Inflation

What are older investors to do right now? Get out of the stock market entirely? Stay out of the market if you have already decided to get out? Get back into the market now or wait and risk further increases while on the sidelines? Place the majority of your savings in bonds? Purchase an immediate annuity ? Purchase that immediate annuity with inflation protection? Tough questions for both investors and their advisors. There are some good thoughts and discussions shared in a recent New York...

A good question and answer piece from the Chicago Tribune. The reader had just purchased a $400,000 immediate annuity at a relatively young age. The purchase was also made from one insurer in a relatively low interest rate environment. Having both a pension and Social Security (both are lifetime annuities), I would not have committed half my portfolio to an income annuity at the relatively young age of 63 and during a period of low interest rates . It does not appear that the annuity came with...

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...