Description: The investment allocation is a critical component of pension risk management and having actuaries with a strong investment acumen is critical for pension success. This article dives into why investment knowledge is so valuable for actuaries today and what the SOA is doing to help provide actuaries with these critical skills.

Description: Summary of current Pension Section activities, including continuing education opportunities.

Description: This article presents the background around the Post Retirement Needs and Risk call for essays focused on: (1) defined contribution plan risk management strategies; (2) decumulation strategies for retirement and (3) long-term care financing. The important essays from that exercise are presented in this Pension Section News publication along with interviews of the winning authors.

Description: The "feel free" strategy helps retirees understand when they can retire, how much they can spend and how much guaranteed income they might want. The approach is very simple - divide your age by 20 and feel free to spend that percentage of your savings in a year.

Description: The asset portfolios of retirees’ serve many purposes including current income, liquidity, purchasing power, estate, tax minimization, and so on. Multiple objectives with different levels of importance lead to a complex asset allocation problem for retirees. Existing asset allocation methods normally focus on a subset of the multiple objectives of retirees in an approximate way. The simulation-based multiple objective asset allocation method objectively assesses each allocation plan against multiple objectives in a consistent way and provides a more holistic picture of possible outcomes. This information is critical for finding the optimal allocation plan. The optimization is based on the weighted performance relative to multiple objectives. At the same time, it requires more inputs and advanced modeling.

Description: 4 ways my preconceived notions about pension actuarial work were challenged during my tenure on the PSC.

Description: Overview of ideas about longevity risk management focused in part on plan design and on adjusting retirement ages, the interaction of multiple risks and on collective and multiple entity plans. Key ideas from the 2013 Pension Research Council meeting are included and several sets of resources are cited.

Description: The 2013 report looks remarkably similar to the 2012 report. The long-range, 75-year actuarial deficit grew slightly from 2.67 percent of taxable payroll to 2.72 percent of taxable payroll.

Description: This article from Pension Section News, May 2007, No. 64, is the Chairperson's Corner discusses the challenges of attracting and retaining qualified workers. With that in mind, she suggests that we keep an international perspective as we continue to advance our Retirement 20/20 initiative.