It’s hard to avoid advertisements that knock annuities. In fact, once you start doing online research about retirement, the warnings and diatribes will follow you to your inbox.
Every time I see one of these, I think of the quote from Albert Einstein: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Or to put it another way, the stages of reaction to an idea follow the predictable pattern of reject, resist, embrace and, finally, self-evident.
Having spent my career in the insurance, annuity and retirement industries, I know that certain annuities are overly complex. On the other hand, some are elegantly straightforward in their purpose and design. So, it’s just wrong to dismiss a category like annuities without investigating and understanding all the products or services within that category. More