Welcome to the Annuities wiki! This is a wetpaint place for all of your annuity needs and any help with annuities that you may be interested in. Hopefully as a community, we can help each other out and assure ourselves to help eachother avoid mistakes that are made when investing in annuities. As you may know, annuities are complex vehicles. They offer many advantages, however they can be tricky. It is very important to know what you are looking for, otherwise you may be taken advantage of very easily. This becomes especially important if you don't have the knowledge or education to ensure you do the right thing or make a good decision. Feel free to browse the information here. I am available to answer any questions you may have on annuities or anything else to do with investing.

The main point of this wiki is to have a place where you can collectively collaborate and add content to assist each other with annuities and annuity help. I am creating a thread below called the 'Annuity Horror Stories' as well as a page for that. This will be where you can share your bad experience regarding an annuity in order to assist people from making the same mistakes and to give people insight. Please feel free to share.

By the way, should you have any questions, feel free to click on the word annuities!





With this in mind, I would like to add a few comments.

How do you trust that your money will be in good handswhen it comes to annuities? Well, it's important to first understand that not all annuities are good or bad. Annuities, like other investment vehicles, are as good as the purpose they are serving at the particular time.
For example, for someone who is looking for instant liquidity, an annuity is not going to be the answer. They are notorious for tying your money up for a specified amount of time. That is the tradeoff. Supposedly for this tradeoff, you should enjoy the benefit of (one or more) tax deferral, higher rates, etc. There is usually a plus to the minus.

However, this isn't always the case. It is important that you do whatever it takes to understand your annuity intimately. Yes, I said intimately. If you were going to choose a spouse, wouldn't you want to know as much as you could about him/her? Absolutely!!! The same goes for annuities.

You are stuck with them for a long time (usually 5 to 10 years) and getting out of them (like divorce) can be extremely costly. Therefore, it pays to take your time in order to take it all in and read the fine print.

Sure, your annuity salesperson may attempt to get you into an annuity five minutes after knowing you but you need to do your homework. You need to study the agent, the company he is recommending, and the annuity being recommended. That is how you get good help. You must help yourself first and foremost. There are no firesales when it comes to annuities. You can take your time and rest assure that by doing so, the benefits you look forward to receiving will be available when you are ready.

Again, watch the video above and see if it doesn't lend you insight as to what to do about getting help with your annuities.