Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Allstate Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's program, Pat Macellaro. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Jonathan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Allstate's Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. After prepared remarks by Tom Wilson, Steve Shebik and myself, we'll have a question-and-answer session. Yesterday, we issued our news release and investor supplement and posted the slides we'll use this morning. These are all available on our website at allstateinvestors.com. Our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements regarding Allstate's operations. Allstate's results may differ materially from these statements, so please refer to our 10-K for 2013, our 10-Q for the third quarter, the slides and our most recent news release for information on potential risks. Also, this discussion will contain some non-GAAP measures for which there are reconciliations in our news release and in our investor supplement. We're recording the call, and a replay will be available following its conclusion. I'll be available to answer any follow-up questions you may have after the call. Now I'll turn it over to Tom.

Well, good morning. Thank you for your continued interest and investment in Allstate. I'll provide an overview of where we stand strategically and operationally, and then Pat and Steve will go through the results in detail. And as always, our senior leadership team is here with us, so Matt Winter, who's Allstate's President and the leader of all the Allstate branded operations; Don Civgin, the President of Emerging Businesses; Kathy Mabe, who's President of our Business to Business Operations; Judy Greffin, our Chief Investment Officer; and then Sam Pilch, our Corporate Controller. Let's start with Page -- Slide 2, Allstate's 2014 results. It demonstrates that our consumer-focused strategy when combined with strong execution creates real value for shareholders. We had 5 operating priorities for 2014. Let me go through each of those with you, starting with growth. We had a good year with total policies in force growing by 840,000 or 2.5%. The Allstate brand had accelerating growth throughout the year as auto insurance built up momentum, and we've put increased focus on growing the homeowners business now that we're comfortable with its returns. The number of Allstate agencies increased by 4% for the year, and auto new business in 2014 hit a historical high. When combined with improving customer satisfaction and retention, that's leading to sustainable growth. We intentionally slowed growth at Esurance and Encompass to focus on improving returns. The second priority was to maintain margins, and we did this through the year with the underlying combined ratio being at the favorable end of the range we set at the beginning the year with you. Fourth quarter auto margins were off somewhat, and Pat will discuss that in a few minutes. The Allstate brand homeowners business had a great quarter with recorded combined ratio of below 70. Despite…

Thanks, Tom. I'll begin by reviewing the Property-Liability highlights on Slide 6. Beginning with the chart on the top of this page, Property-Liability earned premium of $28.9 billion in 2014 grew $1.3 billion or 4.7% over 2013. Recorded combined ratio for the year of 93.9 increased 1.9 points versus 2013 driven by an increase in catastrophe losses of $742 million or 59.3% compared to the historically low level recorded in 2013. As Tom mentioned earlier, the year-to-date underlying combined ratio was an 87.2, at the lower end of our full year outlook range. Net investment income for the Property-Liability segment decreased 5.4% from the prior year due primarily to lower returns from the fixed income portfolio. Property-Liability operating income in 2014 was $2.1 billion, 16% lower than 2013, reflecting the higher catastrophe losses. Chart on the lower left shows net written premium and policy in force growth rates for Allstate Protection. The red line representing policy in force growth shows a continued positive trend that's being driven by all 3 underwriting brands. Policies in force grew by 840,000 or 2.5% from year-end 2013. The Allstate brand accounted for 78% of policy growth in 2014 compared with 27% in 2013. Average premium increases to reflect increased costs raised the total premium growth rate above unit growth. Exhibit to the right of this chart highlights the Property-Liability recorded and underlying combined ratio trends. You can see the consistency in our underlying results for the last 8 quarters as well as the quarterly seasonality we experienced in both the first and fourth quarters each year. You can also see from the red line that while the fourth quarter recorded combined ratio of 90 was the lowest in the year, it was due to the fact that lower catastrophe losses offset an increase in…

