American Academy of Actuaries Reinserts Caveat Language into Their Social Security Challenge/Game

Kudos to the American Academy of Actuaries (AAA) for reinserting the following caveat language in its Social Security Challenge tool. 

Actuaries Confuse the Primary Causes of the Social Security Funding Shortfall

The American Academy of Actuaries (Academy) recently published its annual Actuarial Perspective on the annual OASDI (Social Security) Trustees Report. Usually, these briefs are published by the Academy shortly after release of the trustee’s report, but this year’s brief (covering last year’s 2023 report) was significantly delayed for some reason.

Among other things, this year’s actuarial perspective on Social Security attempts to convince us that system’s current funding shortfall “was mostly caused by economic factors that came up short of expectations, including the growth of taxable payroll, and trust fund investment returns.” This is apparently the same conclusion reached by the system’s Chief Actuary as discussed in the article entitled, “Here’s the real cause of the Social Security funding shortfall, according to the program’s chief actuary”

It’s that Time Once Again for Retired Households to Perform Their Actuarial Valuations

At the beginning of each calendar year, we encourage our retired (or near-retired) readers to perform an actuarial valuation of their household assets and spending liabilities to see whether changes should be made to their financial plans. A household actuarial valuation involves calculating and comparing present values of household assets and household spending liabilities for the purpose of determining the household’s Funded Status. To do this, we suggest you follow the easy 5-step valuation process outlined below using our Actuarial Financial Planner (AFP) models.

2023 was a better year for retirees after a pretty tough 2022. Most of us experienced better-than-assumed investment return experience, rising interest rates and lower levels of price inflation. As a result, we increased the default assumptions used in the AFP to estimate future investment returns and decreased the default assumption for future inflation (as discussed in our post of November 16, 2023). The combined effect of more favorable experience during 2023 and changes in our default assumptions will generally increase household funded statuses as of January 1, 2024.