How to Buy an Annuity
With the financial markets in complete turmoil – the S&P and Dow both closed below their 1997 lows today – many investors are asking where they can safely put their money, or even grow it, after they have been burned by so-called safe investments and strategies. Buy-and-hold investors have watched their wealth disintegrate as they’ve held the so-called ‘blue chip’ stocks like General Electric, Pfizer, AT&T, Philip Morris, and Citigroup all fall to fractions of their 52 week highs; and more conservative bond investors have found their portfolios crushed by bid/ask spreads that are wider than ever or else declining mutual fund NAV values, as once AAA-rated companies and securities find themselves tiptoeing toward junk credit status and a price to match. Now more than ever, investors want simplicity, transparency, and stability, which makes it a great time to be selling annuity products to the millions of Americans who really want to buy annuity products.
What is an annuity? An annuity, in a word, is a series of payments made from one party to another for some period of time, usually as a fraction of some principle amount. In the case of annuity products, a saver will give the salesperson a certain amount of principle in return for a steady stream of income that usually will last until death or at very least until the principle has been repaid (in inflated, future dollars.) Since many fear outliving their money, guaranteed income until death is an attractive insurance policy, and is a risk that the sellers of annuities are willing to take, as the amount of the annuity takes the ‘risk’ of someone living to be 120 into account. Within the annuity universe, there are different types – fixed and variable, leveraged and unleveraged – each of which are tailored to meet a different kind of saver’s needs.
You could be making a lot of money by selling annuity products to anyone planning for retirement. Since the cost of providing the annuity payments is viewed as more or less fixed according to actuarial tables, the commissions associated with the sale of an annuity product are on par with any other insurance policy commissions, with the caveat being that principle amounts regularly exceed $500k, translating into whopping commissions for you and a great deal of comfort and security for whoever it is that chooses to buy annuity products from you.
Selling annuities is a great for you to make good money while providing much-needed peace of mind to savers who have watched their fortunes collapse.