Capital

Income limits that have prevented many people from converting from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA will be eliminated on January 1, 2010. With a traditional IRA, contributions and growth of capital are tax free, but distributions are taxed as normal income. Roth IRAs differ in that contributions are taxable while growth of capital and distributions are tax free. In addition, unlike traditional IRAs, there are no required minimum distributions with Roth IRAs. Last, with a Roth IRA your heirs do...

The head of an Australian financial service firm's life operations, Richard Howes, is an advocate of compulsory annuitization . Howes believes that 30 percent of retirement funding should be compulsorily assigned to guaranteed income streams--in other words to annuities. Howes also suggests that the relatively slow take-up of annuities in the Australian market is a result of investors who have been conditioned by a uninterrupted 20 year bull market in equities. Howes spells-out the case for...

The CEO of the Hartford Financial Services Group, Ramani Ayer, will step down from the post by the end of 2009. Mr. Ayer has been with the Hartford for 36 years and has been CEO for 12 years. He has been the chief architect of the company's aggressive pursuit of variable annuity business. The Hartford has been one of the most active companies in the variable annuity space over the past several years. This line of business has been particularly painful for the company in light of fallout from...