Retirement-income products often try to achieve multiple conflicting goals, including guaranteed income, inflation protection, liquidity, asset growth and estate potential.

Participants in self-directed retirement plans may fail to understand and mitigate investment and longevity risk, putting their retirement security at risk. Variable deferred annuities with lifetime income and investment guarantees could rectify the problem.

As defined contribution plans continue to replace defined benefit plans, retirees face substantial financial market risk to their non-guaranteed retirement savings.

Variable annuities with guaranteed minimum lifetime withdrawal benefits (VA/GLWB) offer retirees longevity protection, upside exposure to equity markets, and access to savings in case of emergencies.

We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an “all or nothing” decision.

Annuities are not popular despite providing valuable insurance against outliving one’s savings.

This paper assesses the impact of variable investment-linked deferred annuities (VILDAs) on lifecycle consumption, saving, and portfolio allocation patterns given stochastic and systematic mortality.

This paper assesses the impact of variable investment-linked deferred annuities (VILDAs) on lifecycle consumption, saving, and portfolio allocation patterns given stochastic and systematic mortality.

Americans have experienced a steady increase in longevity over the last 100 years.