Description: The aim of this paper is to examine relationships, analogous to that of premiums and reserves, for the case of a general insurance with benefits payable in respect to several forms of decrement. Specifically, this paper presents a system of splitting the total premiums and reserves into components related to the different benefits, with formulas distinguished between dependent and independent relationships between premium and reserve components. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: Initiated by the Financial Reporting Section, this paper explores rising interest rates. Following this path, the paper will look at implications of interest rate changes for the life insurance industry, current stress testing practices, and how a risk manager can proactively prepare for an uncertain future. A paper published in 2014 focused on why rates could stay low, and some aspects of this paper are similar (e.g., description of insurance products). This paper also uses a sample model office to help practitioners look at their own exposures. It includes typical interest-sensitive insurance products and how they might perform across various scenarios, as well as a survey to establish current practices for how insurers are testing interest rate risk currently.

Description: This is a report on the PBITT Working Group's fourth survey to gather the assumptions actuaries use in pricing, reserving, and risk management of minimum guarantees on Variable Annuity products, such as death benefits, income benefits, withdrawal benefits and maturity benefits.

Description: This paper introduces the symbolic valuation, a stochastic valuation which allows flexible interest rate and cash flow assumptions, and provides an illustration which values a simple SPDA product. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1992, Vol. 1.

Description: This is a discussion of the paper, 'Group Annuity Mortality' by Ray M. Peterson, which presents the Group Annuity Table for 1951 with projection factors. The paper is reviewed, an additional projection method is suggested with illustrations, discussion of the difficulties of using projected rates for premiums and reserves, and critiques are provided.

Description: The objective of this paper from the Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1964, Vol. 16, Pt. 1, No. 44 AB, is to illustrate some of the alternative approaches to making approximate probability statements about the present value of life annuities assuming a specified distribution of the random variable, time until death, and a fixed interest rate.

Description: At retirement, people face a choice between annuitization and self-management of liquid wealth [also called self-annuitization]. A common belief is that annuitization provides longevity insurance at the cost of liquidity. This paper argues that the desire for liquidity is actually driven by bequest motives and estate value should be the measure on the liquidity of a given strategy. The authors demonstrate that self-annuitization give more estate within a critical duration [before life expectancy] while annuitization creates more estate after that. In their second result, they compute the expected ending estate at death under these two strategies and find that, on average, annuitization creates more estate than self-annuitization under reasonable assumptions. They conclude that, as long as the same fund is being used for these two strategies, annuitization and self-annuitization just create different patterns of estates over time. However, annuitization is usually better than self-annuitization for estate creation and liquidity, on average. This is somewhat counter-intuitive to popular belief because payout annuities without a certain period do not have cash surrender values. The creation of the balance stream and the results shown in this paper have important implications on new product and marketing strategies for payout annuities.

Description: This paper sets out the basic principles of federal income taxation of annuity payments, together with the general rules for determining which of two possible methods must be used and the general formulas to be used. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1968, Vol. 20, Pt. 1, No. 58.

Description: This paper discusses the calculation of minimum statutory non-forfeiture values for annuity contracts with stipulated annual payments under which contractual values are based on the 1937 Standard Annuity Table.

Description: This is a brief discussion on the paper by Eugene A. Rasor and T. N. E. Greville titled, 'Complete Annuities', which addressed the calculation of a payout life annuity factor. The commentary notes that the complete annuity is actually a refund annuity, where a proportional share of the final payment made say a premium payment is refunded as of date of death.