Unlocking the Two Mysteries behind SPIAs

We also need to know the probabilities of survival to each subsequent age, since the annuity only pays when the owner is alive. The table shows survival probabilities for a 65-year-old male at each subsequent age using the 2009 period life table from the Social Security Administration. The final column shows the survival-weighted discounted value of the future income stream. This is the income earned in a given year, times the discount factor for that year, times the probability of surviving to that year. When we add these values across all of the future years, we get the present value of the annuity on an actuarial basis.

This guaranteed income stream would cost the client $147,816. It can be included on the asset side of a client's balance sheet to properly reflect the value of the SPIA when it is purchased. Guaranteed income does indeed have a present value.

Mystery 1: Are SPIAs a free lunch?

The first mystery (Why does the present value of a SPIA often exceed its cost?) became apparent as I listened to financial planner Mike Lonier, of New Jersey-based Lonier Financial Advisory, present the spreadsheet he developed for working with clients using the household-balance-sheet view. His presentation was part of RIIA’s intensive retirement seminar held at Salem State University in July.

Mike was calculating the present values of assets and liabilities for a hypothetical client assuming a 30-year retirement planning horizon. I noticed that the present value of the SPIA payments included on the balance sheet greatly exceeded the cost of the SPIA.

Let’s modify the illustration from Table 1, in which the cost of the SPIA is $147,816. After buying the SPIA, Mike would calculate its present value to be included in his client’s balance sheet. As mentioned, his balance sheet was based on a 30-year planning horizon, not on actual survival probabilities. Table 2 creates the calculations for the present value of the SPIA with a fixed 30-year planning horizon. What essentially happens is that the survival probabilities are assumed to be 100% for 30 years, and then they fall to zero. Calculating the survival-weighted present value with these alternative assumptions gives us a present value for the SPIA of $228,444. This is 54.5% larger than the cost of the SPIA.

In other words, the SPIA purchase immediately increased the value of the balance sheet assets by $80,628. And who said there is no such thing as a free lunch?

The mystery: Is this cheating? Does it make sense to value the SPIA on the balance sheet by more than its cost?

This can be justified, but it depends on the circumstances of the client. In one of the most important research articles written on retirement income, Moshe Milevsky and Huaxiong Huang’s Spending Retirement on Planet Vulcan: The Impact of Longevity Risk Aversion on Optimal Withdrawal Rates from the March/April 2011 issue of Financial Analysts Journal, the authors discussed the idea of longevity-risk aversion. Essentially, this is how clients feel about outliving their financial assets. Milevsky and Huang argued that we could identify how longevity-risk aversion manifests itself by noting that risk-averse clients will plan for a longer life expectancy than dictated by any “biological/medical estimate.”

So while the annuity may have been priced under a reasonable actuarial assumption that the median life expectancy for the client is about 18 years at age 65 (Table 1 shows that age 83 is when the probability of survival is about 50%), clients may very well wish to make their planning under the assumption that they will live for 30 years, or even more. In this case, the client could place a personal value on the SPIA that is otherwise higher than its market value.

While it may make sense for particular clients to do this, it is important to remain cognizant about what is going on from the balance-sheet perspective. In this framework, partial annuitization (through the purchase of a SPIA) immediately increases the funded ratio for the client as it creates a one-time increase in assets without any offsets on the liability side of the balance sheet.

Mystery 2: Why do SPIAs cause equity allocations to increase?

The second mystery (Why do equity allocations appear to increase when a SPIA is purchased?) comes from a research article I recently co-authored with Michael Kitces, The True Impact Of Immediate Annuities On Retirement Sustainability: A Total Wealth Perspective. The mystery is that when clients use part of their financial assets to purchase SPIAs and then maintain fixed asset allocations for their remaining financial assets, their equity allocation will usually rise over the retirement period from a balance-sheet perspective.

We have known since the 2001 classic article, Making Retirement Income Last a Lifetime, by John Ameriks, Bob Veres and Mark Warshawsky, that purchasing a SPIA with part of one's assets at retirement will reduce the failure rate for the portfolio and allow for larger bequest after enough time passes for remaining assets to grow in value.

But it turns out that from a balance-sheet perspective, partial annuitization ends up behaving as though it were a so-called bucket strategy, in which the retiree disproportionately spends down their fixed-income assets first, leaving their stocks to grow. The present value of remaining SPIA payments declines as retirement progresses and continued survival probabilities worsen. These factors cause stock allocations to increase as a percentage of the client’s assets.

It also turns out that using a rising equity allocation results in lower failure rates (i.e., the possibility that the client will outlive his or her assets) for portfolios. Rising equity allocations reduce client vulnerability to sequence-of-return risk, since the stock allocation is less at the time the client’s retirement, when the client is most vulnerable to an absolute loss in wealth.

Partial annuitization has two effects. The effect arising from this rising equity allocation can be mimicked without a SPIA by simply using a rising equity allocation with a portfolio of stocks and bonds. The second impact of partial annuitization is the real value provided by the SPIA: its longevity protection and mortality credits provided to those living beyond their life expectancies.

SPIAs do indeed provide benefits to their owners, such as longevity protection. But one needs to live well past life expectancy before the unique benefits of SPIAs can be enjoyed.

Inflation-adjusted SPIAs look a lot better than fixed SPIAs when viewed with the balance-sheet approach. They provide lower failure rates, and more of their benefits come from mortality credits, as they don’t provoke as steep a rise in equity allocation as do fixed SPIAs. Earlier research, including an article I wrote about the efficient frontier for retirement income, gave too much credit to SPIAs by comparing them to a stock/bond strategy that maintained a fixed asset allocation without accounting for SPIAs’ rising equity allocation.

This mystery becomes clear once one thinks in terms of the household balance sheet.

The bottom line

Strategies for the withdrawal phase of retirement require a different thought process than for when one is accumulating assets. The objective in this phase is not to maximize a risk-adjusted return, but to provide a sustainable income over an unknown length of time. Planning for this income requires a holistic process where issues are framed from the perspective of the client’s household balance sheet. This requires advisors to quantify the present values of different cash flow streams, whether they represent income or expenditures. I have solved two important mysteries facing advisors when incorporating the present value of a SPIA in their client’s balance sheet.

Wade D. Pfau, Ph.D., CFA, is a professor of retirement income in the new Ph.D. program in financial services and retirement planning at the American College in Bryn Mawr, PA. He is also an activeblogger on retirement researchand maintains the educational Retirement Researcher website. See his Google+ profile for more information.

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