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Posts feedLump sum or annuity?
People are often faced with a decision whether to live off their savings or buy an annuity. Normally such decisions are made around the retirement ages of 60–65. However, an interesting counter-example has just been provided by eighteen-year-old Charlie Lagarde, the winner of a lottery in Canada.
Some points for integration
The survivor function from age \(x\) to age \(x+t\), denoted \({}_tp_x\) by actuaries, is a useful tool in mortality work. As mentioned in one of our earliest blogs, a basic feature is that the expected time lived is the area under the survival curve, i.e. the integral of \({}_tp_x\). This is easy to express in visual terms, but it often requires numerical integration if there is no closed-form expression for the integral of the survival curve.
Insurance or right?
The Economist recently carried an article about the perceived unfairness of increasing the retirement age. The argument is that poorer people have higher mortality rates, which means they get less value from a given pension than richer people: the poor are less likely to survive long enough to receive the pension, and if they do they will draw it for a shorter period of time.
The limits of limits
Is there a limit to life expectancy?