About LossReserves.com

LossReserves.com is an independent educational publication about loss reserving and unpaid claim estimation. It is written for the people who have to think about reserves without necessarily being actuaries themselves: risk managers, CFOs and finance directors, captive managers, public-entity finance officers, and hospital risk officers, along with the actuaries and brokers who advise them.

What We Do

We publish two kinds of content. The first is a set of evergreen explanatory articles on reserving methodology and the reserving issues specific to particular kinds of self-insured programs: single-parent captives, group captives and risk retention groups, public entity pools, and self-funded health plans. These are written to be durable references and are revised over time as standards or our understanding change.

The second is a dated feed of current-events coverage relevant to self-insured reserving, covering regulatory shifts, court decisions, rate filings, and the kinds of developments that move expected losses for a particular program type.

How this content is researched, sourced, and reviewed is described on our How We Curate page.

Why This Site Exists

Loss reserving is one of the most consequential numbers on a self-insured organization's balance sheet, and one of the least well explained to the people who own that balance sheet. The technical literature is written for actuaries. The vendor material is written to sell. There is not much in between that treats a CFO or a risk manager as an intelligent reader who simply has not been taught this particular subject.

This site is meant to be that in-between. It explains how reserving methods actually work, what they assume, where they break, and what a buyer of actuarial services should understand before reading a reserve report. The goal is a reader who can ask their actuary better questions and understand the answers.

Authorship

LossReserves.com is written by Sam, an actuary who saw that the reserving conversation aimed at non-actuaries had largely been left to vendor material and dense technical literature. Articles carry a single byline so that responsibility for the site's content sits in one place. How that content is researched, sourced, and reviewed is described on our How We Curate page.

Get in Touch

Questions, corrections, topic suggestions, or feedback are all welcome. Please reach us through our contact page.