Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome everyone to the Annuity Straight Talk podcast, episode number 171. My name is Brian Andersen, founder and creator of AnnuityStraightTalk.com My Last Day in Mexico. Gonna shut this camera off and maybe go get some more sun and then head to the airport shortly. Got a newsletter written for you sitting up by the rooftop pool yesterday. It's been a very healthy month. A lot of good sunshine, good food, very nice people. Never done this part of Mexico before, so I'm new to it and I'd have to say I would do it again. Recommended trip, but a lot of you guys that take trips and stuff, you know what you like and that's fine. I want to encourage you all to like subscribe or comment on any of your favorite podcast platforms or on YouTube. Share it with your friends, get the message out for anybody that you think could use it. I'm working hard to provide you guys information and here's my newsletter for the week. When I think about all these things and actually being in a place with a lot of people, I still tend to keep to myself a lot. I have a lot of time to think about things and I think about the people I talk to through the website or around and what stood out to me, which I thought was important. I was trying to think of an idea to do. It came up with this title. And these titles are done to make sure that people that are looking for the information find it. It's not salesy, it's marketing and just letting everybody know. Cause if I buying an annuity in 2023, Google's gonna dump that to the bottom. The ads are gonna be expensive. It's not gonna be worth my time to chase it. But as much as I like to think it did, think it does. Over time, not as much has changed in the annuity business. Buying an annuity in 2025 is not any easier than it used to be. There are a lot of good operators on there and a number of people online who are trustworthy.
[00:01:45] But it does only give you more choices. And more choices means more information. You gotta sift through it. And unfortunately, there are just as many lazy agents as ever. Maybe good people, but they don't do a whole lot of homework. They take someone else's word for it. Marketing, whatever agencies will give you, hey, this is the hot product for the month. That means they're making the most money on it, not always the best. But those are the guys who sell one or two things, maybe just one company to everyone. Regardless, like the Dinner seminar guys. There are good guys that do dinner seminars as well, but there's dinner seminar guys that are going to sell the same product to the all 30 couples that show up for that, and it's just not the way you should do it. Yeah, those guys don't really shop around a whole lot. I would say maybe they don't do homework, but that tends to be, unfortunately, the largest swath of available agents that can sell this stuff. So when that happens, like, it gets tiresome to me, and so I want to go through this and give everybody kind of a focal point to what to look for is I ended up answering the same questions over and over again. And the podcast is beneficial to answer those questions ahead of time. So someone sees that beforehand. And with 171 episodes, we're going to update a lot of them from the past. But we need to keep those front and center because there's. I don't expect any single person to be able to sift through all those podcasts and find, hey, that's the one I need. Okay. As you guys can expect, I ran into a lot of retired people down here. People. People vacationing. Most of those were Canadians. Nice people. I grew up around Canadians, so I get along with them. A lot of them for eastern Canada, some of them from western Canada. But they all ask the same kind of question, what kind of work do you do? Because I look a little bit younger than them. The Mexicans all seem to think that I look like I'm in my early 30s, so that's flattering. Never thought I'd need that kind of reassurance, but, hey, I'll take it, I guess. Yeah. What do you do? You can stay here for a month. And you guys understand. I could go around with a sales pitch all the time, but I don't really work that way, especially with a full schedule. I don't want to go out in the evening to go have dinner and then keep trying to drum up business. That's why I started the website. You come to me if you want me. I'm not going to come chase you now. I can't do a whole lot for Canadians anyway, because I'm from Montana. There is an opportunity that I know of where I can. Someone who maybe has a second home in Montana, because there's a lot of those, but it just doesn't ever come up a whole lot. And their retirement system's way different. We don't need to go into that. But the Americans would ask the same question. So. Met a couple of investment advisors, One retired, one not. And we did talk about the website and what I'm doing and what the deal is. But over the years, because I've been doing it online, it's put me on the spot to say I don't really have my one liner that just easily explains what I do. If I say I sell annuities, then people will be just like, oh shit, I don't talk to him. I haven't really nailed down a one line approach to it because times like this are the exception in my life for the most part. Back in Montana, I pretty pretty much a loner. So it's okay. Yeah. So I guess suppose I could give people a pro, an annuity pro or tell them what to avoid. Hey, annuities are great. Pros can be done in a sound bite. I think it's a little too salesy. Guaranteed income, protected asset, an annuity might be the best options.
[00:04:55] But what got me thinking about this is the bad advice that people are coming to me after having received that. And I figured that takes a little bit more time to tell you what to avoid, but I figured that's going to be more useful. And a lot of some people prefer positive information and don't like how a negative opinion. If I give you a negative opinion of some type of advice, it's like I've had a lot of people, hey, why don't you just tell us what does work instead of telling us what doesn't work? Well, because most people are coming to me because they have questions about whether something will work anyway. But this will take longer to develop, which will not make a good sound bite in the sales pitch in the Caribbean. But I wasn't coming here looking for extra business. I was coming here to get out of the winter and enjoy some more weather. And you guys need to be able to differentiate between good advice and bad. So here are the top things to avoid. If you are going to buy an annuity in 2025 or if you bought one in 2023 or 24 and you want to make sure you did the right thing. A lot of people come two years after the fact. Yeah.
[00:05:55] So here's the deal.
