Thoughts on the Future of Retirement Income Products
This fly-fisherman, financial advisor and former insurance company executive surveys the retirement income product landscape from his lake house in central Maine.
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Letting the GLWB Out of Its Cage
The "Ruin-Contingent Life Annuity" proposed by Moshe Milevsky's QWeMA Group would liberate the guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit from the confines of variable annuities and separately-managed accounts.
Wanted: Iconoclasts
"Like the 8th-century Byzantine church, the nexus of Washington and Wall Street has grown corrupt," says Hutchinson, who writes the Bear's Lair column at PrudentBear.com, where this article first...
It’s Reigning Buckets
Envestnet's new PlanHorizon income distribution method resembles other 'bucket methods' like IFLM and RetireSense, but also integrates the bucket method into the firm's full-service investment and administrative platform for...
FundQuest to Carry Fidelity’s No-Frills Variable Annuity
The alliance marks the first time Fidelity's annuity and insurance business has expanded its distribution through a turnkey asset management firm.
The Latest Chapter in the Indexed Annuity Saga
In Mooney vs. Allianz Life, the jury didn't award damages because the plaintiffs couldn't prove that they lost money on their investments in indexed annuities.
Re-Start Your Engines?
Strong insurers offering VA income riders with attractive roll-ups did very well in the third quarter, but sales for the category as a whole were flat.
Out-of-Pocket Medical Costs in Retirement: Part II
At the rate we're going, the cost of health care will eventually dwarf retirees’ ability to pay for it.
Fidelity Outsources GWB Production to MetLife
The living benefit guarantees became too expensive for FILI, Fidelity's life insurer, to underwrite cost-effectively.
House Passes Historic Health Reform Bill
The so-called “public option,” declared dead last summer, is very much alive in H.R. 3962.
Red Zone Strategies
Near-retirees who are in Jim Otar's "crowded" Red Zone don't have a lot of options. "Their only choice is annuities," writes the Canadian author/advisor in the concluding chapter of...
An Income Feather in BoA’s Hat
Bank of America’s new service, My Retirement Income, is a revival of a program created at Merrill Lynch in 2006.
Gray Zone Strategies
"If you are in the gray zone, be very leery about any strategy that does not involve some form of annuities," Otar writes.
Neapolitan Annuity
Hartford Life’s new Personal Retirement Manager is three products in one. It bundles a deferred income annuity with a variable investment and a fixed return account.
Green Zone Strategies
In Chapter 42 of "Unveiling the Retirement Myth," Otar explains how to advise the "Green Zone" clients whose assets can easily finance their retirements.
Get Smart
With its inflation-adjustments and liquidity features, Lincoln's new SmartIncome SPIA is designed to answer the usual objections to income annuities.
Zone Therapy
"Everything you have read in this book so far guides you in one direction: ignore the popular wisdom and hype. Design your own 'personal' pension for your retirement." So...
Presidential’s New Campaign
Presidential Life has engineered a two-tier income annuity where the first annuitant receives benefits for life but the survivor receives income for a period certain or for life, whichever...
Let’s Look at Your Telomeres
These loss-leaders at the ends of chromosomes, which help determine our longevity, were the basis for this week's Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Shunned in U.S., Income Annuities Thrive in the U.K.
The "at retirement" market for annuities in the U.K. topped £14 billion in 2008 and is expected to reach about £23 billion in five years.