Thanks, Pat. Turning to Slide 11. As we discussed last quarter, our strategy is for Allstate Financial to become more integrated with the Allstate brand's customer value proposition. Expanding Allstate customer relationships to Allstate Financial's products and services will further our agents' positioning as trusted advisers. Allstate Financial results for the quarter and full year are highlighted on the top of this slide. Premiums and contract charges declined by 8.3% in 2014 due to the sale of Lincoln Benefit Life. Excluding 2013 LBL results, Allstate Financial grew premiums and contract charges by 2.8% over the prior year. Operating costs declined by 17.5% or $99 million for the full year 2014, the result of actions to improve strategic focus and modernize the operating model. Operating income for the year was $607 million, 31.7% higher than 2013 when excluding the impact of the LBL disposition, due primarily to strong limited partnership income, lower expenses and profitable growth at Allstate Benefits. The chart on the bottom of this page shows the change in reserves and contractholder funds from year-end 2007 to year-end 2014. As you can see, Allstate Financial's product liabilities have been reduced by over 50% since 2007 due to actions taken to reduce exposure to spread-based annuity products along with the sale of Lincoln Benefit Life. Select estimated historical results for Lincoln Benefit Life are provided on our investor supplement to provide you with further context. Shifting to investments on Slide 12. Our total portfolio return on the top was 1.1% for the fourth quarter, bringing total return for the full year 2014 to 5.8%. You can see that the valuation impact varies from quarter to quarter, primarily with changes in interest rates, while the income yield has been relatively constant. The lower half of the slide provides the investment income…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Josh Stirling from Bernstein. Josh Stirling - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division: So Tom, I wanted to ask a question, if I may, about Esurance and Encompass and thinking about margins for the overall company, driving some higher margins into these 2 smaller segments would seem to be some of your biggest levers for improving the combined -- overall combined ratios. And I'm wondering if you can sort of walk us through a bit more detail what your targets are for these businesses, some of the things you're doing to drive margins and if there's any specific challenges that we should understand because big picture, it feels like these are things that ought to offer you higher margins than you're able to deliver. Today, you've got a mass affluent business at Encompass, and obviously, Esurance has got attractive direct economics. But I'd really love to hear you walk through how you compare and contrast the long-term margin potential of both of these businesses and kind of what you're doing in both of them to get us there.

All right. Well, thank you, Josh. It's a good question. I'll provide some overview, and then I'll ask Kathy to talk a little bit about Encompass and Don to talk a little about Esurance. First, you're absolutely correct that those 2 businesses -- obviously, the math shows you that they don't generate the same amount of underwriting income as we get from the Allstate brand, and that is one of the reasons why we slowed the growth, is we want to diversify our profit sources amongst those. That said, we have different opportunities in the 2 areas, and we're investing differently in each of those. So -- but let me first talk about -- the Allstate brand is also a growth opportunity, as you can see from this quarter's results, and we can get back into that later if other people have questions. But I don't want people to feel like that's -- you saw we're adding agencies. The growth is picking up across product lines, so that's a good growth vehicle for us as well. The combination of all 3 of those brands gives us really a way to compete aggressively with people on a whole variety of fronts. And so managing those as a portfolio is important both from a go-to-market standpoint, a strategic standpoint and obviously, a financial standpoint. As it relates to Encompass, it is focused on the mass affluent. We need to raise returns in both of the auto and property businesses. The property business actually has a decent combined ratio relative to 100, but it doesn't have a good enough combined ratio relative to the returns we think it needs to have given the long-term volatility in that business. It bumps around a little more in terms of its profitability than you would see…

