Annuities and Retirement Income Planning
By Patrick J. Collins (Schultz Collins)
This CFA Institute Research Foundation brief provides a broad-brush survey of the US annuity marketplace as of the end of 2014. It is a short and generic introduction to currently available annuity contracts. It is oriented toward both investors who are contemplating the use of annuities to generate income and hedge longevity risk and their advisers. It does not discuss the literature that evaluates annuities as instruments to enhance utility in the context of a life-cycle model or as benchmarks for monitoring and evaluating the health of a retirement income portfolio (these topics are covered in the CFA Institute Research Foundation literature review Longevity Risk and Retirement Income Planning). Nothing in this piece should be considered financial-planning advice for a specific type of investor or an endorsement of a particular product or strategy.
Full Content: SSRN
