The cost of longevity risk

​I'm not an actuary, but do occasionally work with institutional investors, where the tradeoff between market risk (volatility as well as systemic macro risk) and runout/longevity risk is important, and has significant impact on optimal portfolio construction and risk management in closely held ownership stakes.

Approaching this from the side of personal financial planning, I've appreciated the writing of Prof. Moshe Milevsky in Toronto ("Are you a stock or a bond?"), including the thinking in his book "Pensionize your nest egg" with Alexandra Macqueen. The shift from DB to DC pensions is opening up a longevity risk can of worms many people are not sufficiently concerned about.

Over at my old colleague (25 years ago!) Michael James' blog, I've done some quick analysis that shows very roughly (with crude assumptions) that for a typical North American retiree, longevity risk protection can be worth about as much as an extra 3% per year of investment returns. A value not insignificant given reasonable after-tax, real (post-inflation) portfolio return expectations -- and ripe for capturing (and often in fact captured in large part) by higher and less transparent product fee levels.