Life Annuity | Annuities

Posts tagged "life annuity"

Keep Pace With Inflation in your Life Annuity

For millions of Americans, a life annuity can provide safety of principal and tax deferral. However, one disadvantage inherent in most life annuities is their inability to keep up with inflation over the long-term. For example, assume that you invest $100,000 into a single premium immediate life annuity. as an example, a current contract from a major annuity company would then pay out $658.59 per month, for a total of $7,903.08 for the year. The problem is if the rate of inflation is 3%, then the purchasing power of these payments will decline from one year to the next. Obviously, $7,903 will not buy in a future year what it can now. Imagine how you feel twenty years from now when the purchasing power of your life annuity is reduced by 47%! One way that life annuity buyers can deal with this problem is to purchase a cost-of-living rider in the contract. This rider is designed to ensure that the income from the annuity stays abreast of the rate of inflation over time. However, these will be a trade off in that less income may be received today. For example, the same immediate life annuity contract with a 3% inflation [...]

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 [...]