Description: State and local pension plans provide their stakeholders with a great deal of information. However, that information is typically not presented in a user-friendly way. Summary documents often fail to give their readers a clear and comprehensive picture of a plan's finances. The premise of the SOA Project described in this article is that there is a need for concise summary reviews of a plan's operations. The Project's mandate included the preparation of two sample reviews of two different state systems that might serve as models, but not rigid templates for reviews prepared by plan management. This article describes and compares the two reviews and their accompanying dashboards, and also addresses the Project's broader goals. The article emphasizes that it is not the exact shape or format of a summary review that matters, but how effectively it conveys the current state and prospects of a plan's finances.

Description: Article discusses how middle class Americans are doing in saving for retirement, sources of incomes and results of the Survey of Consumer Finances.

Description: How can we manage decumulation in an era of Defined Contribution plans? Marketing and incentives for annuity conversion, pooled-type retirement plans plus developing a "Social Security longevity annuity" can all be pieces of the solution.

Description: Discusses a wide range of issues related to financial decision making and aging. Includes discussion of cognitive decline, fraud and poor decisions. Brings in role of technology and tools.

Description: summary of Canadian topics from recent Retirement Section Council meeting. Update on defined contribution initiative and potential US legislation. Highlight recent SOA research on retirement income.

Description: In 1995, Mexico replaced the public pay-as-you-go system by a privately managed system based on individual accounts. This paper analyzes the causes that made necessary the reform of the old Mexican pay-as-you-go pension system. A description of the modifications and current situation of the pension system also are discussed. The paper concludes that although the pension system has been modified during the last few years, there are still some weaknesses that have to be corrected to provide an appropriate retirement benefit to workers.

Description: Chapter 1 describes important changes in Mexico in the 1990s such as re-privatization of banks, relaxed financial regulation, membership in NAFTA and OECD, and political change at the federal level. From Retrospective and Perspective Analysis of the Privatized Mandatory Pension System in Mexico, M-RS02-1.

Description: Mexico substituted its defined benefit system [IMSS] of the formal sector by a defined contribution system in 1997. The initial plan called for buying single premium annuities for the widows and disabled workers under the new system. In the first three years, this market came to occupy a significant part of the insurance sector. Then, the number of workers getting benefits started to fall dramatically. This is the abstract of a paper that shows that such a fall has been a direct result of how the IMSS authorizes the issuance of single premium annuities. The paper analyses the rationale behind such a dramatic change in policy, analyzes various possible scenarios of IMSS strategies, and examines the problem to see if it brings in any long-term benefits to IMSS.

Description: This discussion on retirement plans for the self-employed reviews encouragement given to plans through tax relief resulting in their more widespread use in Canada and Great Britain as well as the outlook for similar legislation in the United States. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1957, Vol. 9, No. 25.

Description: A discussion of where insurance companies and their products fit in the retirement asset market and trends over the past few decades. Some historical data on the insurance companies' share of retirement assets is included.