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Do You Have Lifetime Income Insurance?: Shootin' It Straight with Stan®
Today's topic is, do you have lifetime income insurance? I know what you're saying. "Stan, that's sappy. We know where you're headed with this. You're going to talk about." No, I'm going to start out by asking you some questions. Do you have car insurance? Do you have home insurance? Do you have flood insurance? Do you have fire insurance? Do you have life insurance? Which is the best return on investment you'll never see because you're dead. That's a great investment. Do you have Long Term Care insurance? Do you have that type of insurance that you might not ever use, and money goes poof down the rabbit hole? Let me ask you the main question. Do you have lifetime income insurance?
Now, the answer to that for every single one of you with a Social Security number is, "Yes, Stan The Annuity Man®, I have a portion in lifetime income insurance and that's Social Security," the best inflation annuity on the planet. For all you hypocrites out there that say you hate all annuities, then stop taking your Social Security payments, or if you're planning on taking them, don't, because you're a hypocrite, because you hate all annuities, remember? It's the best inflation annuity on the planet. It's part of your overall income floor.
If you have an IRA, a traditional IRA, a 401k, things like that, that's been deferring taxes, as of right now when you hit age 72, the IRS is going to tap you on the shoulder and say, "Hey, there's these things called required minimum distributions you're going to have to take from your IRA." To me, that's a forced annuity. I know people argue with me all the time semantically about that, but you're taking money out every single year. So, if you have a Social Security number and you have an IRA, you already have lifetime income insurance, period. If your spouse has an IRA and then they're going to have Social Security, then now you have four.
My question is, do you need more lifetime income insurance? And before we get started on the types, let me just dunk on all the people out there that say, "Well, I'd never buy a lifetime income annuity, Stan, because when I die, the annuity company keeps the money." That's going to go down in the history of things people say about finance as one of the most uninformed statements of all time. The crazy part about that is a lot of the people saying that are advisors who don't know anything about annuities, who need to shut up and read my books and watch my videos and listen to my podcast every Tuesday, Fun With Annuities.
The bottom line is this: you can structure lifetime income products and there are currently four, and there could be an argument there are five ways to get lifetime income from an annuity type. There are many different types. There's not just one annuity. You can't just say, "I hate all annuities." That's like saying you hate all restaurants, you hate all shoes. Again, misinformed. Don't say it if you don't know what you're talking about. But do you have lifetime income insurance? We can structure it so that 100% of any unused money will go to your family or your trust or whoever you want the beneficiary to be, and the annuity company never keeps a penny, even though they're contractually obligated to pay you as long as you're breathing and to pay even if there's no money left in the account if you live forever. Are we clear about that?
Do not call me and say, "Well, I'd never buy an annuity because I don't want it to go poof when I die. That's one of over 40 ways to do it. That's called "life-only." If you're a complete misanthrope and you hate humanity and you hate your kids and you hate your family and you hate life and you hate all people, first of all, I understand, but second of all, you can do life-only. But if you say to me, like the majority of people do, "Hey, Stan The Annuity Man. I've worked my butt off for this money. My spouse and I, we have scrimped and saved and we have accumulated. Yes, we want a lifetime income stream, but man, if we die early in the policy, we do not want that annuity company to keep a penny. We want them contractually obligated to pay as long as one of us is breathing, but we want 100% of that money to go to our beneficiaries contractually." We can do that.
Now with that premise laid, that foundation solid, and you understand the evil annuity company's not going to keep a penny of it, then let me ask again, do you have lifetime income insurance in addition to your Social Security and your forced RMDs with your IRAs? Do you? Do you need more? And if so, how much do you need? Now if you go to my site at theannuityman.com, you can run what's called a reverse engineer quote with income starting now or in the future. There are four calculators we have: an Immediate Annuity calculator, a Deferred Income Annuity calculator, a Qualified Longevity Annuity contract calculator, and Income Rider. We're the only ones with an Income Rider calculator at this point, and we're proud of that. And we're shopping all carriers for the highest contractual guarantee for your specific situation. Annuities are commodity products.