Okay. Thanks, Josh, for the question. In terms of Encompass, our goal this year is to return Encompass to a true underwriting profit, so we took a number of actions. We're always concerned about elasticity in this channel as we put rate and underwriting actions in. If you look at retention for both auto and home, it looks like we could have taken even stronger action, and we're prepared to do that in 2015 because our retention held as we put rate into auto and somewhat into home. The actions that we are taking are geared toward specific states that really have out-of-balance profitability challenges, and we have 5 key states that really need strong underwriting and pricing action, and that's already well underway. In addition, we're trying to reposition distribution to get to more profitable growth opportunities for Encompass. So those actions are also going on simultaneously. I think the biggest opportunity for us is to continue to have strong discipline on the underwriting side, particularly in those problem states. And so if -- I don't want to take too much time to go into detail, but it's a multiple grouping of levers that we're trying to pull simultaneously to improve the profit for Encompass. I think, also, it's safe to say that if you look at the amount of rate that we put into Encompass for the year, in auto, we took about 6.6%, and I think there's opportunity to take even more in 2015 because our retention was actually up 1 point in auto.

Don?

Josh, let me see if I can just add a little bit of color to what Tom talked about as it relates to Esurance targets. First, we've been consistent since we put the companies together, that our goal was to run the business in a way that it's economic over the lifetime of the policies that we're writing. And the good news is it's nearly twice as large as it was when we bought it. The bad news is, as a result, it had nearly twice the impact on the overall results, and so it's more noticeable. I would break the combined ratio into 2 pieces when you think about where we're headed with them, the loss ratio and then kind of expenses. The loss ratio showed a point or so improvement this year. That's good. We took a fair amount of rate. We took some underwriting actions because the loss ratio was too high last year. We're seeing it earn into the book. There's more to come. 76.6 is not good enough. We still have more work to do to get that number down. I'd like to think, over time, we'll get another point or 2 out of that. But the loss ratio is still a bit higher than it needs to be. On the expense side, it's a little bit of a different issue. We're trying to balance how much advertising we spend money on so that we can generate what ends up being economically viable long-term growth. And so it's a seasonal advertising spend. It's a bit of a seasonal business. We have quarters like the first quarter of last year where we spent an awful lot due to the Super Bowl and the launching of the campaign. But when you look throughout the year, Tom's right.…

Josh, I think you should assume we will always invest in those things that are long term. We have both the earning power and the capital to invest in things like telematics to try to figure out how to grow in the aggregated channel, what we call, Integrated Digital Enterprise, which is about redoing our system with digitization and sort of straight-through processing. Not such though that those get -- we assume we have to cover that for our shareholders -- cover that with our shareholders, still deliver the profitability and invest for the future, but we don't really have projections as to what that will do for either top line or the bottom line in the short term. But know that we continue to invest for the long term because we recognize that if we don't do something today, we might me unhappy 3 or 4 years from now.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Nannizzi from Goldman Sachs.

I was wondering if you could drill down a little bit further into the auto loss ratio in the fourth quarter. You talked about, Pat -- I think, Pat, you mentioned severe weather, non-cat weather and frequency. Can we get a little bit more idea of how much of each of those contributed and what exactly was the frequency driver on the -- or the driver on the frequency side?

Mike, thank you for the question. Matt has been waiting anxiously for your question because he spent untold number of hours over the last, really, 3 months since we saw a tick-up in October. So we were on this early, and he can give you all the specifics.

Thanks, Mike. Otherwise, I would feel like I had studied for the wrong question on a test. So let me give you some background. And first of all, both Tom and Pat touched on it in their opening remarks. First, at a high-level look at the seasonality that we always see with a combined ratio in the fourth quarter and when you look at Page 7 of the presentation, you'll see a fairly consistent spike in the fourth quarter. You see it clearly in 2010 and 2011. Recall that 2012 fourth quarter was Sandy, so some of the trends that normally appear were masked that quarter in cat. So there is some seasonality in the fourth quarter in the combined ratio. That's one. Second, as I believe Pat mentioned and I believe it was also highlighted in the release, when we talk about the uptick in frequency in the fourth quarter, we noted that there was an uptick in 2 out of the 3 months. It was an uptick in October and November that seemed to moderate, and we had the December that was more in line with prior trends. So we had a 2- out of 3-month tick-up. Third point is what's driving it and what's not driving it. Let me start with what's not driving it. Number one, we saw nothing to indicate that it's a quality-of-business issue or that it's being driven by growth, which is a natural question that you would have since I hope some time during the call we talk about the growth we're achieving in the auto business. And so with all that growth, you question is this somehow related. Well, we looked at new to renewal ratios. We looked at state mix ratio. We looked at rating plan relativities, and we saw…

