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: discussion of a new product idea for retirement planning which integrates a variety of needs estate death benefit, annuity income, disability income, etc. into one product