Description: Lessons learned by an actuary who makes a move to the dark side, sales and marketing, and becomes successful.

Description: Variable insurance products are popular in the marketplace. They are risky to insurers partly because the guaranteed minimum living and death benefits give policyholders great control of their policies. In this article, the author investigates managing policyholder behavior.

Description: The SOA has developed a new “tool” using Microsoft Access/Excel for international actuaries to conduct mortality and persistency studies in conjunction with the SOA’s international experience study initiative. Professionally programmed, this new tool facilitates the work of international actuaries.

Description: The Congressional Budget Office reports that out-of-pocket expenses accounted for 19 percent of the total long-term care LTC expenses in the United States in 2006, and private LTC insurance accounted for only 8 percent of these expenses, which shows that Americans are underinsured for LTC expenses. While it is true that public programs like Medicaid and Medicare cover much of the nation’s LTC expenses 68 percent of the total LTC expenses in the United States in 2006, eligibility for these programs comes at a great cost to the individual.

Description: Continuation of article from previous issue. This article illustrates the practical and financial implications of applying nested stochastic techniques to a sample product.

Description: This is a summary of the NAIC meeting held in September of 2008.

Description: An article from the Chairman of the Product Development Section Council with a brief discussion of plans for the section for the upcoming year 2009.

Description: discussion of the Product Development Section’s plans for the annual meeting.

Description: Shows why predictive modeling should be a necessary tool for the life actuary, identifies examples of various limitations in traditional mortality experience analyses, and also posits various predictive modeling techniques as a means of avoiding these constraints.

Description: Article discusses the findings of the SOA International Experience Survey on embedded-value financial assumptions. It is intended to provide international actuaries with benchmark assumption data.