Inflation

A sustained increase in the general price level—often measured by a broad index such as the consumer price index (CPI).

Research Highlights Fixed SPIAs

Retirement researcher Wade Pfau published a research paper titled “An Efficient Frontier for Retirement Income .” Pfau’s paper analyzes the relative merits of equities, bonds, fixed single premium immediate annuities (SPIA), inflation-adjusted SPIAs and variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits ( GLWB ). Each of these allocation options are examined in the context of achieving retirement spending goals. Pfau creates an efficient frontier for a...

No Time for Guarantees

The concept is seductive: a financial product that provides upside exposure in the event that equity markets trend up and to the right while also providing a floor of protection in case the bottom falls-out from under markets again.

Sort of like having your cake and eating it too. Very tempting in light of the massive financial uncertainty that has existed for the past several years.

Products playing into this “upside plus protection” theme include (but are not limited to) variable annuities with guaranteed...

Prepare to Rely on Human Capital Rather than Financial Capital

In his most recent Investment Outlook letter, PIMCO founder Bill Gross suggests that investors need to prepare for difficult adjustments in a world of near zero real returns from financial capital

Gross describes the dying cult of equity that has evolved over the past century, and advises readers to expect future equity returns that are much less than 6.6 percent average real return (the “Siegel constant”) since 1912. 

Gross considers the 6.6 percent real return on stocks since 1912 to be an “historical freak, a mutation likely never to be seen again as far as we mortals are concerned.” 

This view is based in part...

Key Phrases Autotag: 

On Withdrawal Rates

In a recent Barron’s interview, Ray Dalio discusses financial deleveraging and makes an interesting point about the relationship between nominal interest rates and...

Maddy Dychtwald on How Women are Driving a Transformation of the Market for Financial Advice and Products

Maddy Dychtwald is a nationally recognized author, co-founder of Age Wave, and a leading expert on the changing demographic trends shaping the marketplace, the workplace and our lives.

Having spent twenty-five years exploring and forecasting lifestyle, marketing and retirement implications of the age wave, she has recently emerged as a renowned authority on the economic ascent of women, including its impact on the financial services industry.

Age Wave’s breakthrough research on women and money includes the recent research study A New Era of Women and...

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