TIAA Enhances Customers’ View of Retirement Income

TIAA announced enhancements to its Retirement Profile tool, a 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.

According to Executive Vice President and CEO of TIAA Financial Solutions Lori Dickerson Fouché, the tool is designed to make retirement planning easier for customers and help them build confidence in their decisions.

“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,” she adds.

According to TIAA, the expanded retirement income profile tool offers individuals estimates whether an their portfolio is “on track” to generate the monthly income they will need in retirement using real-time account data; 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; and 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.

Proposed strategies are 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. The tool also generates a “probability of success” indicator to further illustrate whether a particular approach will put an individual on track to achieve their annual retirement income needs.