I mean, I guess, so the bottom line then is, I mean, from your perspective, it sounds like you understand what happened, and you're taking action to address it. So there's not a third factor of why is this happening and what can we do about it that you're concerned about.

We're confident that we have analyzed this to death, some might say. We understand the drivers. We understand the dynamics in the marketplace, and we know how to use the levers available to us to react to it to maintain margins.

Which is why we committed to 87 to 89 for next year.

And then just one real quick one on capital. Just looking at $3.4 billion in holdco capital, this year, it's up 20-ish percent from last year, which is up considerably from the year before. Without Lincoln Benefit there and kind of a more streamlined infrastructure, how should we think about what that -- what you want that number to be on a go forward? And also, just trying to reconcile, too, just a bit of a lighter buyback in the fourth quarter. What was the thought process there just given that big capital chunk at the holdco?

Yes. Mike, let me give you a -- start with the second one first, and then Steve can give you some specifics on ASRs and the impacts. So first, as it relates to the share buyback, the $2.5 billion that we're -- we'll be competing this first quarter, you'll remember when we set that out, there was $2.5 billion over 18 months, and we'll clearly be done with it a lot sooner than that. So we've been buying shares back aggressively and ahead of schedule because we have the capital both in the company and at the holding company level. Steve can talk about the impact. I know you had a question on the fourth quarter rate, so he can help you sort through that piece. And as it relates to holding company cap, we think about capital for the whole company, and we try to have -- to the extent the capital and the cash is at the holding company, we have more flexibility with that. So we have a process of having -- moving it up as often and frequently as we can. If it needs to go down to a subsidiary, like it has in the past, then we do that. If the subsidiaries are appropriately capitalized, then we like to keep somewhere around $1 billion up there, which covers a year's worth of dividends and interest payments so that if anything were to happen in the subsidiaries. But we could obviously, given our debt capacity, run much lower than that, and so if we had a use for that capital, one way or the other, we could run with very little cash at the holding company. You want to talk about...

Yes. So we execute our share buybacks a number of ways, one, open market purchases obviously. A second that we've used the last couple of years are accelerated share repurchase programs, and when you see the bumps between quarters, it's generally because of the accelerated share repurchase buybacks. Those are front-end loaded essentially. So the particular one in the last half of the year, we entered into, after our second quarter earnings, $750 million program, provided 4.5 months of buyback for the investment bank that executed that for us. So over that period of time, in the third quarter, you saw roughly $1 billion of buybacks. In the fourth quarter, you saw $250 million. And that's because we gave the $750 million to the investment bank back at the beginning of the program. They bought back. They effectively gave us a significant portion of the stock they will buy back under that program over the next 4.5 months. We recorded that in the third quarter. And in the fourth quarter, we just have a settle up, which happened in mid-December, which is about $100 million -- a little bit about $100 million and 1.6 million shares, something like that. That's why you saw such a low number in the fourth quarter. Same phenomenon happened in the earlier in the year, if you remember, in the first quarter to second quarter.

Mike, let me maybe provide some economic perspective. Why would you use an accelerated share repurchase, right? So what happens is Steve writes a check to the investment bank. They give us a whole bunch of shares. Those go off of the share count, which, obviously, has an impact on your recorded shares, which helps with operating earnings per share. But that's not why we do it. We do it because it's economic. We don't do anything for bookkeeping around here. We -- other than keep the books well, as opposed to -- they’re looking at me like he's about to shoot me. But we do it because we essentially sell off the volatility. By entering into an ASR, we can sell off of the volatility, and we end up with a lower net economic cost of purchasing the shares.

