If retirement is looming on your horizon, you are probably wondering if you will have enough money to last you through the rest of your life. A secure guaranteed income stream can bring some peace of mind, but where exactly can you put one in place? After all, Social Security will provide some benefits, but will it be enough?
The good news is that even if you feel that you could have saved more money than what you have, there are still options for securing a guaranteed retirement income. Let’s take a deeper dive into what some of those options might look like, and what they can do for you.
Let’s get into a deeper dive on pension plans, alternatives that are available and will pay you guaranteed income for life, and how these options look in the full spectrum of retirement planning.
Are you looking for alternatives to a pension plan for guaranteed income in retirement? Perhaps you have a pension plan and worry about its future ability to make good on promised payments.
Pensions are becoming increasingly rare in corporate America today. Many private-sector employers have replaced pension plans with 401(k) or other profit-sharing plans to cut costs.
But if you are lucky enough to have a pension plan, it’s important to know how it works, what you will get from it, and explore pension alternatives for secure retirement options. And if you won’t be getting a pension, exploring your options can help you make well-informed decisions about retirement.
Let’s dive into pension plans, alternatives that guarantee lifetime income, and how these options fit into your overall retirement planning strategy.
Are you counting on a pension when you retire? Are you familiar with how it works? In this article, we will give a quick overview of how a pension plan works, different types of pension plans, and how payments from a pension plan to retirees work.
Once you have a better understanding of how your pension works, you will be in a better position to make well-informed choices about your overall retirement. That can include whether other sources of retirement income will help you reach your goals. Read on for a deeper dive into the basics of a pension plan and how it works.
An individual retirement annuity is a retirement savings vehicle issued by life insurance companies. The individual retirement annuity can come in fixed or variable flavors. Similar to traditional and Roth IRAs, it works much like any individual retirement account (IRA) and is subject to contribution limits.
The retirement annuity offers a steady income stream to its owners, and it can have higher fees than IRAs. You can check with your financial professional for more details on that. The retirement annuity, like an IRA, is available in both traditional and Roth versions.
Therefore, the annuity owner can take the upfront contribution deduction available to the traditional account. Or they can choose to receive tax-free income at retirement. With the private pension rapidly disappearing, creating your own pension-style payment stream may be a good idea for you.
When you are looking for an annuity or a life insurance policy, people often say that you pay attention to life insurance company ratings. That is good advice, as it’s one primary indicator of an insurance company’s financial strength.
Unfortunately, they also don’t usually tell you how to find those ratings or what they mean. In this article, we will give a quick rundown of life insurance company rating basics, who gives them, and what these ratings mean for you.
A bonus annuity is an annuity product that offers either an upfront bonus on premium or a first-year bonus on the interest rate. The premium bonuses are usually associated with fixed index annuities, while the interest rate bonus usually comes with a traditional fixed annuity. Bonuses are even attached to variable annuities on occasion.
Life insurance companies offer the bonus as an incentive to choose that annuity. One of the complexities of annuity bonuses is that, while they usually get credited on day 1, they actually vest over the contract’s life.
It’s good to know that generally speaking, the growth potential of a bonus annuity will be less than that of a non-bonus annuity. This is one trade-off for the annuity bonus.
Here’s a rundown of how bonus annuities work. This is a good starting point of what to look out for if you are considering a bonus annuity for your financial goals.
For some time, U.S. investors and retirees have been in the strange environment of extremely low interest rates coupled with high equity-market valuations. This has kept returns on annuities lower, but interest rates can change at any time.
Of course, all of this can change at any time. It’s good to consider your interest rate environment, inflation, and other economic issues when considering an annuity.
In volatile markets, retirees and those close to retirement worry about the sequence of returns risk. Sequence risk arises out of the timing of losses. Losses late in one’s investment life, particularly near retirement, are challenging to recoup because of the short time window available. A loss that might be serious at 35 can be catastrophic at 55.
When you are building your nest egg, you have time to recoup from losses. That time may be shorter or longer, depending on your age, but it’s there, and you can recover. On the other hand, when you are actually living off those same assets, a bad return or loss can have a severe impact on your lifestyle. Moreover, since you are likely in a far more conservative asset allocation strategy, your ability to recover from the loss is more limited.
Markets can take huge up or down swings at any time – or simply fluctuate in a small range. Those facing disastrous sequence losses when a market veers rapidly down wonder if there is a way to participate in market gains without facing the full fury of potential market losses.
In these conditions, retirees are looking for a place to obtain some growth but not face the risk of losses in the stock market. They want to be able to participate in some market gains, but not be fully exposed to the risks of actually being in the market. One place to achieve that goal is in the fixed index annuity, or FIA.
Annuities are a major staple for retirement planning in the financial products marketplace today. Their guarantees of principal protection and lifetime income make them attractive to many people, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Nevertheless, some financial advisors and retirement savers just don’t like annuities, and there are a variety of reasons for why. Annuities have limits, just like any other financial product, and you should understand what you will get with an annuity before signing on the dotted line. Here’s a quick rundown of some drawbacks of annuities – and also other places in which they come out strong.
A market value adjustment (MVA) simply refers to the ability of an insurance carrier to offer you higher rates by protecting itself against bond market declines. When an annuity has a market value adjustment in its contract, it’s called a market value adjusted annuity (or MVA annuity for short).
Normally the insurance company holds the interest-rate risk when you buy a fixed annuity. But an MVA annuity gives you the chance to earn a higher rate in exchange for sharing in some of that risk with your insurer.
After all, bond values are sensitive to interest rate movements. So one way to think of this is as a “safeguard” for the insurance carrier against bond market losses.
If an MVA annuity happens to fall into your retirement purview, here’s a helpful look at what it might involve. Read More
The idea of dependable, ongoing lifetime payments in retirement is appealing to many people. For over two thousand years, annuities have been a time-tested source of guaranteed income across continents, cultures, and walks of life.
Even now, the need for guaranteed lifetime income is still strong in the face of ever-changing markets, meager interest rates, and other economic factors often beyond anyone’s control.
Of course, there are some ways to get guaranteed retirement income beyond annuities. You have a number of vehicles at your disposal:
Bond ladders,
CDs,
Treasury securities,
Defined-pension payouts,
Reverse mortgages, and
Other certain fixed-interest investments
The Guaranteed Income Question
The million-dollar question is whether these guaranteed instruments can offer you the same level of confidence as annuities can.
Yes, decisions on what to include inside your income strategy always depend on your personal situation. But annuities themselves can pay you a guaranteed income for life in ways that others can’t.
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