Life insurance and pension decisions are of the more important nancial settlements to be decided in a household. In this thesis we investigate dierent aspects of relevance for decision making within a household, especially focusing on life insurance and pension decisions. The focus is on the relation between household preferences and the related optimal product design..Optimal decisions of a household are considered in ontinuous-time stochastic control theory models. Within a standard expected utility framework we investigate the eects of dierences between household members as well as tax-eects. The focus is on the consumption, investment and life insurance demands. In another modeling framework, we modify the utility measurement and propose a combination of forward and backward looking preferences. At last, a model with very explicit preferences for stability in consumption is investigated and we nd that the optimal onsumption pattern derived corresponds to the benet pattern of a specic annuity product. This particular product is in a simulation study compared to Unit-Link annuities, which t perfectly with the consumption patterns derived under the expected utility models.