Annuity Articles

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

A fixed annuity is a contract between an insurance company and one or more individuals, in which individuals make premium payments over the course of an accumulation period. The insurance company invests the premiums, then uses the investment proceeds to make distribution payments to the ...

Lincoln Financial Group (the marketing name for Lincoln National Corporation) is a full-service financial company offering insurance, investment and fund management services. Its headquarters are in Radnor, PA. It offers annuities through its affiliates, the Lincoln National Life Insurance ...

Variable annuities have much in common with mutual funds. In many respects, variable annuities can be described as mutual funds wrapped up inside an annuity contract. Since variable annuities and mutual funds are popular investment vehicles chosen by millions of people, both their similarities ...

No topic is more current in financial circles these days than regulation. Consequently, it is logical for would-be buyers of annuities to wonder how and by whom these products are ...

An investor who goes shopping for annuities for the first time might stop dead in the middle of the financial-products store, paralyzed by confusion and indecision. The imposing array of products, housed in colorful packaging with complicated wording and directions on the back of each box, are ...