Should You Annuitize your Insurance Annuity?

What does it mean? Put simply, to annuitize is to start taking payments from an insurance annuity that may have been accumulating for some time.  Specifically, you “trade” the accumulated annuity balance for a stream of payments over a specific term of years or life (a life annuity). An annuity, a policy that is paid into either by lump some or regular payments by the policyholder, and gains value via investment of those funds by the insurance company that holds the policy, in a manner agreed between the two parties, has many terms attached when it is created, and there may be an option to annuitize at a certain point or date set at the start of the insurance annuity agreement. What happens when I annuitize? When, and how, the policy becomes annuitized is determined by the rules and terms that are agreed by the policyholder with the insurance company, and these can be varied and dependent on many different factors. If the policy has a number of different options at which annuitization can take place, then it is up to the policyholder to decide what is best for him or her.  In many cases, if the insurance company does not hear [...]

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