Sunday, May 26, 2019

Forecasting Future Investment Returns

To help you develop a reasonable annual spending budget, we provide you with Actuarial Budget Calculators (ABCs) that employ default assumptions for future investment returns, future inflation and your expected lifetime planning period.  These default assumptions are selected to be approximately consistent with assumptions used by insurance company actuaries in pricing current inflation-adjusted life annuities (net of expense loads and profit).  Thus, the Actuarial Budget Benchmark (ABB), which uses the default assumptions, provides you with a lifetime spending plan that could theoretically be fully funded through the purchase of relatively low-risk inflation-adjusted annuities at current market rates (the market value of your future spending liabilities).  The default assumptions currently are: