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(Complete Show Notes Below)
In the 28th episode of the Financial Procast:
Looks like Ally Bank needs an ally
The Fed performed its most recent round of “stress tests” for the largest banks in America. You know, the ones that are supposedly “too big to fail”. Anyway, it seems that 17 of the 18 largest banks passed the test but there's one that didn't quite cut it. Who's that you ask…Ally? Who? Yeah that bank that seemingly came out of nowhere and suddenly owned prime time media with all of its commercials.
Ally really wasn't a new bank at all, it was just the old GMAC repackaged and shined up. Turns out you can put lipstick on that pig but it's still a pig. Who knew? Oh yeah, we, the U.S. taxpayers own a majority of Ally…sounds like it's turning out to be a great investment.
Not to worry though, Ally didn't have the worst losses of all the banks. No, that crown was placed atop Captial One. To put it in to perspective, Capital One has losses amounting to 13.2% of its total assets, while Bank of American and J.P. Morgan has losses of 6.9% and 7.7% respectively.
Annuities, Annuities, Annuities
Americans are retiring in record numbers. Could annuities be the answer to the retirement planning crisis?
We weigh in on the good, the bad and the ugly of the annuity industry. Of course we poke fun at all the misleading marketing messages that are floating around about annuities and we even let Ken Fisher, of Fisher Investments weigh in. Also, we give a brief overview of the Glenn Neasham court case and how the compensation really works for variable annuities.
Questions from our listeners
Today we answer questions from Nancy, Geoff, and Linda:
Nancy asks, “Is it better to take my life insurance dividend in cash or should I use it to buy paid-up additions?
Jeff asks, “I recently had someone talk to me about using the private reserve concept, what is it and how does it work?
Linda asks, “In an older post on your site you mentioned the 15 year force out rule. What does it mean?”
Contact us if you have any questions regarding this episode or if you have any questions at all. We're always glad to help.
It would be great if you could add time stamps in the summary so we could skip to the parts of the podcast we might have interest in and skip the other parts. Thanks
Thanks Phil. This is actually something I’ve been thinking about. We’ll see what we can put together to make this happen over the next couple of weeks. Probably something we can roll out with newer episodes, but might take a while to get it on older ones.
If you have any other suggestions, please send them along.