The Personal Pension Pusher

A switch flipped in Matt Carey’s head after wrestling with an underfunded pension plan while working as a banker on the General Motors bankruptcy, and then for the Treasury Department alongside Mark Iwry, a longtime proponent of making it easier for employers to offer annuities in retirement plans.

Yes, pensions had become expensive and complicated to manage. “So ipso facto, we put retirement on individuals without the tools to handle it?” Mr. Carey said this week. This revelation about the transfer of risk felt profoundly wrong, so wrong that he dropped out of business school to co-found Blueprint Income.

The company’s “personal pension” product is its most intriguing, and it’s really a barely disguised version of what’s called a subscription annuity. You sign up with a bit of money, put a bit more in each month and set a date sometime far in the future when you want to start getting your guaranteed checks. Blueprint constantly searches for the best bit of annuity to buy you each period, depending on prevailing market prices. Then, it updates you on the size of the check you can expect.

This is a simple annuity, by the way. There are no sub-accounts tracking securities as with a variable annuity, and no caps or participation rates or other things to decipher like with an indexed annuity. Will Blueprint offer either of those? No, Mr. Carey said.

“It’s not ‘never say never,’” he said. “It’s ‘never ever.’”

There are other companies operating in this area. Relay offers a basic annuity with the regular payouts loaded onto a prepaid Visa that then earns varying levels of cash back. Pensio is trying to innovate around simplicity of user experience and the annuity product itself. And Kindur takes your entire financial life into account and uses technology to help you pick an annuity, but also optimizes your other investments and Social Security choices.

The Plot to Save the Middle

If you earn between $50,000 and $100,000 per year, Dan Solin is worried about you.

The prolific author and investing sage fears that people in this income range are not saving enough, and he recently paired up with an actuary, Patrick Thornton, to come up with a better retirement plan.

Their solution involves some savings in a workplace retirement plan, a little-known type of life insurance that amasses cash value. If you retire at 65, it can help tide you over until you can maximize the size of your Social Security earnings at 70. You also begin paying into a simple annuity midway through your career, but it does not kick out regular payments until you turn 70. By waiting that long to start collecting from the annuity, you get rewarded with fatter checks, which will come in handy if your workplace retirement plan savings have run out.