Annuities

There are several highly useful websites detailing the workings of various types of annuities. Try Sharing Pensions for an overview of annuity and pension options. For current annuity rates, try the FSA, Annuity Direct, or Billy Burrows.

Defined-benefit pension schemes

First stop for mortality matters pertaining to defined-benefit pension schemes should be the Pensions Regulator.

Expert commentary on pension-scheme funding can be found at John Ralfe's website. If you need an independent actuary to assess a pension scheme, or an independent trustee, try Allan Martin.

For news on the business impact of pension schemes, a great deal of useful commentary can be found at the Financial Times.

Longevity and pensions

The website of the U.K. actuarial profession contains archives of actuarial research papers, including mortality. The magazine of the U.K. actuarial profession has also carried quite a few articles on annuities, mortality and longevity in recent years.

The Staple Inn Actuarial Society (SIAS) regularly publishes papers on pension schemes and has carried several important papers on mortality and longevity in recent years.

Mortality

The Continuous Mortality Investigation Bureau (CMIB) is U.K. actuarial profession's body for collating and analysing mortality statistics for life offices and pension schemes. It has published fifteen working papers and reports on mortality in the past three years.

The Government Actuary's Department (GAD) is the source of useful background material on mortality and longevity in the United Kingdom, including the interim life tables. The GAD also makes population projections, including mortality projections, for the four constituent countries of the U.K.

The Human Mortality Database at the University of California, Berkeley, contains long historical records of mortality for many countries.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research at Rostock carries an online journal of demographic research, including mortality and longevity.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is a tremendous source of national mortality statistics for the United Kingdom.

Insurers, reinsurers and distributors

List of U.K. and Irish insurance companies, reinsurers and distributors. Also industry trade bodies and institutions.

Medical

British Medical Journal and The Lancet.

Cardiothoracic imaging.

Genetics

Understanding genetics.

Mathematics and statistics

Mathematics, especially calculus results.

Software

For modelling pensioner and annuitant mortality, both using GLMs and survival models, we use Longevitas. For other statistical modelling, we use R.

For programming and software development we usually use C++.

For simple data processing, we use TextPad, and for more complicated data work we use the PostgreSQL database and SQL Manager.

For document production, including all the PDF files on this website, we use TeX. A free PDF viewer can be downloaded from Adobe.

For print-quality graphs, we use R and Ghostscript.

For file-handling, we use WinZIP to archive files and FileZilla for file-transfer (FTP).

For remote shell access we use PuTTY and to browse the Internet, we prefer Firefox.