No Pressure Over Cappuccino

I'll be out of town all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday. I won't be able to update this blog until sometime on Wednesday afternoon. The news people will be looking for is whether the Supreme Court will issue their decision in the City of Eugene case on Thursday. Don't fret, I already have the two optional blog entries written and will need only press the right button to post it.

On a different front, I am making significant progress developing a calculator for "window" retirees to figure out what their benefits will be under both a favorable and unfavorable ruling in the City of Eugene case, while simultaneously implementing Strunk. Virtually everything hinges on how the Court rules on the PERS Board decision to credit 20% to regular accounts for 1999. The settlement of the case calls for PERS to revise that crediting decision to 11.33%, recalculate retiree benefits AS IF only 11.33% had been credited, compound the earnings forward to the date of retirement, and adjust the required benefit downward to reflect the lower earnings. For virtually all "window" retirees (4/1/00 through 3/1/04), this will result in two changes: 1) a lower monthly benefit going forward and 2) overpayments that must be repaid for the period from the date of retirement to date of implementation of the settlement. In addition, the adjusted base benefit must be COLA'd up from the date of retirement to the date of implementation, which reduces both the excess crediting and lowers the current benefit less. While this calculation is relatively easy to do for an individual, it is considerably harder to do with the different variables involved for large numbers of people. I have the program prototyped, all my crucial implementation questions answered by PERS, and have the necessary constant data (COLA by cohort) to calculate. It will probably take me the rest of this week and into next week to finish a working version. The result will not be a "pretty" program like my earlier PERS calculator. In fact, it won't even be a Windows program. It will run in a DOS console under Windows. The program is written in standard ISO C++ (under Linux) and is intended to be fast and accurate, not pretty. Error checking will be minimal, but will prevent non-Window retirees from getting useless answers. Aside from that, it follows the garbage in/garbage out model of programming. It should work very well for members who rolled all variable into regular at retirement. It will only give rough (but close) answers for members who kept money in variable after retirement. When the court's ruling finally comes out, I will begin to harden up the error checking and *maybe* prettify it. Watch this space for more information on how and when you can acquire a copy of this work of low art.