Kerry H. Pechter, the founder, editor and publisher of Retirement Income Journal, set out in 2009 to create a digital-only, subscription-based publication that would provide unconflicted news and analysis to the annuity and financial advice industries. RIJ,which reaches about 7,100 each week, recently celebrated its 500th issue.

Pechter is the author of Annuities for Dummies (Wiley, 2008) and two other non-fiction books. He has been an editor of Annuity Market News, a writer in Vanguard’s individual annuity marketing department, a senior editor at Rodale Press and a reporter for The Billings (MT) Gazette.

His feature articles have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and other national publications. He is a graduate of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and studied creating writing on a teaching fellowship at Indiana University.

He has twice been selected for fellowships by the National Press Foundation, traveling to Taiwan in 2009 with a group that included writers from Barron’s, NPR, and other national publications. In 2010, he was awarded a fellowship to an NPF symposium on retirement policy in Washington, DC.

He is one of the few journalists invited each year to the meeting of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In each of the past three winters, he spent a month abroad (Costa Rica, Spain, and Israel) studying and writing about each nation’s public and private pension systems. He has been invited to speak publicly about annuities and has been interviewed on radio, television and for podcasts. He is a contributor to Forbes.com’s Retirement section, and blogs on LinkedIn to more than 2,000 followers.

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