Research Projects in Pension – Post Retirement Needs and Risks

Middle Market Retirement: Approaches for Retirees and Near-Retirees

The Society of Actuaries’ Committee on Post Retirement Needs and Risks is pleased to make available a paper offering a basis for further thought and discussion on the different approaches used by individuals, professionals, and other service providers to address the need of the middle market for retirement.

To provide some overall perspective on the report, Anna Rappaport, Chair of the Committee on Post Retirement Needs and Risks, has provided the following comments:

I am proud to have chaired the Committee on Post Retirement Needs and Risks since its inception more than ten years ago, and very proud of our accumulated body of work. The middle market has been a major focus of the Committee for many years. We have focused on a combination of research including learning about public perceptions and thinking about solutions. We have learned a great deal about the problems, but have found that the path to finding solutions is very challenging. We have also learned that experts do not agree on the right answers to many of the questions that come up and that there is not a good ongoing dialogue on some of the key questions. I am very proud of this report because I feel it is an important step to finding good solutions. It identifies a number of ways of thinking about the solutions, provides a method of classifying approaches and links the approaches to the problems that need to be solved.

We hope that this classification and analysis will encourage more discussion about the range of approaches, and what works well in different circumstances. It may lead to other ideas for classification as well. Such discussion should help move the retirement system forward in finding better solutions for middle income Americans. We hope that this discussion will help people who are building tools, and figuring out what best to do for clients. We see this paper in advancing a discussion and leading to more ideas and development. We know that ideal answers are not clear. We hope to facilitate discussion that can be shared as we learn more from each other.

Thank you to the working group of the Committee who contributed to this important paper. And thank you in advance to the people who will move this work forward.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the report, please contact Steve Siegel, Research Actuary at ssiegel@soa.org.

The SOA’s Committee on Post Retirement Needs and Risks would like to thank the following members of the working group for their input:

Carol Bogosian
Steve Cooperstein
Betty Meredith
Anna Rappaport
Steve Schoonveld
Chuck Yanikoski
Andrew Peterson, SOA Staff Fellow
Steve Siegel, SOA Research Actuary