Description: Read the December 2018 issue of Small Talk published by Smaller Insurance Company Section. Practical information on trends that impact sections and activities.

Description: The article summarizes three papers presented at the 2014 Living to 100 Symposium V, which was hosted by the SOA in Orlando in January 2014. The papers take three different views of retirement saving: the individual's, the insurance provider's and a wholesale risk management view. David Blanchett of Morningstar proposes a new model to assess the true cost of retirement, Moshe Milevsky proposes a new product concept based on the nearly forgotten tontine and Johnny Li proposes a new set of mortality indices based on the Cairns-Blake-Dowd projection model for the purpose of actively managing mortality and longevity risk.

Description: This is a web page containing links to papers presented at the Retirement 20/20 conference held in Washington, D.C. on November 17 & 18, 2008.

Description: This paper responds to comments on a proposed compulsory savings program combined with transparent investment vehicles designed to promote competition based on expense levels, fund performance and customer service. At retirement 50% of the account is annuitized in Participating Variable Annuity (PVA) backed by TIPS. All investment experience, expenses, and pooled longevity experience is passed to annuitants through periodic benefit adjustments. Annuities are priced uniformly based on age at commencement.

Description: This paper responds to the comments on the Total Career Benchmark Model, consistent with Retirement 20/20 principles, focuses on reconstructing and maintaining a consistent and reasonable sharing of risks and rewards amongst the four stakeholders: Individuals, Society, Employers and the Markets. Modern technology provides the necessary tools. A series of benchmarks are used for tax limits, target pensions, accrual to date etc. The self adjusting, consistent benchmarks under the TCB Model, means that all stakeholders speak the same language. Individuals and Employers can easily compare what they have to what they need – and more importantly can see how to accrue what is needed. An individual’s ability to tax shelter income over a career is not dependent on the design of any employer pension plan. All funds allocated to an individual remain the individual’s and are not used to subsidize another person – except for the inherent risk sharing of an annuity – by hidden transfers of value.

Description: The Social Security file and suspend and restricted application claiming strategies have received a great deal of attention in the past few years as allowing individuals to increase their Social Security benefits. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 made significant changes to these strategies. This article reviews those strategies and then discusses the impact of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 changes on those strategies.

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

Description: This paper presents a generalized profits released model which resolves the difficulties of the traditional analysis posed by products that have fluctuating profits and losses over time or have no initial investment. Discussions of the paper are included.

Description: The Total Career Benchmark Model, consistent with Retirement 20/20 principles, focuses on reconstructing and maintaining a consistent and reasonable sharing of risks and rewards amongst the four stakeholders: Individuals, Society, Employers and the Markets. Modern technology provides the necessary tools. A series of benchmarks are used for tax limits, target pensions, accrual to date etc. The self adjusting, consistent benchmarks under the TCB Model, means that all stakeholders speak the same language. Individuals and Employers can easily compare what they have to what they need – and more importantly can see how to accrue what is needed. An individual’s ability to tax shelter income over a career is not dependent on the design of any employer pension plan. All funds allocated to an individual remain the individual’s and are not used to subsidize another person – except for the inherent risk sharing of an annuity – by hidden transfers of value.