Wade Pfau to Step Down as Full-Time Professor

What You Need to Know

Wade Pfau revealed this week that he will turn his primary professional focus toward developing the Retirement Income Style Awareness program.
Pfau will continue his work as a retirement researcher at McLean Asset Management.
He will also continue to contribute in a more limited way to The American College as a professor of practice.

Wade Pfau, professor of retirement income at The American College of Financial Services, revealed this week that he intends to step down from his full-time role in academics.

In an extended post published on LinkedIn, Pfau confirmed that he will instead turn his primary professional focus toward the development and deployment of the Retirement Income Style Awareness program, which he launched in 2021 alongside fellow retirement income researcher Alex Murguia.

The RISA program is built directly on the academic work of Pfau and Murguia, and it operates under the hypothesis that there are multiple retirement income “styles” to be found among large groups of investors — and that an individual’s awareness of their preferred style will lead to a more satisfying retirement.

Writing about his decision, Pfau points to the work of Moshe Milevsky, the finance professor at Schulich School of Business at York University, who in 2008 wrote a book asking the titular question: Are you a stock or a bond?

“For the past 19.5 years, the primary hat I wore was as a full-time professor,” Pfau says. “That’s a very bond-like source of income. In stepping down from a full-time role in academics, I now head off into the unknown of stock-like income.”

Pfau says he is “very excited about what we’ve been able to build at RISA to help individuals identify the appropriate retirement strategy to consider as a starting point.”

“I’m ready to commit myself to developing the Retirement Income Style Awareness as the go-to first step for individuals as they start to think about their transition into retirement,” Pfau adds. “That being said, it was a great honor to serve as professor of retirement income at the American College over the past almost 10 years, and as the RICP Program director for the past three years.”

Before these roles, Pfau also served The American College as a curriculum director.