This is the second in a series of columns about annuities and retirement planning.
Michelle Richter-Gordon has an idea for a way to make life better for retirement investors: Add a ruler that does a better job of measuring what they really need.
She is the co-founder of Annuity Research & Consulting, a firm that helps retirement plan fiduciaries shop for lifetime income options for the participants.
Richter-Gordon, who also serves as executive director of the Institutional Retirement Income Council, has proposed supplementing the "assets under management" metric with a new "income under advisement" metric.
Today, a retirement professional might equate retirement planning success with maximizing a client's pile of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, crypto and gold bars, without thinking too much about whether, and when, liquid cash will squirt out and help retired clients pay for little things like, say, groceries.
Investment fiduciaries ask clients to fill out a risk tolerance framework, but aside from considering the client's apparent tolerance for risk, "they are not required to think about the liabilities," Richter-Gordon told me in a recent conversation.
Richter-Gordon believes that there could be many reasonable ways to define income under advisement. In a recent conversation, she proposed three possible models:
1. The retirement income projections now included in the lifetime income disclosures sent to 401(k) plan participants.
2. The income base used in annuity guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit riders.
3. A lifetime annuity yield index developed by CANNEX.
If a fiduciary rule applied to retirement professionals' efforts to help clients maximize and stabilize income under advisement, rather than the pile of assets, "you'd see a lot more annuitization," Richter-Gordon predicted.
Why is a new measure necessary? Why can't AUM-oriented advisors simply buy new income projection software modules?
David Lau, the CEO of DPL Financial Partners, a firm that distributes fee-based insurance and annuity products, talked about the psychological sandpaper slowing the gear shift at LIMRA's recent annual meeting.
