Más o Menos: Ticos Cheerfully Eke By
With 4.8 million people, Costa Rica’s problems are comparable to those of a big U.S. city, like Los Angeles or Chicago. Yet the tensions of a large U.S. city...
_Position: Cover
Dream-House Shopping in Costa Rica
The house was for sale. Its mystical vibe seduced them into paying $150,000 in cash. Monkeys, sloths, macaws, butterflies and gekkos would be their neighbors as the couple aged....
Skin in the (Costa Rican Retirement) Game
How do Costa Ricans pay for retirement? In San Jose, Alvaro Ramos Chaves (above), the pensions regulator, told RIJ how his nation’s mandatory DB and DC plans work. His...
RetirePreneur: Dream Forward
The next wave of automation in retirement plans will be chatbots--intelligent virtual assistants that both teach and learn from participants. Dream Forward, a startup led by Grant Easterbrook, is...
When You’re 64
Six months after reaching age 64, Americans are showered with Medicare supplement pitches. While the path of least resistance leads to a Medicare Advantage plan, a Medigap plan might...
Policy Forecast: Gloom with a Chance of Doom
At the Employee Benefit Research Institute's policy forum in D.C. last week, retirement policy experts were not cheerful about the coming inauguration, and some feared that retirement security will...
Voya: From Orange to Origami
Almost four years after its IPO, Voya (formerly ING-US) has rebranded, retooled itself as a fixed indexed annuity shop and launched an ad campaign featuring origami rodents that talk....
What To Tell Nervous (Older) Clients Now
During market turmoil, the messages from “retirement income” advisors to their clients should be substantially different in their content from the messages that investment advisors typically send to their...
Which Annuity Is Better? This New Tool Tells You
Cannex, the Toronto-based annuity product data, just announced a new tool, based on research by annuity guru Moshe Milvesky, that enables advisors to do side-by-side comparisons of annuity contracts....
Trump and the Trajectory of Interest Rates
'There could be pressure for rates to go higher as investors digest the deficit spending pushed by Mr. Trump,' said Andrew McCormick, head of T. Rowe Price’s U.S. taxable...
The View from the (DOL) Trenches
'“Many of the broker-dealers are still searching for a light switch in a dark room,” said James Lumberg of Envestnet, who, with Jeff Schwantz of Morningstar and Arjun Saxena...
A Word to the Wise Advisor
At the Money Management Institute Fall Solutions conference in Boston this week, one of the presentations focused on the right and wrong words to use when explaining the impact...
The Annuity That Pays for Itself
The deferred income annuity, aka longevity insurance, is favored by academics and is mandatory in Germany and Singapore. Here's a compelling new way to explain its value to clients,...
We Believe What We Like to Believe
In another of our occasional Research Roundups, we survey papers that explore how we like to fool ourselves, how debt keeps women working, why it's better to grow up...
One Step Ahead of a Rolling Boulder
In Colorado Springs this week, members of the Insured Retirement Institute met to discuss the impact of the DOL fiduciary rule. 'It's not all doom and gloom,' said one...
Could You Be Sued Under the New DOL Rule?
'If you’re trying to get things right, our aim is to help you, and that will be true for some time after December 2017,' said attorney Tim Hauser of...
Guiding Clients Through the Medicare Maze
Medicare counseling can be an excellent marketing tool for advisors, especially those who are positioning themselves as retirement specialists. Just ask Ash Toumayants of State College, Pa.
The Essence of Goal-Based Investing
Goal-based investing is more than just mental accounting that assigns labels like “house,” “college” or “retirement” to different pots of money. It's ultimately about risk management, as we learned...
AIG Tops Annuity Sales Chart Again
Eight years after collapsing under the weight of CDS losses and four years after emerging from federal ownership, AIG is again atop the annuity sales charts, with $9.78 billion...
