Project Background
DC.Gov is the official web portal for District of Columbia’s government information and services. Launched in 1999, the award-winning web portal has grown to include over 100 websites for District government agencies and topics ranging from sustainability to being an age friendly city to the quadrennial Presidential Inauguration.
The Challenge
The District of Columbia (DC.Gov) needed to develop a retirement planning calculator for use by employees participating in the district’s retirement plans. The objective of this calculator, called the Personal Retirement View (PRV), was to help employees with multiple retirement savings accounts determine the amount of retirement income they require, and to understand and to adjust current salary deferral amounts and portfolio asset allocations to effectively meet their retirement income goal.
DC.Gov needed the PRV to be available as a real-time analysis tool, available for on-demand use 24/7 via their internal website. They also need it to generate a quarterly retirement income planning report that would provide a retirement health snapshot on a quarter-by-quarter basis. Since the tool was aimed at employees with multiple retirement savings accounts, the PRV needed to aggregate employee census and third-party administrator data to provide employees with a holistic view into their retirement health.
The Solution
VisualCalc developed the PRV on top of VisualCalc’s Retirement Planning Tool platform, and then customized it to address DC.Gov’s specific needs. Once a user logs into the PRV, that user’s personal employee information, along with his internal and third party investment account information, are used to generate an online report showing that user’s current retirement health. This report includes his retirement allocations, a gap analysis showing whether or not he is on track to meet his retirement goals, and how his retirement health might vary across different market growth scenarios. Based on these results, a user can perform an interactive “what if” analysis, changing different input assumptions and then seeing the impact these changes have on his retirement health.
The Results
The PRV is now successfully deployed and in use on DC.Gov’s internal website. To date, the solution has met all of DC.Gov’s project objectives, resulting in an increased participation rate and an elevated contribution rate per employee.
