The past 50 years have seen an abundance of research on retirement planning and longevity risk. Reviewed here is the academic side of the research and its varied viewpoints and nuances. The evolution of retirement risk models, retirement portfolio problems and solutions, and annuities are some of the many topics covered.

This is the eBook version of the printed book. This Element is an excerpt from Are You a Stock or a Bond?: Create Your Own Pension Plan for a Secure Financial Future (9780137127375)by Moshe A. Milevsky, Ph.D. Available in print and digital formats. Learn how to systematically control the risks associated with your retirement–and avoid the massive blunders that millions of Americans are still making. One of the most egregious behavioral “sins” Professors Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi have identified is the tendency of too many Americans to allocate too much of their 401(k) plan–and even their own investments–to company stock. Even after the notorious cases of Enron and Worldcom, more than 5,000,000 Americans have more than 60% of their retirement savings invested in their own company’s stock....

Annuitization is one asset management strategy for retirees seeking to secure lifetime income. The US annuity marketplace offers a variety of annuity contracts, including single premium annuities, advanced life deferred annuities, variable annuities with lifetime income guarantee riders, and ruin contingent deferred annuities. Advisers seeking to provide guidance to clients in or near retirement can benefit by understanding (1) the arguments both for and against annuitization and (2) how a client’s interests might be best represented in the marketplace. Important annuity contract provisions are highlighted and briefly discussed so the adviser can become more familiar with retirement-planning options.

Strategies, products, and public policies that will help a new generation of retirees maximize income and minimize risk. As members of the baby boom generation head into retirement, they face an economic environment that has changed noticeably since their parents retired. Most of these new retirees will not be equipped, as many in the earlier generation were, with private pension plans, early retirement options, and fully paid retiree health benefits in addition to Social Security and Medicare. Today it is increasingly left to retirees themselves to plan how to maximize retirement income and minimize risk. In Retirement Income, Mark Warshawsky and his colleagues describe strategies, products, and public policies that will help a new generation achieve financial security and income growth in retirement. Warshawsky, a noted expert in the field who has worked in both government and private industry, analyzes two insurance vehicles, life annuities and long-term care insurance, and their capacity to protect against the extra costs arising from longevity and disability. He proposes two innovations. The first is a strategy that includes a set percentage withdrawal from a balanced portfolio, which is gradually used to purchase a ladder of life annuities. The second proposal, which includes a description of the potential choices in product design and available tax characteristics, is a product that integrates the immediate life annuity and long-term care insurance. With Retirement Income, Warshawsky offers practical ideas based on the results of empirical investigations and analyses, which can be applied to household decision making by retirees and their financial planners and to the design of insurance products and public policy.

Are you ready for the monumental shift towards managing income in retirement? How does managing money in the "accumulation" years differ from the "income" years? With life expectancies increasing retirees have to plan for the reality of living 25-35 years in retirement. Do you have enough for when your paycheck stops? Have you thought about the sources of guaranteed income you may have? How much could you withdraw from your nest egg and not run out of money? How can you take the mystery out of knowing if you'll have enough? Will you continue to work in retirement? Will you turn your hobby into a small business? What will the landscape of retirement look like for you? These questions and many more are answered in this book "Managing Income in Retirement." Find out how you can have more confidence knowing that you have a plan to go into your retirement income years. Planning provides confidence. Confidence brings the ability to enjoy the retirement you've always dreamed about.

A shifting retirement landscape demands that retirees seek new strategies that emphasize lifetime income. Many recent social, demographic, and economic factors have heightened the already significant risks around longevity. Lifetime Income to Retire with Strength addresses those changes and other issues retirees face through the lens of longevity risk. In an era where conventional retirement planning approaches are challenged, author Bruno Caron proposes an innovative new approach based on a strategic combination of asset management, insurance, risk pooling and income generation. Emphasizing the importance of lifetime income in retirement planning, Caron offers a logical rationale for considering investment and insurance tougher as two pillars critical to retirement income planning. The book's framework invites the retirees, pre-retirees and anyone interested in retirement planning to shift from the traditional "spending rate vs. probability of ruin" trade-off to a "spending rate vs. bequest" trade-off. Through historical, actuarial and logical perspectives, Caron examines the urgent challenges around retirement planning and offers thoughtful solutions based on his experience as an actuary, entrepreneur and stock and credit analyst.

Two fundamentally different philosophies for retirement income planning, which I call probability-based and safety-first, diverge on the critical issue of where a retirement plan is best served: in the risk/reward trade-offs of a diversified and aggressive investment portfolio that relies primarily on the stock market, or in the contractual protections of insurance products that integrate the power of risk pooling and actuarial science alongside investments. The probability-based approach is generally better understood by the public. It advocates using an aggressive investment portfolio with a large allocation to stocks to meet retirement goals. My earlier book How Much Can I Spend in Retirement? A Guide to Investment-Based Retirement Strategies provides an extensive investigation of probability-based approaches. But this investments-only attitude is not the optimal way to build a retirement income plan. There are pitfalls in retirement that we are less familiar with during the accumulation years. The nature of risk changes. Longevity risk is the possibility of living longer than planned, which could mean not having resources to maintain the retiree's standard of living. And once retirement distributions begin, market downturns in the early years can disproportionately harm retirement sustainability. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it acts to amplify the impacts of market volatility in retirement. Traditional wealth management is not equipped to handle these new risks in a fulfilling way. More assets are required to cover spending goals over a possibly costly retirement triggered by a long life and poor market returns. And yet, there is no assurance that assets will be sufficient. For retirees who are worried about outliving their wealth, probability-based strategies can become excessively conservative and stressful. This book focuses on the other option: safety-first retirement planning. Safety-first advocates support a more bifurcated approach to building retirement income plans that integrates insurance with investments, providing lifetime income protections to cover spending. With risk pooling through insurance, retirees effectively pay an insurance premium that will provide a benefit to support spending in otherwise costly retirements that could deplete an unprotected investment portfolio. Insurance companies can pool sequence and longevity risks across a large base of retirees, much like a traditional defined-benefit company pension plan or Social Security, allowing for retirement spending that is more closely aligned with averages. When bonds are replaced with insurance-based risk pooling assets, retirees can improve the odds of meeting their spending goals while also supporting more legacy at the end of life, especially in the event of a longer-than-average retirement. We walk through this thought process and logic in steps, investigating three basic ways to fund a retirement spending goal: with bonds, with a diversified investment portfolio, and with risk pooling through annuities and life insurance. We consider the potential role for different types of annuities including simple income annuities, variable annuities, and fixed index annuities. I explain how different annuities work and how readers can evaluate them. We also examine the potential for whole life insurance to contribute to a retirement income plan. When we properly consider the range of risks introduced after retirement, I conclude that the integrated strategies preferred by safety-first advocates support more efficient retirement outcomes. Safety-first retirement planning helps to meet financial goals with less worry. This book explains how to evaluate different insurance options and implement these solutions into an integrated retirement plan.