Have Your Danish, and Eat It Too
A novel retirement plan design, called TimePension (“Tidspension” in Danish) uses a buffer account to smooth out market volatility and ensure a stable income in retirement.
RetiremEntrepreneur: Mike Alfred
"Save like you will retire, but live like you won't," is part of Alfred's personal retirement philosophy. He is co-founder and CEO of BrightScope, the first firm to rate retirement plan quality and publish the ratings on the Internet.
It’s an Index! It’s an Income Calculator! It’s a Fund!
BlackRock’s new CoRI helps older DC plan participants find out how large an income annuity they can afford to buy at retirement—but it stops short of helping them buy one.
How to Make Annuitization More Appealing
In the embedded video, Brigitte Madrian of Harvard (pictured) describes the results of two surveys of older Americans about lifetime income that she and a team of other Ivy League researchers conducted. An article accompanies the video.
Featured
Introducing: The Journal of Retirement
The Journal of Retirement is a new quarterly publication from Institutional Investor Journals. In this three-minute video-taped interview, editor George 'Sandy' Mackenzie describes the aims of the publication, whose first issue is now available.
A New DC Concept from Denmark
'Smoothed income annuities' represent an entirely new retirement and wealth accumulation strategy for the private and occupational pension markets in the U.S., writes Danish actuary Per Linnemann, Ph.D.
News
At Lincoln Financial, the dawn of a brand new DIA
So far, mutual insurers with captive agent forces have dominated the DIA space, so it may be significant that Lincoln, a publicly-held company with a big third-party distribution network, has jumped on the DIA bandwagon.
Sales of all fixed annuity products rise in 2Q 2013: Beacon
New York Life was the top-seller of fixed annuities in 2Q 2013, followed by Security Benefit Life, Allianz, American Equity and Great American Life, according to Beacon Research.
New York Life releases selected mid-year sales figures
New York Life remains the leading seller of fixed immediate annuities, with 32% of the market for first quarter 2013, and is the leader in sales of deferred income annuities, with 46% of the market for first quarter 2013, according to industry sources.
Spain wants to link pension benefits to longevity, not inflation
Spain’s employment minister, Fatima Bañez, stressed that there would be no hike in the legal retirement age in Spain – which currently stands at 67 and is among the highest in Europe.
Quote of the Week
"If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt." -- from "Blindness," by Jose Saramago.
