How to generate reliable income in retirement? It’s becoming the new holy grail for the financial services industry in the wake of the 2008 crash. But if your workplace retirement plan is handled through a mutual fund, brokerage firm or bank, the retirement income solutions offered most often are simply strategies for decumulation of your [...] [...more]
I’m not a big fan of variable annuities – they tend to be expensive and to under-perform. But the plain vanilla single premium income annuity (SPIA) can be a useful way to insure against longevity risk—the risk of outliving your money. A retiree makes a single payment to an insurance company, which in turn promises [...] [...more]
Guaranteed retirement income has become a hot topic in the wake of the 2008 market crash, with financial planners and government policymakers alike looking for ways to reduce retiree exposure to equities and boost sources of guaranteed income. Much of the buzz has focused on the humble single premium income annuity (SPIA), which offers regular [...] [...more]
Social Security and a pension–there was a time when they went together like coffee and cream. Together, they provided a guaranteed source of automatic retirement income–no management by retirees required. According to The Urban Institute, 38 percent of private sector American workers had traditional pension plans as recently as 1980–funded and managed by employers and [...] [...more]
Let’s say you won’t have a defined benefit pension in retirement, or that you have a pension that won’t pay much. One option is a do-it-yourself pension–better known as an income annuity. An income annuity is something like the mirror opposite of life insurance. A life insurance policy protects you and your family from the [...] [...more]