Our next question comes from the line of Vinay Misquith from Evercore.

So the first thing is, Matt, I think you studied for the correct test. So the question is on the frequency on the personal auto, curious as to whether you think this is an industry issue or something that just Allstate is seeing. And as a follow-up to that, how much of rate do you think you need to take to offset this higher frequency?

Thanks, Vinay. First of all, it's really impossible to compare Allstate's results to competitor results. There's different books, different geographic locations, different starting points in history. And remember, a lot of what we're talking about is versus the prior year, so we all started in different places. So I can't talk about what other competitors might be experiencing and might not be and by what measures they are. I can say that precipitation and unemployment rates are not Allstate peculiar issues. They're environmental issues. So they may impact competitors differently based upon our geographic footprint, based upon where the precipitation occurred and based upon the books of business. But they're not going to be related specifically to the company. They're related to the general environment. So I would expect that we would see some indications and we have. I think most people have been attributing it to gas prices, to the miles driven, which I think is, as I said earlier, just a moderately important piece of this, while I think the unemployment rate is more significant. On the rate question, we'll take as much rate as we need to maintain margins as is indicated in each geography as appropriate. I don't tell you in advance because I don't know what will emerge. But you look at our history, you look at our quarterly history over the last many, many years, and we'll take rate as needed, and we maintain margins. We're quick to react. We're fortunate in that our structure allows us to take rate quickly, and it earns in quickly. And as a result, we don't have long-term dislocations between indications and reactions.

Vinay, this is Tom. To long-term trends, I'd point out what Matt -- and reiterate what Matt just said. If you look at our long-term profitability in auto insurance versus the industry, we're obviously in the upper quartile of that. There's about 3 companies that consistently make money. If you look at the homeowners business, the same thing is true, it's a different group of companies, and we were not in that category 10 years ago. We are in that category now with about 3 companies that make most of the money. And then if you look at fast-track results, which is an industry thing, over a long period of time, we show improvements versus the industry, so that supports that number. And if you look at pricing versus our competitors, Matt is exactly right. Our numbers always look like low single digits in total, obviously, bounces around a lot by state. Matt's had to take a lot of rate in. Your question really, if you ask Matt about Michigan, he'll give you a different answer than if you ask him about Wisconsin. The -- so -- but ours tend to be frequent and small. Some of our other competitors, particularly in the auto space, bump around a little more than we do.

Sure, that’s helpful. The second question is -- I was wondering if you could comment on Google's proposed entry into selling insurance online. Would Allstate be willing to join that marketplace?

Vinay, I would say we're in that marketplace with the largest aggregator that there is today. So Answer Financial is the largest, at least, as far as we know. It's not really industry specific on that upper-right quadrant. It's not like there's a specific industry study on that. But Answer Financial does over $0.5 billion in premium for other companies. A lot of it is done online through the web or through the call centers. So it is -- it serves that self-serve aggregator customer, which would be the people purportedly that Google would be attempting to -- they've been talking about doing that for some time. We're in the marketplace. It's not as big a market as you would see in the U.K. and other places for a whole bunch of dynamics, which is a longer conversation. But I would say we're there and active.

Our next question comes from the line of Jay Gelb from Barclays.

For the Allstate brand, we've seen favorable acceleration of policy in force growth every quarter for the past several, so I just wanted to confirm whether that trend will continue.

Let me have Matt deal with that because he's very happy that you asked the question and very happy with himself as am I.

