Optimal consumption–investment and life-insurance purchase strategy for couples with correlated lifetimes

This paper presents a technique to solve the problem where a couple aims to optimize their consumption, investment, and life-insurance purchasing strategies, thereby maximizing their family objective until retirement. Assumed correlated lifetimes of the two wage earners are modeled by using both the copula and common-shock models. Subsequently, closed-form solutions are obtained for determination of the optimal strategies in both the copula and a special case of the common-shock models. As observed, use of the copula model is more advantageous in its provision of closed-form strategies and ability to distinguish mortality impacts. The optimization problem considered herein is investigated under a Markovian setting and solved using the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. Numerical examples are also provided to illustrate the utility of the proposed optimization strategy.