The question is, do you need a gap fill of income? Then quote it. Or you can say, "Well Stan, we have a lump sum. We don't want to tie up or annuitize the money. Can we get lifetime income insurance by just protecting the principal and peeling off interest?" At this time, interest rates are at a level that yes, a lot of you can do that. Just like buying a CD, there's what's called a Multi-Year Guaranteed Annuity. That's the annuity industry version of a CD. We have a live feed on my site at theannuityman.com. You just pull it up, put in your state, put in the duration, and you'll see the best rates, period. And some of these might allow you to take interest out, some don't. But if you want to take interest out, then those are the ones you're going to focus on. And you can protect the principal, not pay any fees, and peel off the interest. That's another way to do income. That's another form of lifetime income insurance.
When you hit Chapter 2 of your life, and you know what I'm talking about, you're not working anymore or you're headed toward retirement, you're headed toward the door and you're going to go take care of yourself and take care of the spouse and go spend some time with your family and do the things you've wanted to do. Live your life right now. That might mean lifetime income insurance.
Fill in that income floor, whatever that income floor is, let's contractually fill it up in combination with Social Security and RMDs or whatever pensions you have, dividend income, et cetera. Let's make sure that that monthly amount is hitting your bank account every single month and you don't have to think about it. If you want to have money in the markets, go do it. Knock yourself out. But cover those basic expenses with lifetime income insurance and annuities, the four to five different types of annuities that provide lifetime income. Insurance can do that contractually. You own an annuity for what it will do, not what it might do®. So I ask you once again, I need you to think about lifetime income insurance.
Now don't come back to me and say, "Well, I'd like a product that adjusts for inflation because of inflation..." There's not a product on the planet that adjusts for inflation. And anyone who tells you they have it, get up and walk out or hang the phone up. Nobody's figured that out. The closest you're going to get is I bonds. But you can't put a lot of money there. I love I bonds. Go there, TreasuryDirect.gov, but don't talk to me about inflation. There's no way to solve for that. And inflation affects every single one of us differently and individually. Me, I'm not buying as much milk anymore because my kids are gone. We're not taking them to dance classes, so there's no gas, and there's no dance class that I'm paying for. I mean, inflation is hitting me differently than it’s hitting you. Don't just carte blanche-ly say, "Well inflation, I don't know what we're going to do with that one, Stan." We're not going to do anything, because no one can do anything. All you can do is look at your guaranteed income floor that's needed and if you need more, you add to it.
If anyone says, "Well this annuity, it increases with inflation." All the annuity company will do® is severely lower the initial payment to make up for it. Typically it's like 30% and the break-even point makes no sense. Annuities are math, Run the math numbers. Don't buy the sales pitch. Run the math numbers because you're buying a contract. I encourage you to look at the annuity category and the four to five types that provide income as lifetime income insurance. You're going to need it. You're going to live longer than you think, your spouse is going to live longer than you think, and you're going to have to prepare for not outliving your money. They call it longevity insurance. I call it lifetime income insurance. You know what else? I call it? Smart, proactive, getting ahead of the cognitive decline issues coming down the pike.
Lifetime income insurance, I need you to think about it. I need you to contact us at theannuityman.com. We'll run customized quotes for you. We will treat you like a professional. This is not some, "Hey, there's a nail. We're the hammer." We don't do that. You buy annuities on your terms and on your timeframe. And that's the reason we've trademarked the phrase, "The Annuity Man®, where annuities are bought, not sold." Do we sell them? Yeah, we sell more than anyone on the planet. But it's on your terms and it's after you've run the quotes and it's after we had the conversations. It's after you've read the books, it's after you've looked at the videos and the podcast and all that stuff and you feel comfortable with it.
Never forget to live in reality, not the dream, with annuities and contractual guarantees! You can use our calculators, get all six of my books for free, and most importantly book a call with me so we can discuss what works best for your specific situation.