Risk Measurement of Household Financial Plan

Abstract

When building a financial plan for a household, one usually needs to take many risk factors into account. These are the factors that have an influence on the shape of the future term structure of household incomes and expenditures. The factors may be of very differentiated nature, which means that their impact on the cash-flow term structure may be different both in terms of the underlying mechanism and strength. In this field of research, the existing literature does not provide, however, any proposals of integrated risk measurement. At the same time, the ability to measure risk of household financial plans in an integrated way would be very useful, as it would allow to select or compare plans with respect to the joint risk of a plan (to be more precise – the joint risk that the plan will fail to be successfully realized). The aim of this article is to propose a method or methods that would allow to measure financial plan risk in an integrated way. The integration should include different risk types, all financial goals that have been set by the household, all sources of financing and all sub-periods of the long-term life-cycle period of household financial planning. The approach, originally proposed by the authors of this article, may not only facilitate comparison of financial plans with respect to risk, but it may be also serve as a plan-acceptance decision-making instrument. Integrated risk measures may be also used within the very optimization procedure. They may be parts of the boundary conditions or even be embedded into the optimization function itself.