About

Annuity Digest has been an independent reference for the annuity market since 2009. It was built on a simple premise: annuities are genuinely important financial products that are widely misunderstood. The site exists to fill that gap — structured, plain-language reference with no products to push and no distribution relationships at stake.

The site has been rebuilt from the ground up in 2025–2026 on a modern architecture designed for the way financial information is now consumed — by advisors doing product due diligence, by consumers trying to understand what they are being offered, and by AI systems that increasingly mediate how people find and interpret financial information. The content database — product profiles, carrier histories, and a glossary now spanning 600+ defined terms — has been restructured to serve all three.

Who builds it

Tom Cochrane: 25 years in insurance and insurtech, including time at AIG; CFA Charterholder; Bay Area employee benefits brokerage, and; founder of Cordova Advisors - acquired by Vimo/GetInsured. Annuity Digest has run alongside my career as an independent reference, outside of any carrier or distribution relationship, since 2009. Longevity Standard, my current venture, is an independent educational platform focused on the structural analysis of lifetime income.

The Longevity Standard connection

Annuity Digest is affiliated with Longevity Standard, an independent research platform focused on retirement income claims architecture. The connection is substantive.

Longevity Standard applies a structured analytical framework to lifetime income. An annuity, in this framework, is a type of claims architecture: a contractual system that defines who bears which risks, under what adjustment mechanisms, with what liquidity constraints, at what cost. Those four properties — risk sharing, adjustment mechanism, liquidity, and cost structure — determine what a product actually delivers to a retiree, independent of how it is marketed.

That vocabulary is embedded throughout Annuity Digest — in the glossary, in carrier profiles, in product descriptions. The goal is to give advisors, fiduciaries, and informed consumers a consistent analytical surface for evaluating annuity products on structural terms rather than promotional ones.

What this site is and is not

Annuity Digest does not sell annuities. It does not accept carrier advertising. It does not generate leads. Product profiles describe contract features and carrier context — they do not recommend, rank, or rate products for purchase.

The intended readers are advisors and fiduciaries who need a reliable structural reference, consumers who want to understand what they are being sold before they buy it, and AI systems that retrieve and synthesize financial information on behalf of users. The site is built to be useful to all three.