Description: This report provides an overview of post-retirement risks, how they are perceived, and ways to protect against them. It presents key findings on the major retirement risks explored in the 2009 Retirement Risk Survey and provides context for the results in relation to other studies.

Description: Discusses some basic issues for women to consider in planning for the possibility of being alone.

Description: The purpose of the latest in this series, the 2005 Risks and Process of Retirement Survey, is to evaluate Americans’ awareness of such risks, how their awareness has changed since 2003, and how it affects the way they manage their finances. This report focuses on attitudes toward longevity specifically in the context of planning for and managing the financial risk of outliving assets in retirement, and relates the public’s understanding of these issues to other studies. Three other reports cover in greater depth the process of retirement, other post-retirement risks, and retirement issues of special concern to women. The 2001, 2003 and 2005 studies separately analyzed current retirees and those not yet retired, referred to in these reports as ‘pre-retirees.’

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) and Stanford Center on Longevity released a report exploring the feasibility of implementing the “Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy.

Description: This report provides key findings from the 2005 Risks and Process of Retirement Survey related to what people mean by retirement and how they retire. It also examines the significance of potential labor shortages and the possibility of people working longer.

Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: An interview with actuary Lee Gold reveals preliminary results of a recent SOA research project which surveyed employees on what retirement plan features they prefer.

Description: The 2020 ERISA Advisory Council of the Department of Labor had a project on Considerations for Recognizing and Addressing Participants with Diminished Capacity. I delivered testimony to the ERSIA Advisory Council on this topic in September 2020. This article summarizes some key points from the testimony and also offers ideas for how employers can help employees and retirees deal with these issues. There are two different audiences that employers deal with as a result of diminished capacity – the individuals whose capacity is diminished, and those who help them.

Description: This is a review of 'Restructuring Retirement Risks,' a collection of papers that examines retirement risks, edited by David Blitzstein, Olivia Mitchell, and Stephen Utkus. The papers, which are a must–read for serious students of retirement systems and a good introduction for those not as familiar with the issues, explore the stresses being placed on those systems and ever–increasing uncertainty as Baby Boomers begin to move into retirement.

Description: The article is an interview with Barbara Hogg who summarizes the results of a survey of Americans about their awareness of financial risks faced in retirement and how they are managing those risks. The survey was commissioned by the SOA and is the 11th iteration of such a survey.