My first instinct was to dislike annuities. It ties up a large chunk of your money and makes it illiquid. You can set it up so that once payout starts it also goes to the surviving spouse, but it won't go to your heirs.Not if you want liquidity.
With index funds, you can easily liquidate everything, leave the country, and take everything with you.
However, the Washington Post is currently running a very interesting series on the extremely individualized scams against seniors to rob them of their retirement savings. These scams are successfully fooling smart and sophisticated people. A previous series described a scam against a retired government scientist. The current series has the scammer posing as an FBI fraud investigator.
There's no guarantees such a scam might not work against me when I have diminished faculties, let alone my spouse.
However, if it should occur, the only surviving assets would be social security and annuities.
The other argument in favor of annuities is that I'm more likely to actually spend them in retirement during a market downturn. I don't think I'm quite there in terms of buying them right now, but I'm on the fence and am at least planning for it. The current plan is to eventually annuitize half of my bond allocation at different points in time, to allow rebalancing and to address interest rate fluctuations.
Statistics: Posted by wolf359 — Sun Dec 08, 2024 10:04 am