Some modern defined benefit schemes do that -- give a formula for the total dollar value you'll receive at retirement. And if you want to convert that to a pens

Some modern defined benefit schemes do that -- give a formula for the total dollar value you'll receive at retirement. And if you want to convert that to a pension you buy an annuity with it. However, they seem (to me) to have a couple of problems - - as the formula is often based on your last five years' average salary, it seems like an "all eggs in one basket" on your salary growing. Which seems to be the inverse of the sort of hedging and diversifying you try to do with personal investments -- if my salary grows I already gain, but I'd like my retirement savings to grow even if for any reason my salary stalls in 20 years' time. - the formulas seem to be quite fixed and can have some perverse incentives. For instance, "average salary from the last five years" seems (to me) to be partly behind why Vice Chancellor roles changed so much -- someone stepping back from being a VC to being a professor would face a salary drop, which would then affect their defined benefit pension calculation (costing them a lot of money), so it became "up or out" and the idea of university leadership roles as being a service role that academics would take on for a while simply died because it had to be the last role you took before retirement. Ok, that's a bit of an aside about how pension schemes can change the nature of the university, but practically speaking I'd like to keep the option of doing things like semi-retiring at the end of my career (dropping to part-time or doing something interesting that might not increase my salary) without incurring a massive penalty on my retirement savings.