its own copy of the finished plan.
Your answers and saved plans are not used for advertising and not shared with anyone else. Nothing deletes a saved plan on a schedule. To have yours deleted, email militaryretirementcalc@gmail.com.
Affiliate Links
Our website contains affiliate links to third-party services (USAA, Navy Federal, Veterans United, SoFi, etc.). When you click on these links, we may track the click for analytics purposes, but we do not share your personal information with these partners.
If you choose to sign up for services through our affiliate links, those third-party websites have their own privacy policies that govern how they handle your information. We are not responsible for their privacy practices.
4. Data Security
The free calculator never sends your numbers to us, so our servers hold none of them. Saved Personalized Plans are the exception. They are kept in our web host's storage, filed under the purchase that paid for them, and you can have yours deleted by emailing militaryretirementcalc@gmail.com. The analytics data we collect through Google Analytics is protected by Google's security measures.
5. Your Rights
You have the right to:
- Opt Out of Analytics: Use browser extensions like Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on
- Delete Cookies: Clear cookies through your browser settings
- This site does not act on browser Do Not Track signals. To stop Google Analytics, use the opt-out add-on above.
6. Children's Privacy
Our website is not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.
7. California Privacy Rights (CCPA)
If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what personal information we collect and how we use it. Sections 1 and 3 describe what we collect. For most visitors that is analytics data only. If you built a Personalized Plan, it also includes the saved plan, which you can have deleted by emailing militaryretirementcalc@gmail.com.
8. European Privacy Rights (GDPR)
If you are located in the European Economic Area (EEA), you have certain rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including the right to access, correct, or delete your data.
The free calculator keeps your inputs in your browser and does not send them to our servers. Google Analytics receives the items listed under Analytics Data in section 1. If you built a Personalized Plan, the saved plan described under Personalized Plan Generation is personal data we hold, and you can email militaryretirementcalc@gmail.com to have it deleted.
9. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last Updated" date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.
10. Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at:
Email: militaryretirementcalc@gmail.com
11. Consent
By using our website, you consent to this Privacy Policy.