About Longevity Standard
Longevity Standard is built on a simple idea: people make better long-term decisions when they can explore the questions for themselves.
It is an independent reference for understanding lifetime income through transparent models, structured exploration, and clear explanations.
Why Longevity Standard Exists
Longevity Standard was created to bring clarity to a question that increasingly defines financial security:
How can a lifetime of savings be translated into stable, dependable income over time?
Sponsor-safe education, internal evaluation, and documentation. A consistent way to explain trade-offs under stated assumptions, and communicate with committees and participants.
The fundamentals — survival probabilities, spending paths, risk sharing, and value transfer — are stable and measurable. What's been missing is a clear, accessible framework for understanding them.
Longevity Standard exists to provide that framework. Not a prediction engine or a source of recommendations, but a transparent reference point for how lifetime income works — an independent analytical foundation for decisions that unfold over long horizons.
Our Focus
Lifetime income is shaped by a small set of structural mechanics. Change one element — time horizon, cost structure, spending rules — and outcomes change elsewhere.
Longevity Standard focuses on these mechanics directly, using transparent assumptions and a consistent structure. The goal is clarity and comparability across approaches, not persuasion.
How Longevity Standard Works
Longevity Standard provides scenario-based education built on a single deterministic reference model. The same assumptions are applied consistently across every scenario, so when outcomes differ, the difference traces to structure, not shifting assumptions.
Scenarios are bounded, curated, and illustrative. They answer controlled questions: what changes when risk is shared, when costs rise, or when income rules adjust. They do not optimize outcomes or provide guidance.
Outputs are produced by the deterministic engine and translated into plain-English explanations through a structured editorial process. The engine is the source for every number; the framework determines how the numbers are organized and explained.
How Longevity Standard is Used
A learning community can make lifetime income concepts easier to understand by providing a place for structured discussion and shared exploration.
People are living longer. Responsibilities have shifted from institutions to individuals. Many tools that shape long-term income are technically detailed or framed in ways that make the underlying mechanics difficult to see.
Clear explanations of how lifetime income works as a system. Helps people understand trade-offs, uncertainty, and structure — without products, recommendations, or financial advice.
A common framework reduces confusion and improves communication, especially when plan designs, market conditions, or income approaches differ.
Principles and Guardrails
To bring clarity, structure, and interpretability to the mechanics of lifetime income so people can make sense of long-horizon decisions without needing specialized training.
Three principles shape this mission:
Independence
No products, sales, or incentives.
Determinism
Repeatable outputs under stated assumptions.
Transparency
Assumptions and mechanics are visible.
Fairness as Structure
Value transfer is examined, not assumed.
Bounded Scope
Explanation and interpretation, not advice.
Honest Limits
What the model can and cannot tell you is made explicit.
Built by
I'm Tom Cochrane, CFA — 25 years in insurance, starting at AIG, moving to brokerage, and spending the back half of that career building insurance technology ventures, including Cordova Advisors (acquired by Vimo/GetInsured) and Annuity Digest, an independent publishing platform active since 2009. A consistent thread runs through the work: modeling, decision-support tools, and content that make structurally complex financial decisions legible to the people who have to make them — first in consumer-directed healthcare, now in lifetime income.
The LS analytical framework was developed to be deterministic, reproducible, and grounded in published actuarial and financial economics research. Development draws on specialized contractors and open-source tooling.
Independent. No distribution relationships. No revenue from licensing or financial education.
Based in La Jolla, CA.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. LS is an independent educational venture and does not sell financial products.
Yes. LS supports sponsor-safe education and communication using structured scenarios and repeatable outputs under stated assumptions.
AI is used as an explanation layer to translate deterministic model outputs into clear educational language and structured summaries. It does not generate predictions or recommendations.
No. All content is educational and comparative.
No. The framework is product-agnostic.
Assumptions are stated explicitly and, where applicable, displayed alongside outputs to support interpretation.
Yes. LS builds on academically grounded and open-source lifetime income research when applicable, with attribution.