Annuity Articles

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Structured Settlement Annuities

Structured settlement annuities are specialized annuities issued by insurance-company affiliates to compensate plaintiffs in personal-injury tort litigation. They are the artifact of two institutions: the court system and the tax system.

Prior to 1982, personal-injury plaintiffs ...

Tips for Selling Your Annuity

In the classic sense, annuities are intended to be terminal vehicles. That is, they are inherently designed to provide guaranteed income for life and cease operating only upon death of the annuitant(s). Annuities are retirement-oriented financial instruments, geared toward the final phase of ...

Annuity Investment Risks Overview

Annuities are contracts between individuals and insurance companies. Annuities are investments that also possess various insurance features. The purpose of insurance is to reduce risk. Thus, the association of annuity investment with risk may seem anomalous. In fact, risk is omnipresent and ...

How Inflation Impacts Your Retirement Savings

Inflation is traditionally defined as a concurrent increase in the prices of all or most goods. This is unlike ordinary circumstances, in which price increases for some goods are offset by decreases in others. A sustained inflation must be the result of an increase in the supply of money ...

How Annuities Handle Disability and Long Term Care

Annuities are retirement-oriented contracts between insurance companies and individuals. The nature of their commitment demands that insurance companies exert control over the funds entrusted to them. They do this by levying surrender charges on the full or partial withdrawal of funds by ...

Index Annuity Crediting Methods

Since their introduction in late 1995, indexed annuities have enjoyed great popularity. Like there fixed counterparts, indexed annuities credit holders with an interest return. This rate is not fixed according to a period stipulated in the annuity contract. Instead, it is tied to a financial ...

Retirement Planning

The stage when retirement planning shifts into high gear is perhaps the most crucial time in the individual’s financial life cycle. It begins between the ages of 45 and 55, roughly a decade before the planned retirement date. The individual is entering his or her peak earning period; ...

Benefits of Equity Indexed Annuities

In the last 15 years, equity-indexed annuities have become a popular addition to the roster of annuity products. They offer a solid list of benefits to prospective purchasers. These benefits more than offset the complicated mechanics and ground rules of this asset.

Annuities and IRAs

Annuities and IRAs are both retirement-oriented investment entities. Both offer favorable tax treatment to owners. Both subject owners to penalties for premature withdrawals.

Despite these similarities, the two are fundamentally different things. Outlining these differences helps to ...

Mass Mutual Annuities

Mass Mutual Financial Group is one of the world’s leading providers of insurance and financial services. From its inception in the mid-19th century, it has remained a mutual insurance company, owned by its participating policyholders. It enjoys the distinction of having paid dividends ...

How to Choose a Financial Advisor

The reason why modern economies are so much more productive than ancient and medieval ones is because specialization is more highly developed. We don’t grow our own food, make our own clothes, build our own houses, or attend to our own medical needs. Most of us don’t even change the ...

Variable Annuity Comparison

Much time and effort has been spent comparing variable annuities with other financial instruments - particularly mutual funds, which they closely resemble. Much less time has been devoted to comparing variable annuities with each other. Presumably, this is because the mistake of choosing the ...

How to Save for Retirement

When people save for retirement, what action contributes the most to their success? Casual observation suggests that most people consider the selection of investments and the amount saved to be paramount. This is wrong. To see why, consider the ...

Genworth Life and Annuity

Genworth Financial Group is an international financial-services company headquartered in Richmond, VA. The company was spun off from General Electric Financial in 2004 in an initial public offering that raised about $2.8 billion. At that time, this was the14th largest IPO of all time. A ...

Single Premium Annuity

Annuities provide retirement income in the form of payments from insurance companies to annuityholders in return for premiums paid to the companies. Annuity contracts specify the amount, frequency and duration of payments from annuityholders to insurance companies. Usually the payments ...

Retirement Investment

In former times, an article on retirement investment would have been short and simple: “Shift everything to cash and conservative, fixed-income securities.”  Advances in medicine, nutrition and fitness have lengthened life expectancy and changed the perspective of investing. Today, a ...

Tax Sheltered Annuity

A tax-sheltered annuity (TSA) is an investment vehicle that allows an individual to make pre-tax contributions to a retirement account. Original TSA participants were restricted to annuities in their choice of investment instruments. Today the name is a misnomer because the menu of investment ...

Fidelity Annuities

Fidelity Investments is a financial services company that began in 1946 as a mutual fund company. Today, Fidelity Management and Research LLC (headquartered in Boston) owns and manages mutual funds throughout North America and is the world’s largest mutual fund company. As of September 2007, ...

Annuities for Dummies

An annuity is a contract between an individual and an insurance company. The individual pays the insurance company money, either in a lump sum or regularly over time. The money is invested. When the individual retires, he or she begins receiving regular payments from the insurance company. The ...

Annuity Contracts

Annuities have a reputation for being complicated financial instruments. This is not unjustified, but the features and details inside annuity contracts are there for a reason. Each one enhances a particular investment or insurance benefit. Since the annuity holder pays for those benefits, it is ...