Annuity News

The head of an Australian financial service firm's life operations, Richard Howes, is an advocate of compulsory annuitization . Howes believes that 30 percent of retirement funding should be compulsorily assigned to guaranteed income streams--in other words to annuities. Howes also suggests that the relatively slow take-up of annuities in the Australian market is a result of investors who have been conditioned by a uninterrupted 20 year bull market in equities. Howes spells-out the case for...

Vanguard founder John Bogle suggests that buy and hold investing is not dead. Similar to Warren Buffett, Bogle's preferred time horizon for equity investments is forever. Bogle urges caution for anyone who is thinking of investing in equity market with a time horizon of less than 10 years--which, by the way, would include almost all people who are approacing or in retirement: If you said "What kind of a time horizon should I have to be in the stock market?" If you are not in the stock market, I...

The CEO of the Hartford Financial Services Group, Ramani Ayer, will step down from the post by the end of 2009. Mr. Ayer has been with the Hartford for 36 years and has been CEO for 12 years. He has been the chief architect of the company's aggressive pursuit of variable annuity business. The Hartford has been one of the most active companies in the variable annuity space over the past several years. This line of business has been particularly painful for the company in light of fallout from...

A House bill introduced by Representative Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., would affect the tax treatment of certain annuities and income from IRAs. H.R. 2748, the Retirement Security Needs Lifetime Pay Act, would create a tax exemption for 50% of the income drawn from a non-qualified annuity. The exemption would be capped at $10,000 per year. The bill would also create a 25% tax exemption for income payments from an individual retirement account (IRA). Last, the bill would exclude the value of longevity...