Glossary

Pool governance is the set of rules, decision rights, and structural features that determine how a lifetime income pool operates — including underwriting standards, redistribution rules, withdrawal rights, and dispute resolution — and that fix the pool's behavior independently of any individual member. Why it matters Every pooled arrangement has rules that determine how the pool actually operates: who can join, how mortality credits are redistributed, what happens when a member wa

Pooling efficiency is the degree to which a lifetime income pool delivers the structural benefit available from mortality pooling, given the pool's size, governance design, and operating costs. Why it matters Different pools deliver different fractions of the theoretical mortality-pooling benefit. A small pool with high operating costs delivers less than a large pool with low costs, even if the underlying mortality assumptions are identical. Pooling efficiency names this compariso

Pooling multiplier is the factor by which the income produced per dollar of premium increases when capital is contributed to a mortality pool rather than self-managed, holding planning horizon and assumed return constant. Why it matters Pooling produces more lifetime income per dollar than self-management, even at theoretical best — that's the core analytical fact about mortality pooling. The pooling multiplier names this benefit directly and quantifies it. Without naming the mult

Portfolio withdrawal strategy is the general term for any rule-based approach to drawing income from a self-managed investment portfolio across retirement, encompassing fixed-percentage, fixed-dollar, dynamic, and bucket-based variants. Why it matters Portfolio withdrawal strategy is the umbrella category covering most decumulation approaches a DC plan participant or advisory client actually uses, and it is the language in which advisor recommendations and individual planning deci