Finance Professor Moshe Milevsky of York University’s Schulich School of Business has published a new book titled How to Build a Modern Tontine.
With the goal of guiding professionals and retirees in more efficient decumulation, the book demonstrates how to build a modern tontine. Milevsky has long been fascinated with tontines, and a few years ago he wrote a book about their origins in the 17th century; however, this time the story is about the 21st century, and how the modern version can be used in RRSPs, RRIFs and retirement portfolios.
“One of the reasons I embarked on this project was because I saw a need for the investment fund industry in Canada to develop solutions for retirees that can complement those offered by the insurance and annuity industry,” said Milevsky.
The book is technically oriented, employing a cookbook format, featuring R code, and examining retirement planning through a statistical lens. This how-to guide, which is a sequel to his 2020 book Retirement Income Recipes in R, will be invaluable for retirement planning professionals and advisors, as well as for PhD scholars in retirement planning, quantitative finance, and related fields.
“These days it’s not enough to sketch equations on a blackboard, or prove that a solution to a problem exists, you have to actually show the audience precisely how to do it in practice, and that inevitably involves writing computer algorithms and code which is where my new book fills a niche,” said Milevsky. “Overall, this work is part of a larger project to ensure undergraduate BBA students in finance get an opportunity to learn how to code in R.”