SEIU Local 503 is Oregon’s largest public services and care provider union, representing 72,000 people and 500 different job descriptions. SEIU retained Anderson Economic Group to provide the underlying calculations for an online pension benefit calculator that allows SEIU members to estimate their future retirement benefits upon retirement.
We reviewed pension benefit formulas for PERS, comprehensive annual financial reports, documentation on the system’s Individual Account Program, and historic market return data. We used this information to construct a model that allows users to enter their age, years of service, pension tier, salary, and IAP balance into the model and estimate their future annual pension benefit and IAP balance. We provided these calculations to SEIU, who then retained a web developer to put the calculator online.