Fortunately for retired actuaries the dues are far lower. OTOH, I get almost no benefits other than the opportunity to provide free volunteer labor to the SOA for E&E activities.
I don’t remember even getting a volunteer gift in 2020. I have gotten trips to many locations I enjoyed, but most of those were while I, really my employer, was paying full dues. The current policies for E&E work locations are not as appealing as in the past. Due to COVID, no E&E travel for me since Jan 2020; no idea when it might resume. My volunteer time has not decreased, increased a little in fact, despite no in-person meetings.
My time for E&E has been less since 2017 myself, because of Stu’s cancer.
I don’t know what the current policies for E&E are, but grading has been distance for the last couple sittings, obviously. Distance grading went pretty well, but we obviously had to change procedures.
Almost all my work has been on question setting (involvement in some question setting capacity in every exam session since 1978 except one; almost always with just one exam per session). I graded papers for the first time, distance grading, for Fall 2020. No reward at all* for that grading work, but I did enjoy it and will volunteer to continue grading. It went well, IMO.
They did reimburse $9.53 for an app to let me grade pdfs, an app I would not have bought otherwise and may never use for any other purpose. So not a reward.
Last I checked, all the syllabus materials for which the CAS owned the copyright were all free as a PDF. Obviously, 3rd party textbooks cost whatever they cost. But I know situations where the CA chose one textbook instead of two because they were concerned about the total cost to candidates.
Probably because it’s really two orgs that got merged.
If SOA & CAS merge, we should expect the same. Watch out!
More seriously, in the U.S., we have a third major actuarial org: the AAA.
To be sure, many American actuaries don’t join the AAA, even though they’re qualified to. Very few actuarial jobs actually require being an MAAA (signing off on reserves, etc.) – AAA dues are $720 right now.
I had $670 for SOA (as I’m an MAAA) & $720 for AAA – $1390.
And just to, um, increase the the margin of that Canadian “victory”… at least for casualty actuaries, don’t the CAS’s CE requirements effectively require actuaries who live and practice in Canada to be members of the CIA, as the CIA requires membership to access the professionalism module required under Canadian CE standards?
At least in the US, Academy membership isn’t actually required.
Colleague’s SOA dues like doubled because of when they became an ASA. They were sticker shocked - thankfully they don’t have to pay for it themselves.
Our company wants us to have the dues hit in 2024, so I am holding off until the end of December. Company giving off strong George Constanza K-Uger! vibes
thanks for volunteering despite the abuse