Yes. So thank you for noticing. Look, it's widespread and it's -- so we had -- we have 44 states that are growing year-over-year in IF growth and standard auto. And what's interesting about it to us is it's driven almost equally now by new business and retention trends, so it's about 50-50. As you noted, it's our sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, and it's actually our 7th consecutive quarter-over-quarter increase. So the trend line and the momentum is building. I obviously can't tell you exactly how long that will continue. That will depend upon a wide variety of factors. I can tell you that the momentum engine is building. We are -- we added a great number of agencies. And despite the fact that we have probably 30% fewer agencies than we did 4 or 5 years ago, we're at historical high levels of new business production. That's because their productivity is at an all-time high. Quote volumes are at an all-time high, and close rates are dramatically better than they were. So we see that momentum continuing to build as we have points of presence continuing to build, and we have an aggressive growth and recruiting plan, aggressive plans to add additional license sales professionals. And we believe that the combination of that existing growth momentum with all the work we have underway, with trusted advisor, with deepening the relationships, with bringing in the other -- the remainder of the product sets, with bringing in life and retirement products, consumer household products and truly managing all the risks for our customers and their households, we believe that all of those factors will act synergistically to perpetuate that growth trend line. So we're -- I'm bullishly optimistic on it, but I cannot give you a time frame for how long it will continue at that quarter-over-quarter increase.

Jay, I would also encourage everybody to think about growth on a broad basis. So we tend to get into conversations about growth in auto because, obviously, it's our biggest line of business, and the public comparisons are easiest to make between us and other people because that's there. But if you look at -- Matt, is -- the work that's in auto, it's obviously, great. So we're growing, as Matt said, in a whole bunch of states. Homeowners business is also growing as well, and I think in 27 states, Matt, you're up in like 6 of the top 11 or something like that. So he's -- they're -- you're starting to see that grow, too. So as you think about growth, think about it from a customer standpoint, which is selling auto, homeowners, other property lines, which were up 2.1% last year. So this is about building the relationship which also leads to sustainability.

Matt, on the frequency issue, you said that the frequency recovered in December. Was that also the case in January?

We just closed the month end. Let's just say that, obviously, we were looking at it on the first...

An hourly basis.

We get claim counts daily, so let's just say we looked at it. We don't give out results, but it didn't -- we did know what the numbers were before we committed to 87-89.

Let you know in May.

Okay, so it doesn't seem -- I mean, it seems like it was more of a 2-month split in 4Q rather than an ongoing basis.

I think I would focus on the point Matt made, which is think of the system. We have a system of adapting, adjusting. It's local. It's centralized. And whatever happens, whether it's frequency, severity, mix of business, we're about doing a good job for our customers and making sure our shareholders are well compensated for that.

That makes sense. And the last one is on the capital management plan. So over the past 2 years, it looks like the share count has been reduced as a result of buybacks by 6% to 7%. It seems like that might even accelerate in 2015. I'm just trying to get a sense of if you think about reducing the share count as a capital management goal consistent with the dollar amount of capital returned.

No, we look at it on a dollar basis.

Our next question comes from the line of Sarah DeWitt from JPMorgan. Sarah E. DeWitt - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Could you talk about your appetite to do a significant reinsurance deal on the homeowners business? And would you consider reinsuring a significant portion of the business or maybe even the whole thing given that reinsurance market conditions are increasingly favorable? And if so, do you think you can find a counterparty for that?

It's a good question. As you know, the -- we have number of sources of capital, our own money, which we get from shareholders. We have capital we can get from reinsurers and increasingly a developing alternative source of capital called cat bonds or sidecars or a variety of other things. And that market is growing quite rapidly. There are a number of people who want to get into that market because the returns are uncorrelated with overall market returns. And so we see that growing. That capital has been coming in at a lower cost of capital than provided to us by external sources. So we've been actively using that. Steve, you did a -- what was the size of the cat bond this year?

2014 was just under $1 billion in total.

