News

While people in the Netherlands are certainly living longer, new calculations reveal that the life expectancy rate is not growing as quickly as initially believed. This is not good news for us personally. Most people want to live as long as possible. As strange as it may seem, this is good news for our pensions, as it improves the financial position of our pension fund. Allow us to explain how.

A new forecast every two years

The Royal Actuarial Association (AG) publishes a new calculation every two years for Dutch pension funds, which is used to predict life expectancy. You receive a pension from your pension fund for as long as you live. Pension funds use this forecast to determine how many pensions they will have to pay out in the future. These are the obligations.

• The longer people live, the longer they will receive a pension, which increases the obligations.
• The shorter people live, the shorter the pension pay-out will be, which reduces the obligations.

Benefit for pension funds

Increasing and decreasing obligations have implications for pension funds. According to the new AG figures, the coverage ratio of pension funds is improving by an average of 1%. A pension fund with a lot of young participants and/or a lot of women may even see an increase of 1.6%, according to the consultancy firm Aon.

Benefit for our fund

Our fund is also applying the new calculations. Visit our Current figures page (in Dutch) for more information about our coverage rate.