Reviews the 7 most important conversations or principles around sound retirement income planning, by presenting the main scientific breakthroughs that have been at the core of providing a sustainable retirement income. The narrative weaves the biographies and life stories of people behind “the equations” many of whom are quite colorful and interesting characters in their own right.

This presentation is extremely popular at client-events (as well as advisors) and is the college version of: Retirement Calculus for Poets, based on the best-selling book: The 7 Most Important...

Recent scientific advances enable us to measure true biological age with much greater precision than before. The backward-looking metric of chronological age has become passé and is being superseded by a forward-looking measure of remaining lifetime. In the not-too distant future your phone, watch or even clothes (i.e. wearables) will determine how old you really are.

For example, longevity risk is now (post-covid) greater than ever before, and “longevity insurance” must be part of the decumulation discussion. Learn how to position protection when your birthday – i.e. the number of times you have circled the sun – is just another number.

Based on book: A Biological Age...

Downside-protected strategies can be acquired in a variety of economic structures and legal facades. Living benefit riders can be tagged-on to traditional variable annuities, fixed indexed annuities, or via portfolio insurance with put options.

The key distinguishing feature of all such strategies is their ability to mitigate against possible losses, but at the expense of some upside potential and liquidity. This presentation will explain the rationale for employing such products in the accumulation and decumulation phase of the lifecycle, as well as how to explain the benefits (and costs) to clients.

Based on book: In Defense of Annuities: from Accumulation to Decumulation.

Your IRA or 401(k) is a number, not a pension. More importantly retirement planning is more than just accumulating a large nest egg. It’s what you do with that number (nest egg) that counts, especially now that most companies have eliminated their traditional pension plans and replaced them with Defined Contribution (DC) pensions.

But despite the word pension in the plan absolutely nothing is guaranteed. Moshe argues that it is time to start thinking about Pensionizing (a fraction of) Your Nest Egg. How do you do that? He discusses the role of annuities and other types of longevity insurance that are part of modern Product Allocation.

The talk is based on the (2nd edition) Pensionizing book.

Young people own large quantities of human capital – which is defined as the discounted value of their future wages and salary – but very little financial capital on their personal balance sheet. Older and retiring individuals have negligible reserves of human capital, but hopefully have amassed sufficient financial capital to generate a sustainable income for life.

Strategic financial planning is the process of efficiently converting human capital into financial capital, while maintaining the highest and smoothest possible standard of living over what can potentially be 100 years of life. By the end of my remarks everyone in the audience will be asking themselves: Am I a Stock, or a Bond, or something in between?

Based on the (2nd edition) Stock or Bond book.

From obscure tontines to contemporary DIAs, Moshe examines the assorted ways in which members of society have insured themselves against the high, and unanticipated, cost of living longer than expected. He discusses aggregate vs. individual longevity risk, long-run investment sequencing volatility, the unique inflation rate that is experienced by the elderly as well as the longevity of deaccumulation portfolios. 

Overall, Moshe delivers a practical framework for how to think about modern insurance and financial product solutions. Using a unique mixture of humor and financial history. It raises the audience’s level of comfort with the new vocabulary of 21st century retirement income planning.

Based on: King William’s Tontine: Why the Retirement Annuity of the Future Should Resemble Its Past (Cambridge University Press)

Drawing on over a quarter century of his published research, spanning diverse fields ranging from financial history and statistical biology to actuarial economics, Professor Milevsky will offer his unique (and non-quantitative) perspective on why current and future retirees should allocate a significant fraction of their wealth to -- and generate most of their income from – life annuities.

In a nutshell, his key argument is that annuities, whether they are fixed or variable or anything in between, are the only instruments available for properly insuring longevity risk AND optimally decumulating assets. He will conclude with a personal story on how he (finally) convinced his mother to resist the naysayers and “pensionize” a fraction of her “nest egg.”

When Adam Smith joined the University of Glasgow as a 28-year-old professor in 1751, he participated in a “benefit scheme” that was unique for its time. The scheme offered participants a choice of levels at which to contribute savings to a fund, ranging from 2% to 10% of wages, with benefits granted in the form of a reversionary annuity.

This lecture describes the scheme and examines choices made by participants, all of which resonates with the 21st century debate about defaulting into annuities.

Based on the article published in the Financial History Review.