We don’t spend enough time talking about annuities. It’s true. We know it. We occasionally talk about it–Brantley and I. We even make plans to do something about it. Then it gets lost in the bustle of life–forgotten until the next time we remember that we don’t talk enough about annuities. You’d think things would …
Retirement income planning is a complicated and–for many–an elusive task. Industries that exist to help everyday Americans prepare for retirement spend millions of dollars every year trying to craft flashier and fancier marketing hooks to convince would-be retirement preppers to entrust them with their hard-saved dollars. And well-meaning reporters churn out thousands of articles every …
There’s no secret that continuously low interest rates cause a struggle for life insurers and this can have a negative impact on insurance products that accumulate cash value. However, lower market interest rates negatively impact all financial tools that use fixed interest rates as a savings mechanism–think certificates of deposit, bonds, and money market accounts. …
Last week, we discussed the results one could get from indexed universal life insurance from 2001 to 2010. We also looked at how this type of policy performed if the market returns from this time period were repeated over and over again every 10 years. We wanted to evaluate how IUL behaved during a sustained …
Living Balance Sheet® is a financial planning platform created by the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. Guardian makes the software exclusively available to its career salesforce. Living Balance Sheet purports to help both individuals and business owners organize their financial lives, uncover uncommon knowledge, and provide correct advice that traditional financial planning often gets wrong. …
Pension maximization refers to a specific retirement planning technique that can be used by couples to weigh possible pension payout options. You can also consider these options to be annuitization options as they are quite similar to what you will find in a single premium immediate annuity, like the ones I referred to in this …
Somewhere along the way, retirement planning and particularly retirement income planning came completely off the tracks. However, there is a way that you can fix it for yourself and that’s by learning a simple methodology to create your own pension. A retirement income stream that deposits a certain amount of money into your bank account …
Investing in the stock market certainly has its advantages. It can produce some incredible new wealth for those who are disciplined (and in some cases lucky). But the market is not the panacea when it comes to wealth accumulation or retirement planning. It’s a tool one can (and most likely should) employ to grow assets. …
When you start your career in the financial services industry you pretty quickly figure out that you must bow at the altar of the average return on investment in the stock market. Well, that and a couple of other things like… Compliance runs the show–resistance is futile. 8% is the return we assume people will …
We like life insurance because it marches to its own beat. In other words, when CNBC is reporting panic over Facebook, life insurance carries on almost as if its never even heard of Mark Zuckerberg. A majority of our clients adopt a similar view on life insurance. Life insurance serves as a wonderful complement to …
