Description: The traditional informal care of/by family has faced increasing geographic and economic challenges from changing family households and sources of family income. Financial planning and risk protection tools provide important resource in the changing retirement landscape toward optimal family support and crisis management, that is, with less duress and financial burden to affected family caregivers. Ultimately, maintaining family values and close communications through evolving family structures are key to a healthy society and economic welfare of the people.

Description: We discussed impacts of procrastination and strategies to harness the power of inertia to aid individuals in their pursuit of future financial well-being.

Description: Planning one's own retirement financing is a new challenge, and Americans need to hear a consensus message from the experts, not a diverse chorus of opinions.

Description: Social Security provides financial protection by annuitizing retirement. This is not enough for many. My idea creates an additional annuity via Social Security.

Description: This paper suggests that individual decisions to retire are based on personal resource allocations, institutional influences, and social standards. The paper then attempts to create a decision-making framework in which to accommodate this range of influences. From Retirement Needs Framework, M-RS00-1.

Description: The abstract for a paper that focuses on default distributions and why they are important.

Description: Description of the vast variety of predictive analytics topics covered by the Forecasting & Futurism section and introduction to the July 2015 issue of the newsletter.

Description: The article discusses the sustainability of the ACA individual market from a public entitlement standpoint. A key point of measuring sustainability is the reliance on market forces rather than federal budget constraints. The article explains why an actuarial viewpoint of sustainability is necessary to a greater extent than other public assistance and social insurance programs. The article challenges actuaries to be a bold, objective voice in a space that is full of opinionated but often uninformed viewpoints.

Description: For a long time the primary focus of private LTC insurance companies has been to educate the public about the need for private LTC insurance and to make the product more acceptable to a wider population. To this end there have been numerous changes to the product design to make this product more acceptable to general population. However, one of the things that may have been overlooked in those product design changes is the need for alignment of policyholder and insurance company’s interests, which is to make coverage more affordable and to reduce adverse selection. Incentivizing good behavior from policyholders can not only make LTC insurance policies less expensive but also help policyholders make better health choices, which can help them stay healthy for a longer time. These incentives may also reduce some of the inherent risks in a long term care policy and may help in increasing the sales of private LTC insurance.

Description: Retirees and their advisors should construct diversified portfolios of retirement income, allocating among various retirement income classes that include Social Security, annuities, and systematic withdrawals from invested assets. This essay discusses the pros and cons of various retirement income generators and the issues with constructing retirement income portfolios.