Longevity Risk: An Essay

The report’s key findings are:

• As life expectancy at 65 rises, outliving one’s resources poses a growing challenge.
• This study explores how people perceive their life expectancy, options for handling longevity risk, and why few insure against it.
• A survey of investors with over $100,000 in financial assets sheds new light on this topic:
  • About half of respondents would be willing to buy an annuity at prevailing market rates but just 12 percent actually do so.
  • Reasons for the gap may be that financial professionals do not routinely recommend annuities and actually buying them can be hard.