The Calculus of Retirement Income

Book excerpt: This 2006 book introduces and develops the basic actuarial models and underlying pricing of life-contingent pension annuities and life insurance from a unique financial perspective. The ideas and techniques are then applied to the real-world problem of generating sustainable retirement income towards the end of the human life-cycle. The role of lifetime income, longevity insurance, and systematic withdrawal plans are investigated in a parsimonious framework. The underlying technology and terminology of the book are based on continuous-time financial economics by merging analytic laws of mortality with the dynamics of equity markets and interest rates. Nonetheless, the book requires a minimal background in mathematics and emphasizes applications and examples more than proofs and theorems. It can serve as an ideal textbook for an applied course on wealth management and retirement planning in addition to being a reference for quantitatively-inclined financial planners.