[00:05:57] Number one, do not buy guaranteed income that you don't need. There's still a lot of guys that will sell only guaranteed lifetime income contracts. A lot of people come to me saying I've got this five or six years ago, there's this fee on it, it hasn't grown a whole lot and do you need the income? No, they just said this was the safe place to put it. Often the annual increases are or the roll up is misstated as the contract yield. Hey, this one's paying, I had it last week. This one's paying eight and a quarter. That's not eight and a quarter yield. That's eight and a quarter annual increase to the income. Needless to say, I've seen a lot of people paying fees for something they don't need and a lot of times it's because the consumer trusted the advisor and thought this is a safe place to put it and this is the only thing available. Every single one of these is going to relate to a podcast I have done in the past and you can go to the newsletter page. I will link those if you want to compress this and look at more information regarding one of these. Okay, number two, never buy a myga fixed annuity with a multi year guaranteed based on the rate alone. So rate increases in the past few years, it's a big part of my business. Really nice yields for safe money savers. But when will the rate ever be good enough? Everybody? It's like, oh like I like a contract now that pays five and a quarter to maybe five and a half which three years ago people would have been jumping on. And now it's like I don't want that. I gotta have six. Six you go B plus company. But if safety is a reason for using an annuity, doing that is counterintuitive. And there's not much you're leaving on the table in that little spread there. You're just gaining more peace of mind. And peace of mind is the reason you're supposed to do it. You can also consider free withdrawals and renewal terms depending on how much liquidity you need. But you should be as picky as possible and look at all the options. And I said it earlier this year, I, I will be as picky as I wanna be right now and limit what I sell to a handful of companies that I know are extremely stable. So podcast couple of years ago, how to choose the best myga. And then there's one earlier this year about being really picky and choosy. So number three, stay away from private equity LED insurance company. This is a phenomenon that I talked about earlier this year. It's going to continue to be a theme. If you're tired of it, too bad because this is really important. It started out in 2009 has become more prevalent. Private equity companies, like all the assets insurance companies that they can get it, they take their accounting and their Investments offshore to two different places, they get away from US regulation, take a little bit more risk, maybe have less in reserves.
[00:08:30] So some serious reports in the past few years, my friend Carrie Pector is one of them. He's going to continue to do it because he was really onto it when he started it. And now he's getting a lot of traction, especially with the companies that are under a lot of scrutiny right now. But changes in their accounting practices and their investment models have led to questions about their stability. Now this is a corporation that's taking you away from traditional insurance company operation and management. The thing is you can get just something just as good if you go with a company that doesn't do that. So it's not worth it. Do a little homework, go to the right place, go to somebody who understands what to look for and you'll be fine. And then you don't have to sit there three years from now and be like, oh, there's a couple companies that require cash infusions from their private equity partner just to stay out of the regulators crosshairs. It just, it's a mess in some places but there's still really great traditional insurance companies. And number four is don't buy any growth annuity without evaluating several options. So that's don't buy a fixed index annuity unless you specifically choose it over a myga. MYGA is the building block index annuity is for more potential if you want that. Don't buy a registered index linked annuity without understanding the alternatives. There's a lot of investment managers, hey, here's safe money. There's ability to lose, maybe sometimes there are fees. If you choose that, make sure you do it with seeing the alternative. And don't buy a variable annuity almost in any circumstance unless you know exactly what, why you need all the fees and you really want that. The death benefit, the income, the mortality and expense. You can stack fees up to 4, 5, even 6% in some of them that I've seen. So we have a podcast about every single one of those statements right there. Number five, the last one. I really hate to pick on these guys, but it's just so easy. But only a bad advisor would sell nothing. But Allianz, ABC and the 222, I still hear it all the time. This is the best product. So 222 is the best annuity you can get.
[00:10:32] It's an annuity, it might work. It is not the best. And then when they say we want an option, okay, there's the ABC Was that it? Allianz is the best company. That's all I sell now. After years of poor performance, I did this, highlighted this. Last year, there was a flood of money out of Allianz. The illustrations never worked out and bonuses ended up being what I've said for years and years. I've had lots of advisors come to me and say, man, I wish I'd listen to you. Ten years ago, I ignored what you said. You were right. Do your homework. That's what we're supposed to do. If we're professionals, we work on our trade. And if that's all you got, I'm sorry, you're intellectually lazy. There are a lot of advisors who refuse to change. And every time now I hear it after everything that's put out there. And again, like, if you want to buy the annuity, go ahead. They are never the best in the situation. They're annuities that might work for your goals, but if you really trust the guy, the contract works. You understand all the parts of it. But I'm saying stay away from the guy who only gives you that as an option anyhow. So a lot of this centers around the fact that guys aren't. They're sickening of one thing. They've got tunnel vision. They're taking a path. I put a lot of pressure on myself by putting all this information out here because you have the opportunity to call me on something. Hey, you said this. I sold the guaranteed income deal to a couple yesterday and they went through some videos. But you said, don't do this and don't do that. And so I had to explain why in their situation, what I was telling them to do would be most beneficial and give them the option of the other way and show them how that would work out, and then they see why. So they do it with confidence. And that's the point of what we're trying to do at Annuity. Straight talk. I could probably go on with this list, make a dozen or more. Who knows? I wanted to keep them solid, concrete. This is very consistent with the type of people I'm talking to that I see coming to the website, making appointments. But that's the stuff you're going to run into if you're going to buy an annuity in 2025. There are obviously good people out there. I get people that call me and tell me what they did, and it sounds great. Hey, good guy, great. I do that. I'm not trying to steal all types of business, but do yourself a favor and take a little bit of time before you make one of the biggest financial decisions of your life. It's not that hard to understand. And you guys get it as well. I know. I'm not trying to patronize anyone. If you want to make sure you do it right, this is a good place to start. If you plan to buy an annuity in 2025, then go ahead and make an appointment. Top right corner of any page on annuitystraighttalk.com schedule a call button. Share it with your friends like subscribe or comment. This has been episode 171. My name is Brian Anderson and I'll be back with another good episode next week. You guys have a great day and thank you for joining me. Okay, bye.
