Table of Contents

1. Introduction and motivation; 2. Mathematical preliminaries - working with interest rates; 3. Personal balance sheet and human capital; 4. Consumption smoothing and optimal savings; 5. Debts, loans, and mortgages [Canadian content]; 6. Personal income taxes [Canadian content]; 7. Risk, utility, and insurance; 8. Mortality risk and life insurance; 9. Investment and diversification; 10. The mathematics of portfolio diversification; 11. Housing decisions; 12. Pensions and retirement [Canadian content]; 13. Advanced material*: Part I. Continuous time and the calculus of variations; 14. Advanced material*: Part II. Stochastic optimal control and the HJB equation; 15. Concluding thoughts and next steps.

Promotional Information

This is a final-year college level textbook on personal finance, jointly written by business school and mathematics professors.

About the Author

Narat Charupat is an Associate Professor at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Risk and Insurance and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Professor Charupat's areas of professional interest include annuity and insurance products, financial innovation, arbitrage and behavioral finance. He has taught courses in financial derivatives and personal and international finance. Huaxiong Huang is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at York University, Toronto, Canada, where he has taught since 1999. He has published more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Banking and Finance, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, the Journal of Risk and Insurance and the Financial Analysts Journal. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Engineering Mathematics and Advances in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics and managing editor of the Mathematics-in-Industry Case Studies. A fellow of the Fields Institute, he has held visiting positions in China, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Moshe Milevsky is a Finance Professor at York University, Toronto, Canada, Executive Director of The IFID Centre in Toronto and President and CEO of the QWeMA Group. He has written eight books, more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and more than 200 articles in the popular press on insurance, investments, pensions, retirement and annuities, including The Calculus of Retirement Income: Financial Models for Pension Annuities and Life Insurance (Cambridge University Press, 2006). A fellow of the Fields Institute, Professor Milevsky has received two National Magazine (Canada) awards, the Graham and Dodd scroll award and been honored by the Retirement Income Insurance Association for lifetime achievement in applied research. In 2009, Investment Adviser magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people in the financial advisory business.

Reviews

'This book distils many decades of financial economics research into a holistic and rigorous approach to financial planning. Master this book, and you will master your own financial future.' Jeffrey Brown, University of Illinois

'Strategic Financial Planning over the Lifecycle is a sophisticated personal investment textbook that shows how an individual can manage risk and consumption while taking into account earnings and savings, housing and mortgages, investment and portfolio diversification, and human capital and insurance, all while preparing for retirement and all the other contingencies that happen during a lifetime. The book is readily accessible to students, while providing in-depth analysis for the professional financial planner.' Roger G. Ibbotson, Yale University

'This book uses rigorous models to address several key decisions an individual must make. The authors discuss the model's implications lucidly. This book is for serious financial advisors who want to do their job better.' William Reichenstein, Baylor University

'This book is unique in deriving the formulas for annuity pricing from basic economic theory, making it useful for finance practitioners and, importantly, intellectually satisfying.' Eytan Sheshinski, The Hebrew University, Israel