Page 145 - Ready Set Retire

Ready. Set. Retire!

In one recent weekly issue of Investment News
there were three articles on fixed annuities—
this from a periodical that in the past might
have mentioned fixed annuities three times in
a year. One of the articles was titled
‘Wirehouses Warming to Indexed Annuities,’
centering on how wirehouses are now
embracing them. As a Merrill Lynch managing
director said, ‘Five years ago, nobody hated the
product more than me, but now I’ve seen the
light.’ Wall Street has discovered index
annuities. Why now? They say it’s because the
products have changed and are no longer ‘bad’
but that’s not the real reason. Wall Street is
looking at index annuities they failed to kill
them and their traditional solutions aren’t
working well…

As index annuity sales grew after the
millennium bear market, Wall Street and its
minions bombarded securities regulators with
exaggerated stories of index annuity sales
abuses and how agents needed to be stopped.
In truth, there were sales abuses, but never
even close to the extent that the naysayers

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