So we did a cat bond this year because we thought it was cheaper than traditional reinsurance. We have looked at replacing some of our own capital with third-party capital. We look at that all the time. It just -- it's whether you use preferred stock or common stock or third-party alternative capital. We have a number of requirements that we have on that, which have not yet been resolved in terms of how to do it. But I can tell you that we continue to look at it quite aggressively. Those requirements are -- we need some stability in our pricing on behalf of our customers. We don't want to be out in the market every year trying to find $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion worth of capital and what are we going to charge our customers for it and have to run that through prices. Secondly, it has to meet our economic standards that it's a good trade for us. And then thirdly, there's a whole bunch of, what I would just say, legal accounting hurdles one has to get through so that it's displayed in the reported financials the way the economics are set up. Sometimes things show up as derivatives and stuff like that, and it just makes everybody's life more confusing because the financial structure doesn't show you the economics of that, which we got. So we're hard at work at it. I don't -- I think this is one of those things that develops over time. I think it is -- there's optionality in terms of our ability to further improve our return on capital, and -- but the -- I think the biggest driver will be if we can take some volatility out of the P&L, that should reduce our cost of capital. So if you look at the cost of capital for the auto insurance business, it would be lower than the cost of capital for the homeowners business. To extent Steve can find a way to access alternative capital, reduce volatility, maybe even reduce some of the capital we have in the business, that should not only free up capital, Sarah. It should also improve our PE. So we're hard at work on it. I don't think you expect to see anything in the short term because it is a complicated problem. But if there's -- we are spending a lot of time on it. Sarah E. DeWitt - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: And if you could find the capital, how much of the homeowners business would you want to reinsure versus retain?

All depends on the price.

Our final question comes from the line of Bob Glasspiegel from Janney Capital.

Pension, $700 million swing on penalty to AOCI, so book value didn't grow. Maybe you could walk through -- I assume it's interest rates that drove that addition. And what -- did you use a year-end sort of interest rate compass? Or were you able to take advantage of the increased knowledge of yields coming down higher in 2015? I guess the question is do we look at another hit like this coming next year if rates stay where they are.

So I'll keep -- this is Steve. I'll keep this simple for you. The -- at the end of the year, we mark our pension liabilities to the current interest rate discount -- what we call the discount rate liabilities at 12/31. So the discount rate this year-end 12/31/2014 was almost the same as it was 2 years ago. So what happened is we got a benefit in 2013, and we gave it back at the end of 2014. Secondly, we alone with every other public company, I believe, are adopting new mortality assumptions that the Society of Actuaries issued in October. So that, for financial reporting purposes, increased our liability also. You will -- we will -- we have not and we will not put that in their actual employee calculations until the IRS adopts that same program probably in a couple of years. Those are the 2 principal changes you saw. The Society of Actuaries change -- I don't remember when was it was last changed, the mortality assumptions, but it was well more than a decade ago.

6% or 7%. Yes, it's a decade ago.

More than a decade ago. So that happens every decade or so. The discount rate changes every year. So if rates go down at the end of next year, you'll have another increase. If rates go up, you'll get a benefit like we did in 2013.

Bob, if you'll remember...

And -- go ahead, I'm sorry.

You remember last year, we changed our pension benefits and put them all, everybody into the same plan, which had a substantial benefit to the balance sheet and ongoing operating.

Any implications to funding for 2015 cash flow?

Nothing other than normal funding considerations we would consider the normal cost of the plan. And over time with this mortality assumption change, we'll probably have to fund more in the plan potentially given the investment returns we get in the assets.

So let me close with 4 thoughts: So our strategy focusing on the unique value propositions is working. The Allstate Agency business has excellent prospects for profitable growth. Our business model being in all 4 segments is working as is the ability to have a broad product portfolio. We're seeing some of our competitors take similar -- try to do what we have built. Secondly, we are delivering sustainable growth and profitability. That's our operating expertise. The process is our culture of adapting. Third, we give outstanding cash returns to shareholders. And lastly, we are financially in an extremely strong position, which gives us the resources. We obviously have the will and the ability to continue to compete effectively. So thank you much. I will talk to you next quarter.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.