TIAA announced enhancements to its Retirement Profile tool, a popular feature of the company’s Preparing for Retirement experience. Available to all customers, the tool analyzes an individual’s real-time account information, along with their responses to a handful of simple lifestyle and financial questions, to give them a view of what their income in retirement might look like.
“Too many people live in fear of outliving their savings in retirement,” said Lori Dickerson Fouché, Senior Executive Vice President and CEO of TIAA Financial Solutions. “Tools like Retirement Profile are designed to make retirement planning easier for our customers and help them build confidence in their decisions and knowing they are on track to work toward their financial needs throughout retirement.”
The enhanced Retirement Profile tool shows TIAA annuity customers how the combination of lifetime income – such as fixed and variable annuities, Social Security or pensions – and systematic withdrawals have the potential to yield a steady and guaranteed retirement “paycheck.”
The tool offers individuals three scenarios:
  • Current strategy – Estimates whether an individual’s portfolio is “on track” to generate the monthly income they will need in retirement using real-time account data
  • TIAA proposed strategy – Suggests strategies to help an individual work toward their goals by adjusting factors like the age at which they start collecting Social Security and how they will draw income from their annuities
  • Custom strategy – Provides an interactive “play area” that shows individuals how adjustments to their inputs, such as retirement age, can change their monthly retirement income and likelihood of meeting their annual retirement income needs to help them decide the way forward
The proposed strategy is outlined alongside an individual’s current strategy, illustrating how adding income from annuities may be able to help an individual secure a stream of income in retirement for as long as they live, improving their ability to cover expenses throughout retirement, such as housing, food and healthcare. Participants can also make adjustments to create a custom income strategy by changing their retirement age, Social Security claiming age or the amount of annuity income they want.
Each scenario also includes a “probability of success” indicator to further illustrate whether that particular approach will put them on track to pursue their annual retirement income needs:
  • “On track” (80% or higher probability of success)
  • “Marginally on track” (75-79% probability of success)
  • “Not on track” (74% and lower probability of success)
The Preparing for Retirement experience has helped thousands of participants plan for their life in retirement since its initial launch in 2016. The enhanced Retirement Profile tool is available to TIAA customers via the TIAA website or by calling TIAA’s Advice & Investment Service phone consultants.