Description: This article focuses on retirement planning and knowledge and how the SOA Research Institute has added to our understanding of what consumers know and how they plan. It is the first of a series that offer insight into where consumers are today, identifies gaps in understanding, planning and managing retirement issues, helps us understand how consumers act at various life stages, highlights consumer information collected by the SOA Research Institute and provides some recommendations for working with different stakeholders to improve retirement planning. This article identifies the components of the research and how they fit together and provides a summary of major findings with regard to gaps in knowledge and planning. The research includes focus groups and in-depth interview, consumer surveys, a conjoint study, a study of future issues by Futurists, and more.

Description: The speaker will share his insights into the hedging challenges faced by FIA and VA business in the current market environment.

Description: Anna Rappaport provides her usual highly-stimulating and thought-provoking summaries of ideas that she has heard and generated during some of her most recent expeditions to various Conferences, Meetings, Roundtables, Symposia and Retreats that deal with a wide variety of retirement and old age security related issues.

Description: This research report summarizes current research on retirement adequacy and compares different measures.

Description: 'This paper takes a fresh look at the historical record of the most popular financial planning device retirees encounter, the 4% rule.' From the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, March 2011.

Description: The authors of this report have identified three key corporate finance metrics and measures impacted by corporate pension plans that are increasingly being used by corporate decision-makers. The first is corporate leverage. The second is accounting adjustments made by rating agencies to income statements and cash flow statements. The third is the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) where it is felt that the calculation of the WACC from market data may be biased if corporate pension plans are ignored.

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: The author incorporates inflation-indexed bonds into the retiree asset allocation problem and illustrates how Liability Driven Investing LDI can be applied to individual investors. From the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, March 2011.

Description: An overview of the evolution of equity-based guarantees (e.g. VA, FIA, etc.) over the last few years and discussion the current lay of the land as it relates to the regulatory, issues, capital markets environment in which these products are offered.

Description: This article looks at the risk of investing in stocks by using traditional actuarial tools, such as measuring the probability of ruin. From Pension Section News, September 2004, Issue No. 56.