There is a significant potential demand around the world for a flexible product to manage individual longevity risk. However, annuity markets remain thin, driven by factors including lack of pricing transparency, high product loadings, bequest motives, loss aversion, and the difficulty to hedge the risk. This paper proposes an individual retirement product to allow flexible management of longevity risk. The product combines a lifetime income with a flexible death benefit to meet individual bequest needs. It also benefits the issuers by lower mortality risk due to the natural hedging, and thus lower capital cost as a risk margin. We apply actuarial models that provide transparent pricing for interest rate and mortality risk, the construction of immunized bond portfolios, and the determination of a loading and solvency margin for systematic longevity risk. We also quantify the natural hedging benefits arising from the flexible inclusion of both survival benefits and death benefits.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.