Description: The Retirement Plans Experience Committee of the Society of Actuaries (RPEC) is pleased to present this annual update to the RPEC_2014 model and its corresponding mortality improvement scales. This new version of the model reflects historical U.S. population mortality experience through 2018. For clarity, the updated mortality improvement scale based on this 2020 version of the model is called Scale MP-2020. The Scale MP-2020 Report has been posted below along with an Excel version of Scale MP-2020.

Description: The Retirement Plans Experience Committee (RPEC) hired Ernst & Young to perform a literature review and assessment of mortality improvement rates in the United States population.

Description: This summary is intended to provide the pension actuary with guidance in interpreting and using the termination and retirement information in the 2003 SOA Pension Plan Termination and Retirement Study. The tables in the study were developed based on 1.7 million life years of data from 112 plans collected primarily from actuarial consulting firms for the period 1995 – 2000.

Description: Eric Friedman’s comments on ‘The Case for Stochastic Present Values,” by Dimitry Mindlin

Description: The current financial model put forth as the market value of public sector pension benefit liabilities is simply the expected cash flows of the accumulated benefit obligation, as defined for current private sector financial reporting, discounted using a risk-free yield curve. This model is in serious need of an overhaul. This monograph addresses this issue.

Description: A common approach to estimating the total amount of savings required to fund retirement is to first apply a generic “replacement rate” to pre-retirement income, such as 80%, to get the desired retirement income need. That need is then assumed to increase annually at the rate of inflation for the duration of retirement, which is generally assumed to be some fixed period, such as 30 years. Using government data along with a fairly simple market and mortality model, we explore these assumptions to more accurately estimate the true cost of retirement

Description: This paper summarizes third millennium pension research available on the Society of Actuaries Website. The research is organized by categories. In some cases research is assigned to more than one category due to overlap. The goal is to enable a pension actuary who is looking for a research resource to ascertain if there is relevant research and if so to be able to find and download the information. For each item, the year the research was released, the form of research e.g. literature search, paper, survey and a brief synopsis are provided.

Description: This paper examines how the cash balance plan design is related to the normal cost and accrued liability in the various actuarial cost methods, as well as the interaction of the economic assumptions in the valuation. The analysis will show that the traditional cost methods may understate the actual liability. The paper also presents an alternative cost method, along with its advantages and disadvantages. From Cash Balance Symposium Monograph, M-RS02-3.

Description: This panel discussion examines pension plan dynamics including social security integration, benefit and cost projections under dynamic assumptions, and best estimate limitations. From the 1977 Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol.3 No.3.

Description: This panel discussion examines the valuation problems, funding methods, valuing ancillary benefits, and fluctuations in experience of small pension plans.