For Immediate Release
Contact:
Simon Erskine Locke
Cattell, Locke, Pendleton & Partners
Tel: 917-359-6969
[email protected]
Dirk Cotton Wins 2015 RIIA® Practitioner Thought Leadership Award for
Contributions to Retirement Body of Knowledge
New Retirement Management Journal® Paper Provides New Perspective on
Sequence of Return Risk and Path Dependence of Portfolio Outcomes
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BOSTON, MA, May 14, 2015 – The Retirement Income Industry Association® (RIIA) today
announced that Financial Planner Dirk Cotton, author of The Retirement Café blog and founder of
JDC Planning, LLC, is the winner of its 2015 RIIA Practitioner Thought Leadership Award. The
award recognizes his new paper, “Sequence of Return Risks: A New Way of Looking at Spending
or Saving Scenarios with Path Dependence,” contributions to retirement thought leadership and
RIIA’s Body of Knowledge. The paper appears in the Spring issue of RIIA’s peer reviewed
industry publication, the Retirement Management Journal®.
The paper enhances the understanding of Sequence of Return risk by showing the impact of path
dependency on retirement portfolio outcomes. It shows that the probability a retiree will outlive
their retirement savings portfolio is not simply a result of a series of poor portfolio returns soon
after retiring, but the impact of the order of a range of spending and savings scenarios.
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“Dirk Cotton’s paper highlights the importance of looking at sequence of return risk for retirement
portfolios in a broader context than simply the idea that losses in a portfolio early in retirement will
lead to retirees outliving savings,” said François Gadenne, Founder, President and Executive
Director of RIIA. “Consistent with RIIA’s Household Balance Sheet’s℠ holistic approach to
Retirement Planning, Cotton recognizes that understanding the path dependence of portfolio
outcomes for a range of decisions, such as spending or portfolio withdrawals, provides an
opportunity to manage this risk. Cotton’s paper and PwC’s 4% Rule focused paper, also published
in the Spring RMJ, both highlight the critical importance of building sequence of consumption into
retirement planning and to achieving better portfolio outcomes.”
Past winners of RIIA’s Practitioner Thought Leader of the Year Awards have included Michael
Kitces, partner and director of research for the Pinnacle Advisory Group and publisher of the
Kitces Report, Wade Pfau, professor of retirement income at the American College, and Anna
Rappaport, FSA, MAAA, Chair of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Committee on Post Retirement
Needs for contributions to the retirement industry’s body of knowledge.
“The concept of the path dependency of retirement portfolios is important because it provides a
basis for understanding the impact of both consumption and returns on portfolios,” said Cotton.
“Looking at Sequence of Returns in this broader context means that advisors and their clients will
be better positioned to make planning decisions that reduce the likelihood of exhausting savings.”
The Spring 2015 RMJ is available through Amazon.com.
About RIIA:
The Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA) is a not-for-profit industry association that
was started in 2005 and launched publicly in February 2006 to discover, validate and teach the new
realities of retirement and to do so from the perspective of “The View Across the Silos℠”, with the
goal of achieving better retirement outcomes. RIIA has developed the retirement body of
knowledge that supports its professional designation: the Retirement Management Analyst®
(RMA®). RIIA organizes conferences and events, professional education for RMAs, publishes a
peer-reviewed journal (Retirement Management Journal®), offers twice-monthly weekly
retirement-focused webinars through its Virtual Learning Center, manages a 7,000 person strong
LinkedIn discussion group, provides research and other services to the industry and its clients.
More information about RIIA can be founded at www.riia-usa.org.
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