Tag Archives: endowments

The 5 Wealth Zones of Decumulation

Here’s my latest MoneySense blog, which summarizes pension consultant Don Ezra’s presentation at the most recent meeting of John Por’s Decumulation Institute. Launched in 2014, other members of the Institute include retired actuary Malcolm Hamilton, finance professor Moshe Milevsky, Black Rock Canada’s Paul Purcell, former Black Rock CEO Bill Chinery, Investor Economics’ founder Earl Bederman, Cortex Consulting’s Tom Iannucci, actuary Clive Morgan, and Michael Peskin.  I attend both as an advisory member as well as the sole media representative.

As regular Hub readers may know by now, Decumulation is the opposite of Wealth Accumulation, a topic that will become increasingly important as baby boomers start leaving paid employment and start to embrace encore careers or traditional retirement. That’s why we have devoted one of our six major blog categories to Decumulation (coupled with Downsizing):

The blog can be found by clicking the above link, or below. But for the Hub only, John contributed the following summary of the meeting:

john_por
John Por

The Advisory Group discussed how financial advisors should approach retirees to maximize their income. Don Ezra has been working on a financial modelling tool that would allow financial advisors to plan individual saving and decumulation behaviour using a top down, longevity-based, multi-tier retirement income centred framework. The Advisory Group concluded such a tool would be a great step forward but warned that such a tool could be dangerous in inexperienced  hands if the potential dangers of additional risk taking were not highlighted. Don Ezra and John Por discussed their work on the concepts of what a training program for financial advisors should contain. Jon Chevreau suggested a new certification program may be another useful step to tackle this issue.

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