Baby Boomers and the Great Resignation: A Pension Actuary’s Perspective on Labor Market Demographics
Gabriel Roeder Smith Consulting
Brad Armstrong, ASA, EA, FCA, MAAA
Brad Armstrong is a Senior Consultant in GRS’ Southfield, Michigan office. He has 30 years of actuarial and benefits consulting experience with the last 25 years being exclusively working with public employee benefit programs. Brad has experience with public pension plans of varying sizes and complexity, ranging from state systems to municipal and county clients. He has worked extensively with pension plans in Florida, Maryland, Michigan, and Missouri. He has also conducted actuarial audits for statewide plans in Iowa and Texas, county plans in California and managed special projects for public employee retirement systems in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin.
In addition to regular valuations, Brad has broad proficiency with experience studies, GASB 67 and 68 compliance, plan design analyses, cash flow projections, risk analyses, and early retirement incentive studies. He also has experience providing retiree health valuations for both funding and reporting.
Michelle Jones, ASA, EA, FCA, MAAA, CFA
Michelle (Shelly) Jones is a Consultant in GRS’ Fort Lauderdale, Florida office. She has more than 15 years of actuarial and investment related experience with employee retirement systems and retiree health programs.
Shelly has served both public and private sector employee retirement systems. Her responsibilities include advising clients regarding funding, plan design, and reporting for retirement benefit systems. She assists clients with GASB 67/68 compliance for defined benefit retirement systems and complying with the new GASB 74/75 requirements for their OPEB plans. She has also performed audits for large governmental retirement systems. For private sector plans, she provides actuarial valuations under PPA, IRS reporting forms, PBGC filings and accounting disclosures (ASC 715-30 and ASC 715-60).
Her work also consists of cost analyses for proposed plan changes, experience studies, cash flow projections, retiree health claims calculations, and investment return assumption analysis. Shelly has extensive knowledge related to projecting economic assumptions using stochastic and deterministic modeling.
Israel Bichachi, ASA, MAAA
Israel Bichachi is a Consultant in GRS’ Fort Lauderdale, Florida office. He has more than eleven years of actuarial consulting and plan administration experience. Israel provides actuarial, administrative and consulting services to public sector retirement systems and OPEB plans, and has served clients in Florida and Louisiana.
Israel’s work focuses on pension and OPEB actuarial valuations for funding and accounting purposes, liability and cost projections, experience studies, and actuarial impact statements and cost analyses for proposed plan changes.
Israel has a solid background in several computer languages including Python, Fortran, SQL, and VBA, and is very familiar with GRS’ proprietary actuarial systems. His expertise with these systems extends toward preparing, checking, and reviewing valuations, projections, and studies.
Israel’s talents also extend to the musical arts. His Music degree concentration was in concert piano performance. Israel has served as a soloist and accompanist for over 30 years, and was previously a member of the Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra and Brandeis Chamber Music Ensembles.