There is a school of thought, popularized by Dave Ramsey and echoed by countless financial personalities, that says the answer to retirement is simple: stay 100 percent in growth stock mutual funds, expect 12 percent average returns, and withdraw 8 percent a year. Follow the plan, be disciplined, and everything works out. Ramsey has helped…
Why are annuity rates increasing right now? If you’ve shopped for an annuity recently, you may have noticed something: the rates being offered today are meaningfully better than what you’d have seen just a few years ago. This isn’t your imagination, and it isn’t a sales gimmick. There’s a real, explainable reason annuity rates have…
If you have a pension, you are one of a shrinking number of Americans who still do. And at some point, usually as you approach retirement or when your employer restructures the plan, you are going to face a decision: take the monthly pension payment for life, or take a one-time lump sum instead. For…
If you have money sitting in a Certificate of Deposit at your bank, or you have a CD coming up for renewal, there is another option that most people have never heard of and that almost always outperforms the CD on the terms that actually matter. It is called a Multi-Year Guaranteed Annuity, or MYGA….
Most articles comparing bonds and Fixed Indexed Annuities focus on income. This one is different. This is about the safe money portion of your retirement portfolio, the part that is not there to generate income but to protect capital while still earning something. That role has traditionally belonged to bonds. After 2022, a lot of…
Here is one of the most consistent findings in retirement research, and one of the most surprising to people who hear it for the first time: the biggest financial problem in retirement is not that people run out of money. It is that people who could afford to spend more, don’t. The industry spends enormous…
One of the most persistent myths about annuities is that when you die, the insurance company keeps your money. This assumption stops a lot of people from ever considering an annuity, and it stops others from asking the right questions when they own one. In reality, what happens to your annuity when you die depends…
You’re Asking the Wrong Question If you’ve searched this question, you’ve probably already run into the answer everyone gives: it depends. That’s true, but it’s not very useful. Here’s the more useful version. An annuity was never built to be an investment. It’s insurance. Comparing it to the stock market is like judging a fire…
If you have spent any time researching retirement, you have probably heard the term sequence of returns risk. Most articles about it either brush past it with a single sentence or bury it under so much jargon that the reader walks away vaguely worried but no better informed. This is one of the most important…
Here is a statistic that should be part of every retirement conversation but almost never is: 70% of people turning 65 today will need some form of long-term care during their lifetime. Not might. Will. Seven out of ten. And yet when most people build their retirement plan, long-term care is either ignored entirely or…