Philip J Ellis

Philip J. Ellis is a consulting actuary affiliated with Rudd and Wisdom, Inc., an Austin, Texas firm founded in 1945 and described as the oldest continuously operating actuarial consulting firm in the state. The firm provides actuarial and management consulting for public and private retirement plans, health and other employee-benefit plans, life and property/casualty insurers, forensic economics/expert testimony, and financial planning and investment advisory services. Its offices are at 9500 Arboretum Blvd., Suite 200, Austin, TX 78759.

Ellis is a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA) and works primarily in the retirement and employee-benefits space. He writes for the firm's publications (he appears as an author on Rudd and Wisdom's site) on retirement-policy themes — including a piece questioning the traditional retirement age (a "There's nothing special about the number 65" argument tied to the history of the retirement industry). This places his subject-matter expertise squarely in defined-benefit/defined-contribution plan design, retirement-income replacement, and decumulation strategy.

He is also active on the conference circuit. In 2024 he spoke at EBIG 2024 in Chicago (held at CBOE) on the topic of generating lifetime income from retirement savings — consistent with Rudd and Wisdom's retirement-benefits practice, which covers plan design, actuarial cost studies, retirement-income replacement illustrations, and legislative analysis/testimony on public retirement issues.

Note that "Philip Ellis" is a common name; several unrelated professionals (a UK corporate-finance executive at Optima, a marketing consultant, an author, and others) share it. The individual tied to the `ruddwisdom.com` email is the Austin-based actuary described above.

• No stated startup-investment thesis, check size, or target-company profile could be located from any primary or secondary source.
• His documented professional focus is retirement finance: pension/benefit plan design, retirement-income adequacy, and turning accumulated savings into lifetime income (the theme of his EBIG 2024 talk).
• His writing signals a contrarian, first-principles view of retirement conventions (e.g., challenging the significance of age 65), suggesting an analytically rigorous, data-driven perspective on longevity and decumulation.
• If he does angel-invest, the most plausible adjacent areas — given his expertise — would be retirement/insurtech, fintech, and benefits technology, but this is inference, not a verified fact.