QLAC Archives - Jerry Golden on Retirement

A QLAC Does So Much More Than Simply Defer Taxes

June 15, 2025 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Annuities, Jerry Golden, QLAC, retirement savings

Here are the multiple ways you can use a QLAC, from managing retirement risks to creating income for specific retirement needs and wants.

Perhaps you’ve heard of QLACs and want to learn more about how you might incorporate one into your plan for retirement income, but you feel like you don’t have quite enough information.

No wonder.

A well-written and thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times about reducing risk in retirement did mention annuities, but to my chagrin, it didn’t bring up the value of QLACs, despite:

Government endorsement of QLACs’ significant retirement benefits
A competitive QLAC marketplace, with top-rated insurance carriers
Flexible planning software that can show you how to integrate a QLAC into your retirement plans
QLAC rates are at an all-time high ─ for a new retiree, an average of 80% better than three years ago

Check out the rates for yourself by visiting our QLAC Calculator.

How to Grow Your IRA in Retirement Rather Than Spend It Down

February 1, 2025 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: IRA, ira2income, QLAC, retirement income, Retirement Planning, retirement savings

You really can defer RMDs and lower taxes while at the same time increasing the long-term growth of your IRA. Here’s how.

Almost everyone has an IRA, 401(k) or similar retirement savings account. The purpose is to have that money available when you stop working. But what if you don’t need it right away?

This question was prompted by readers who want to know how to create options with the income from their IRA to minimize taxes and maximize liquidity — rather than merely taking the required minimum distributions (RMDs) each year. Their primary goals are about longer-term liquidity and legacy, instead of just income.

Home-Based Planning to Address Long-Term Care Costs

July 30, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: HECM, income, Legacy, Liquidity, Long-term care costs, QLAC

Traditional planning for the cost of long-term care (LTC) doesn’t reflect the realities of what the costs are and where they’ll be paid from.

We’re living longer in retirement, and more of us want to age in place rather than sell the family home. A recent policy paper by AARP listed the goals of the age-in-place population:

Ensure access to affordable, high-quality long-term services and supports (LTSS) that maximizes the dignity, independence, and protection of older adults
Create age-friendly, livable communities that enable people to age in place, and continue as engaged members of their communities
Support family caregivers
Provide ample opportunities to generate, save, and preserve financial resources

Those goals all seem reasonable and smart. Our focus is around # 4 — and about planning to preserve resources while meeting retiree objectives.

Let’s start with costs.

Is Your Retirement Solution Hiding in Plain Sight?

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Annuities, HECM, HomeEquity2Income, QLAC

Here’s how to use your home equity in combination with an annuity contract to produce late-in-life income.

Editor’s note: The earlier article How Your Home Can Fill Gaps in Your Retirement Plan discussed the “why” of incorporating the equity in your home in your plan for retirement income. This article discusses the “how.”

In retirement, your home means something more than it did while you were raising kids, getting promotions at work, and dreaming about how the future might unfold.Now, it can provide the opportunity that helps you realize your future in retirement — financially at least.

For most of us, our house carries much more equity than it did when we were just starting out. Home prices have more than doubled in the past 20 years. How to use that equity to benefit you and your family is a key retirement question that your home can answer. But as you will see, it may work better when combined with an annuity contract that produces late-in-life income.

How Your Home Can Fill Gaps in Your Retirement Plan

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: HECM, HomeEquity2Income, Income annuity, QLAC, Retirement gaps

If you have gaps in your plan for retirement income, you might consider adding the value of your home to your planning.

Most retirement planning methods have ignored what for some retirees is their largest single asset — their home. That means the plan may fail to deliver on one or more of the five things retirees want:

Don’t run out of money
Grow income each year
Leave a meaningful legacy for kids and grandkids
Increase spendable income by reducing taxes
Build up a source of liquidity for unplanned or unfunded expenses

With the addition of the new HomeEquity2Income (H2I) program described in this article, Go2Income now covers over 90% of all retiree asset classes. H2I uses the equity in your primary residence to fill in the gaps in your plan that otherwise might require insurance that you don’t qualify for, higher-risk investments, or more aggressive assumptions as to yields and returns in your plan.Starting with this article and continuing over the next month or so, we’ll cover the why, what, and how of the HomeEquity2Income program.

First, the “why” of H2I.