Retirement & Annuities

Saving for retirement and drawing an income from it are different problems. The first one rewards patience. The second introduces a risk that does not exist while you are still working: a bad run early on, at the exact moment you start withdrawing, can do damage that a later recovery never fully undoes.

An annuity is one of the tools built for that problem. In exchange for a lump sum or a series of payments, an insurance company contracts to pay you an income — in some cases for as long as you live. That guarantee is only ever as strong as the carrier standing behind it, and it is bought with trade-offs: access to the money, growth potential, fees, and surrender periods that can run for years.

Those trade-offs are the entire conversation, and they are why this is not a product to be sold quickly. I will explain what an annuity does and does not do, where it fits alongside what you already have, and where it plainly does not fit. Sometimes that answer is that you do not need one.