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Mr. FIA-X joins us again on the Fun With Annuities podcast for episode #69 this week to reveal the secrets of how the “annuity sausage” is made. His first appearance set records for listeners and viewers, and the demand for more of his insights was overwhelming.

Okay, so let's talk about single premium immediate annuity's acronym, SPIA, S-P-I-A. They are the oldest annuity type on the planet and were introduced in Roman times as a pension gift, a lifetime income stream gift to the dutiful Roman soldiers and their families for laying it on the line for the empire.

So, is an annuity a good investment for an older person, a retiree, a senior citizen, a World War II generation? This is a big-time serious topic. And I'm going to go through it in detail so that you can make a good decision, whether it's you out there making the decision for yourself, or you're making a decision for your mom or dad or somebody like that.

So happy that Tom Hegna joined me for Fun With Annuities episode #68. Tom is an expert on all things concerning retirement and retirement income. Together, we turn on a firehose of factual information on retirement and how annuities can properly be a part of your plan.

Is an annuity affected by the stock market? The stock market and annuities are giant topics, and some are affected by the stock market, and some aren't. We're going to go through every single type of annuity, single premium, immediate annuities, deferred income annuities, QLACs, multi-year guarantee annuities, index annuities, variable annuities, all of them.

The five reasons not to buy an annuity. Really? Yeah. Not everybody needs an annuity. Every single video/ article out there has "five reasons to buy an annuity"

July 30th is National Whistleblower Day, so it is with incredible pleasure that we have Bradley Birkenfeld, the most influential financial whistleblower of all time, as #67 celebrity co-host this week.

Let’s start by explaining what a qualified annuity is exactly. It's an annuity where you've used funds that has not been taxed like your traditional IRA, which leads me to a little bit of a rant. I get very sick and tired of stock-type advisors, fee-only advisors, and people who don't know our darn thing about annuities saying to never put an annuity inside of an IRA.

Today's topic is a good one. How renewal rates are the secret sauce, the secret formula, the secret to fixed indexed annuities. So let's do a little history lesson on fixed index annuities, the hottest selling product out there in annuity world. Indexed annuities were developed and introduced in 1995 as a CD type product.

Drumroll… This week's Fun With Annuities celebrity co-host is Dana Anspach, one of the country's most respected retirement and investment minds. In addition to her lengthy bio listed below, she has created unique client strategies to manage their money.

As I’ve said before, you just can't say annuity because there's many annuity types, so it really comes down to the type of annuity that you either own or you're considering owning. The biggest thing with annuities is the fact that annuities are contracts, they're not investments with contractual guarantees.

Robert Powell, CFP®, is a long-time award-winning financial journalist and frankly one of the most influential, whose work appears regularly in TheStreet.com, USA TODAY, The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, FinancialAnswers.io/RetirementInvestor.io, and AARP.

A question I get asked often is, what percentage of your portfolio should be in annuities? Really good question but there are no perfect answers. And if anyone's giving you a percentage, they have no clue what they're talking about.

So the question is, what's the difference between a pension and an annuity? Is a pension the same as an annuity? We're going to go into that. Short answer is they're both lifetime income guarantees, but let's dig further and do a side-by-side comparison of pensions and annuities so you can understand what's out there.

Each week I bring you the best in their field, and this week is no different. This week's celebrity co-host is Christine Benz, Morningstar's Director of Personal Finance and someone I have been a massive fan of for years because she makes complex investment topics clear and accessible to the average reader.