We investigate the conditions under which life-cycle investment strategies based on age may be ‘near enough' to optimal, focusing on the treatment of the pension account balance and assumptions about risk aversion. We show that dynamically adjusting the strategy in response to fluctuations in...

Optimal timing of retirement is an important part of retirement planning. We consider three types of individuals distinguished by the way they use information when deciding the retirement time. For each of these types, we analyze two elements influencing the decision, the market model and the...

We propose a ‘buy, hold, sell’ (BHS) deterministic lifecycle strategy that involves buying and holding assets until they are sold to generate income. Savings are invested entirely into a risky portfolio until a pre-specified ‘switch age’ and then entirely into a risk-free portfolio after...

This paper develops a continuous-time Markov model for utility optimization for households. The household optimizes expected future utility from consumption by controlling consumption, investments and purchase of life insurance on each person in the household. The optimal controls are...