Monday, 21 April 2014

What Makes A Good Annuity Advisor

By Essie Osborn


In layman's words, annuity is described as an investment deal between an investor and an insurance company where the investor enjoys some tax advantages. Adding it to your portfolio of investment can be a very good financial move particularly when you are approaching the retirement age and you do not want to expose your life savings to turbulent fluctuations in market trading. In order to get the best deal however, you need a good annuity advisor to lead you through.

Why annuity and not any other investment plans offered financial institutions like banks, insurance firm, mutual funds or even stock exchange? There are many answers to this, but most people approaching retirement age prefer this option for the reason that they do not want to expose their life savings to market fluctuations.

They have several benefits some of which include the fact that they guarantee that you cannot run out of money, increase in future retirement income is guaranteed for every year, protects asset from the creditors and probate and is the safest way to pass more to heirs as inheritance.

Annuities come in several types which include immediate annuities, the equity indexed, variable and fixed annuities. Each of these varies in one way or the other and has its own merits and demerits. It is the job of your consultant to outline all these for you and tell you which option is the best and which one is not.

These specialists ought to urge his customer to try for that venture alternative that is in his best investment and not simply anything. On the other hand, the expert has an obligation to enlighten the customer on the investment vehicle on his or her interest. These specialists are typically expected to stick to professional codes of conduct.

The major issues that your consultant should avoid include misrepresentation of information in sales of the insurance or other financial related products, false advertising, defamation, twisting, rebating (offering the client inducement in any form), use of bait and switch to get client purchase what was not originally planned for.

In addition to these, these consultants too should completely avoid talking negatively about their rivals, the rival products and character unless there exists official records of civil or criminal nature committed by those rivals. Basically, they should use their energy to promote their products telling the clients how they stand to benefit.

Many consultants prefer not to recommend annuities to their clients once they realize that there is a possibility that insurance company may be having financial difficulties in the future. Annuities are actually the best way to militate against longevity risk. It is the opportunity to protect the client from the financial problems the insurer is facing.

There are several tips that can be helpful when locating the best insurance firm to take the annuity from. These include working with bigger firms which are known to be less prone to solvency risks, take advice from the rankings as put forward by Moodys, S&P and Fitch and ensuring that the engagement rules are very clear.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment