¶ Intro / Opening
Tom and Don are talking real money.
There's a lot of advice out there floating around on the internet, uh, in the occasional printed publication, which of course Tom loves. He loves anything that kills trees. He's a big fan. Uh, there's a lot of information about investing, how you should invest, particularly for retirement.
¶ Introduction to Financial Futures
And a lot of that advice comes from people with a well, a questionable motive, uh when particularly when it comes to annuities. We are not big fans of annuities. Let's just start with that. Generally speaking, generally, if we're going to go broadly, we're going to say eh, not the best idea most of the time. However, there are times when when an annuity might make sense.
And to that end, we recently read an article from our friend Christine Benz over at Morningstar entitled How to Buy an Annuity. And we thought we would well comment on her position on annuities, what she thinks you ought to be doing when it comes to using annuities in your retirement portfolio.
Yeah, and she had done a piece earlier about is an annuity right for you? Both of these are available free, by the way, at Morningstar. So you could go read first, is an annuity right
¶ Understanding Annuities
for you. This piece was about sort of once you've made the decision that it is, how to go about buying an annuity and what money to use.
Let's start there though. Let's start with is an annuity right for you? Is it?
How do you determine that? Yeah, I I think a couple of ways. First of all, what an annuity should be designed for would be filling in income from fixed income. Let's let's assume that you have a source, at least one source of fixed income in retirement, that being Social Security, right? Some of some people, I think it's 20%, have a pension as well. So now you've got two fixed sources, right, that are supplying a certain amount.
Oftentimes there's a difference between that amount and the amount of money you're planning on spending or already are spending, right? That needs to be filled. Now, many people say, I really like the whole thing when I was working where I was getting regular paycheck, and that was covering the bills, right? And the trips and et cetera, et cetera. Um, so they're looking for a way to do that that is easy, it it handles it, and I don't have to think about it.
I just the money comes in and basically people want to buy into their own pension.
Exactly. So, and the way to do that for many people, I and I can say it's many people because still can't believe this number. The expectation is more than $450 billion with a B in annuities will be sold this year. $450, that's sounds like half a trillion. Uh, it's a lot of money. Well, look at you, Mr. Matthew. How about that? Adding it all up. So that's basically the reason why you should consider one. Now, the reason why people buy them, I think, is they hear an interest rate.
This is when they cut when they call me, they say, Oh, I'm making 7% on my annuity. I said, No, you're not. Yes, I am. That's what they told me.
I put $100,000 in and I'm getting out $70 or $7,000 a year. That's 7% by anybody's math, including.
They think they're making that. That's what they think they're making. That's not what you're making. That's what you're getting. And by the way, some of that money's yours is coming back, and a little bit theirs.
That's the point we're going to get to. That's a point we're going to get to. Because when you switch over to, okay, now we understand why people want an annuity, because they want a regular income that's predictable.
¶ Choosing the Right Annuity
Got it. But there are trade-offs. Now, in the next article, Christine delves into how you choose an annuity. And this is where the waters muddy dramatically.
For me, very dramatically, because in the piece, by the way, the top seller, you'll be glad to know this year the expected top seller in annuities is the ever-popular, never seeming to go away, despite however many bad things we say about it, the fixed index annuity, which is it still the number one annuity?
Oh, okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna hold back for a moment. Because that there goes the show. I'm gonna sit here quietly, wait for you to fill in the gaps here at the beginning. So tell the story.
Christine Benz goes through where the money would come from, right? And sadly, I see a lot of people buying an annuity with what we call qualified money, right? A traditional 401k bond.
Buying it in their IRA or a 401k before. Yeah.
Because it you're getting tax deferral already in your IRA, and you're kind of paying for that when you buy the annuity. But she does go through does it make sense to use taxable assets, right? These are like brokerage money that you've saved outside of your retirement, or qualified money, which I just described. And then she launches into a product that I for some reason I always forget about these. Maybe because I want to.
The CULAC, right? Sounds like a commercial for insurance that features a duck.
CULAC. I think and I think you should I'm trying to remember what that stands for, too.
The qualified longevity. Longevity annuity contract. Yeah. Longevity annuity contract.
The only benefit I can really see from this is you're able to defer your required minimum distribution. In fact, this year you can take $210,000 of your qualified money, put it in this QLAC that will enable you to defer taking the money out and paying taxes on it until at least age 80.
Well, or no, uh up to age 85. You can take it. You can start it. 72, 75. You can start it anywhere along the way. You can pick any point at which you want to start. But the longer you wait, the bigger the payoff is from the insurance company.
Hmm.
I wonder why. Why would they pay you more at 85 than they would pay you at 75?
Because you're more likely to die. You may or may not see the daylight at 85.
And it does she I mean, here's the thing that she glosses over this part. When you put your money in a QLAC, in a qualified longevity annuity contract, you are giving your money, basically in the most basic form, you are giving all your money to the insurance company for a promise that they will start giving you an income, a fixed income, at a stated date in the future.
But the money is no longer yours unless you accept lower income or you pay for a writer that gives you a death benefit, which is just complexity, added on to complexity. Q lakhs in and of themselves are a guaranteed way to give all of your money to an insurance company should you die before the age at which you start taking income.
And what happens if you die before you start taking income? They keep the money. Now, can you buy a contract that says if I die before the income, you would pay a little less. Okay. Yeah.
So there's always a trade-off. The insurance company will not lose. They can't lose on a deal like this. They really okay. I mean, maybe if you live to be 132.
It pays off for you, not for them.
So, okay. So against that. I'm telling you, just let me just tell you right now, Elon, even you, Elon.
I don't want to see a hundred or a hundred and thirty-two,
¶ Exploring QLACs
no offense. So again, again, in my mind, and I wish it was more straightforward with hers, I would only use taxable, as I said, brokerage assets, savings, et cetera, to put into an annuity of any kind.
Yeah, but the only kind we'd really suggest is the single premium income annuity, the SPIA. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
And describe what that is, right? That's putting in a yeah.
I'm sorry, not income, immediate annuity. SPIA is a single premium, immediate annuity. So you give them $100,000, they say we're going to give you 7% a year. They give you that $7,000 every year. Now that you've given them your money, if you don't live long enough, you lose, they win. You don't have any control over your money, you can't get it back, you can't give it to your heirs. That's very similar to a QLAC, a qualified longevity annuity
¶ Immediate Annuities Explained
contract. And let me just tell you a little bit about, for example, a QLAC, if you funded it at age 65 with $100,000, and you said, Okay, I want income at 80. I'm gonna wait, this is gonna be my long-term lifetime income. If you wait until 80, they're gonna pay you. Get this, it's gonna it sounds really, really. Oh, I'm sorry, I meant 200. I did the 200,000, 200,000 is the maximum. 200,000 at age 65, you put it into the QLAC. 15 years, they say if you wait till eighty, guess what we're gonna do?
We're gonna give you thirty-five thousand dollars a year.
Because they know you don't get that many years.
Basically at the end of the month, remember, they had the money for the last fifteen years. Now, if you had just kept the money for the last fifteen years and invested it at six percent per year. Lower than a balanced fund, pretty conservative portfolio, you would have almost five hundred thousand dollars at age eighty.
Which at eighty, you could certainly take out six percent and pay yourself a thirty-five year. Let's assume a problem.
Let's assume you're earning if you're continue to earn six percent and you take out that thirty-five thousand dollars a year, then you uh will have enough money to live until about one hundred and ten. Yeah, you should be good.
Uh again, so this goes back to why we're not big fans of annuities in general, and specifically anything certainly outside of that immediate, because while you're getting the guaranteed income, while you worry less, while you have no market volatility, you have no liquidity, you really have very little transparency, you have the additional expenses, and you have the risk of the insurance company, right? This is
¶ Where to Buy Annuities
only as good as the insurance company. That's a given fact. So, okay. But assuming that you went back and read Ms. Benz's earlier piece, assuming you've looked at your retirement income, you say, I really want something that's going to supply the income here, and you've decided that this immediate annuity makes sense. Where, my friend, do you go to get one? A single premium. You can't go to Starbucks, I don't think, right, and get it with your latte. No, no, no, no, no. Um where do you buy it?
She doesn't talk about this in the article.
Uh here's the problem the i annuities are sold by insurance companies. And so you can't really get these products through anybody but someone who's licensed to sell insurance. So you're dealing and and it becomes very, very difficult to shop for these because the insurance industry is known, as we mentioned earlier, for opacity. They're not big on transparency. Um so finding a place to buy them where you know you're going to be treated right and get the best deal for your money.
There's no clearinghouse like there is for other types of insurance. You can go with comparable systems.
I would say you probably stand a reasonably good chance of getting one through some of the bigger brokerage firms uh like Schwab or Fidelity, because they're gonna have a lot of annuities from which you can shop. I would say and they're gonna probably work with the best carriers, right? Right. They're gonna work with great carriers and they have tools that let you shop.
It adds a level of safety and transparency that you're not gonna get if you go to the insurance company's cap captive agents directly, like a Northwestern Life agent or whatever. You're you're gonna get a selection, you're gonna get an ability to shop. Uh there are some independent annuity marketplaces that I've never dealt with, so I cannot tell you how good they are or not. Things like immediateannuities.com.
Um but um I if I was looking for one, which I'm not, but if I was, I have an account with Schwab already, I would probably go to their annuity marketplace and shop, shop through there. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
And can you shop at a place like Vanguard, for example? Do they have they because I think in the past they have had annuity products.
Because they're a they're they're a brokerage firm. So they're gonna have that available. Everything's brokerage. And I'm pretty sure let me just check their website and see. Uh they actually have a separate platform, which I don't know anything about. It's from a company called Income Solutions. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Somebody they're partnering with. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, somebody they're partnering with. It's called Vanguard Annuity Access.
Um, but again, there you get the credibility of working with a major firm that's likely to only work with the best carriers. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Right, right. Et cetera.
So I I and I I looked up Fidelity's tool earlier, and it's their annuity search tool is actually very robust. I did not look at Schwab's, but I know they have one. Um so since I'm with Schwab already, I would probably go through Schwab if I was looking for one. But again, the thing is we
¶ The Risks of Equity Indexed Annuities
mentioned this earlier. The most popular form of annuity out there is the equity indexed annuity. These are the worst kind of annuity out there. They are the highest commission annuity out there, which which should tell you why they're the most popular. Because there's the most incentive for agents to sell them to you. The only annuity that will buy you a steak dinner is an equity indexed annuity. That's not coincidental. It's because they make so much money on these.
They can make on a hundred thousand dollar, just a hundred thousand dollar annuity, the agent can make between seven and ten thousand dollars in commissions, or the the agent and the agent through which they're selling. That's a lot of stake.
Great afternoon. That's a couple of cows. Productive meaning. So yeah. That's one reason we don't like them. Number two is we don't like the promise they make. And number three is the actual performance, of which we have looked at from time to time, is certainly not market-like returns. Let's just be fair about that.
It's nothing like what they pitch.
Trevor Burrus, Jr. And I know today's world, it feels like I really don't want to watch the market go up and down, depending on the price of oil and war and interest rates and politics and the rest of it, but you have been paid for just allowing that to be the background and getting on with your life.
But you know, it's funny. One of my favorite questions from listeners and others that I talk to about money, and I talk to other people about it because of what I do. Uh my one of my favorite responses when I tell them about these annuities is well how can they say you get the return of the market? How how can they say that? And my answer is people lie. People don't tell the truth.
And they cover their derriere by giving you, if you buy the contract, they give you disclosure documents and they can say, Well, it was in the disclosure document. You actually had to read the disclosure document. You would have had to read the 200-page disclosure document. How many people sell them don't even read it? Yeah.
Very few. And very few, and very and fewer yet read disclosures on those documents. So there you go. Got to have an annuity. We gave you one. No, you but generally that one.
Don't
¶ Alternatives to Annuities
most of the time you just don't need them. If you have any kind of discipline, if you have any kind of structure in your life, if you can create an income stream from a portfolio of about four or five, maybe even stretch it and go six if you're a little daring a year, you can do what an annuity does and keep your money. It's called, you know, you're that having your cake and eating it too. Kind of thing. Yeah. You can actually keep the cake and eat some of the cake.
And the cake might even keep growing. That's even better. How can you have your cake?
I want that cake. And it gets bigger and you're still eating it. Here's the thing. Generally, when it comes to me and cake, I get bigger, the cake doesn't. Well, what you're saying in this case is that.
This cake would actually get bigger while you were nibbling on it. Nibble would be a magic cake.
Yeah. It's a magic cake. That's a whole different cake we're talking about then.
Trevor Burrus, Jr. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are coming to the most exciting part of the program for Tom.
When I depart?
Oh, no, it's the tree killing segment of talking real money. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Keep that on the DL. That tried to kill my wife.
At least you could use unbleached paper. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Well, that's that's not available here, so I'll put in the request, though. I'm sure in three or four years they'll let me know. Can you get unbleached paper for I don't think so?
Try it. All right. I think they call it toilet paper. No, even that's bleached.
Please, we really need more questions. We really need
¶ Answering Listener Questions
more questions. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Tom says he needs more questions.
So please. And by the way, you can call us like you used to in the old days on the radio show, 8559-35 Tom. Yep, you can keep your questions there. You can call all kinds of other ways. Call Don's special Friday.
No, no, you don't call my special Friday thing. You go to talkingrealmoney.com and you click on ask a question. Okay. But you can you can send them in by typing as Don likes. Tom likes typing.
And this one comes from Athens, Illinois.
Oh, darn it, I had the wrong state again. And I'll be in the other Athens. Des Moines. Des Moines, Washington.
Trevor Burrus, Jr. You can start picking on me now. Athens, Greece, where I will be this summer.
Oh, another vacation. Sir, aren't you taking a vacation like this in April? Yeah, you know you've already taken you're back. I know. Sonny. I forgot you were. I didn't even miss you. I hardly knew you were gone. How about that? How can we miss you if you won't go away? You, on the other hand, how can we know you're there if you keep going away?
Exactly. Bryce writes, Hi there. 30 years old, three accounts at Edward Jones in their Guided Funds Solutions account. You can look that up while I'm talking to you. Guided Funds Solutions Account. As I began learning more on investing in its details, I've realized the fees at Edward Jones are very high. Considering moving those accounts to Roths and one simple IRA to Vanguard, I'm comfortable confident I'll be fine, but nervous on selecting my assets and getting the correct asset allocation.
What would your recommendation be? And is it smart to move out of the Edward Jones program?
Yes. There you go. Just absolutely yes.
And by the way, you can get any and
¶ Investing at a Young Age
Bryce, you're 30. So uh you can get any fund you need at Vanguard, any exchange traded fund. So this is pretty easy.
Um Yeah, and by the way, my guess is my guess, and let me guess. I'm just gonna guess. I'm gonna guess that in the guided solutions. Guided funds solutions. Guided funds solutions. Now they're either using they're using one of two mutual fund groups.
Okay.
American funds would be one guess. Oh, good one. Do you know what the other one is? I don't really. Okay. They're uh because this is proprietary. The bridge builder funds.
Ah, yes, those have become more popular in recent years. Well, yeah, because they're proprietary. And they're selling them.
Yeah, and and they actually have, even though they're they're actively managed, they have much better expense ratios than the American funds. So they're very competitive, but they're still actively managed. Traditionally active. Traditionally active. Yeah. Like picking stocks.
Figuring out what direction the market's going, that kind of good stuff. So 20 basis points is really shocking. That is shocking. So yes, I would not keep my money at Ed Jones. And not necessarily for the fees, although, yes, they're going to be higher. Uh, but because you're not going to get treated to 100% protection of a fiduciary advisor, Ed Jones decidedly not that direction. So that would be one. But in your case, Bryce, that's pretty easy.
Because in a Roth, you should probably just have one fund. You could have A V G E or A V G V. Either one would be fine. How old is he? Thirty.
Thirty.
Yeah, that's a long time until we're that's an aggressive age.
You can be very crazy aggressive.
I mean, you could almost do the same in your simple IRA, but if you had to have bonds there, you could have a balanced index fund of some kind, but you could do one fund for all three of those accounts at a very Low cost and be very well diversified, and the upside tremendous. So, yeah, I'd move, I'd go to Vanguard, that's fine as your custodian, and buy one of those one fund solutions.
So Well, and I'm looking, this is really funny. Um, the this just shows the performance of uh of active managers versus just indexes. Over 10 years, the large cap growth fund at Bridge Builder, which is going to be similar to the S P 500 or similar to the S P growth index, uh the S P Growth Index has done 15% per year. Wow. Over 10 years. Yeah. On average, over 10 years. This fund has done 13%. Shows you right there. Over and and that's not expense ratio, that's just not matching the market.
They're buying and selling stuff, telling you what's coming next. So uh that's an easy one, Bryce. Well done. Uh from Pensacola, Florida, Michael writes us. Love the guy, love the show. You guys back a traditional investing philosophy and have for decades. You readily admit you're hesitant
¶ The Debate on Cryptocurrencies
to change.
Mm-hmm.
We said that all the time. Yeah. Sounds like my ex-wife. Uh, this evidenced by your slow transition to ETFs. That's true. Yep. And now finally ditching the radio. Which is true.
The radio still has a pretty good audience. It's just we wanted our weekends back, but okay.
Which most have done so already in favor of dedicated podcasting. Better late than never. In that vein, it appears you're late to cryptocurrencies. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You still push bonds for stability. There's nothing there. No, you're going to it gets better. This gets better.
Okay.
You really should take the time to see what strategy is doing for the financial markets. Capital is flowing from traditional assets, bonds included, to Strategy's perpetual preferred STRC. For stability and security, it's collateralized by five times with Bitcoin and cash. It strives for and has maintained consistent stock price of over $100 in its lifetime. Its annual dividend yield currently $11.55 paid monthly.
It's maintained this dividend, even though the current Bitcoin winter, where Bitcoin price has dropped 45%. This product is appealing to the small investors like me, to the institutional and nation state investors needing stability as well as the increased return. It has a sharp ratio of over three, significantly better than QQQ, Gold, BND, NVIDIA, Google, et cetera. Would love to hear your thoughts on this groundbreaking offer by Michael Saylor and Strategy.
Strategy, this is their preferred stock. Yes, correct. Strategy Incorporated. If Bitcoin is going up, they're going to make money. If Bitcoin plunges for a long period of time, this thing's in deep, deep, deep trouble. It can't pay the 11.55 then. Well, of course not. 11.55. This is it it's it's a oh how do I describe it? It's a gimmick. That was the word I was looking for. It's not a bond, okay? So please don't compare it to bonds. It's not a stock because it can't really grow.
If Bitcoin plummets, it's going to plummet. I I can guarantee you if Bitcoin, it it can only do as well as Bitcoin does. And strategy has done the the the strategy stock itself. Look at that. That that's gonna give you an idea where this thing is gonna go because strategy has in the last let me just pull up the longer term numbers here. Uh I'm sorry, I should have had this, but I didn't have the question in front of me. Yeah, I apologize. In January of 2026, Strategy traded for $178 a share.
Used to be MicroStrategy. Uh right now, MicroStrategy, when we recorded this a couple weeks ago, MicroStrategy was trading on $130, less than $130 a share.
Message received.
STRC is gonna hold up a little better because of the perception of safety from that dividend. But that dividend is unsustainable if Bitcoin continues to decline. I mean, they they they've held their value, but the reality is and that this thing has fluctuated a little, it's held its value really well only because of the dividend. But that dividend cannot be paid if they run into trouble, if Bitcoin runs into trouble and the value of their assets goes down.
Which is worrisome. Well, which is more worrisome to me is bond replacement strategies. How many of these have come along? Many have come along. And many compare themselves to U.S. government bonds, um, which you know has really done pretty well at paying back the people that loan them money at the aforementioned interest rates. Um, the full backing and credit of the U.S. government is substantially better than cryptocurrency. I I don't know how else to say it.
So I wouldn't bank on them as a bond replacement strategy. Number two, for me, just as looking at this from the high level, anything that's paying 11.5%, there's got to be a risk attached to that. Uh it just has to be. So I'd be very careful, Michael, with something like this. I would not use it for bonds. I guess you could use it for a speculative play of some kind, but it wouldn't be something that we would use nor
¶ Caution with High-Yield Investments
recommend. I'll put it that way.
I mean, if you're gonna do the speculative play, then you do MSTR. You do just strategy stock. Um and and I I let me tell you one we yes, we were late to the ETF game. That is a what we still like the idea. We just weren't sure how it would hold up in a bad market if the market was a very good thing. Because we'd seen the bottom fall out. Yeah. Yeah, we saw it during the flash crash many years ago. So this is different. This is this is structurally massively different.
This is an asset created on an asset that was created that really still to this day I do not believe has any reason to exist. That's my fundamental belief, and I cannot imagine that belief will ever change. Ever. Because of the lack of logic. There is no logic behind cryptocurrencies. There isn't any. None. Not as an investment, not as a currency, not as a currency. I mean, other than that, it's like I still don't know what it's good for.
It's not digital gold because it gold has a physical form and shape and use. Crypto still doesn't have a strong, okay, you can make your little baby El Salvador use case. That's not a real use case. It has no real use case. Your only use case is if all the fiat currencies, air quotes, collapse completely. Everybody's gonna go to Bitcoin, right? I I mean, what there's there's nothing there. There's nothing there. This emperor really is walking down the street naked, this currency.
I think it's naked.
You can't wrap it around.
No, no, and everybody's afraid to say anything because you guys, you crypto bros, are so rabid in your defense of it. You're you're truly rabid
¶ The Illusion of Cryptocurrencies
about it. Your your arguments are spurious and you're and I'm gonna get another bad review. Yep. At least I guarantee it. Yeah it's coming. And the fact the fact of yeah the if you notice most of the bad reviews we get, some of them are about the fact that we're we're old guys and out of touch, which I kind of think follows. Um most of them are about our our dislike of crypto. Tom is far Tom is more afraid of you than I am. Tom's just more afraid than you are.
Yeah. Tom Perry doesn't want to come out and just say it as bluntly as I do. Anything for that point. But there's nothing there. This is a big nothing. Yeah. There's nothing there. And the and the perfect example of nothing there is every other crypto that isn't a stable coin. Dogecoin. Oh, come on. Really? A joke doggy coin?
Okay, I'm done. You're you're you're you're gonna go on. So thank you for your question. Thank you for listening.
And the answer to do to that is not the same as an ETF.
No. Oh that's a whole different topic. All right. So speaking of topics, if you've got some, we'd love to do that. Questions, I mean. Oh, questions, topics, concerns, anything? We're happy to take
¶ Engaging with Our Audience
them. Happy to and there's a number of ways you can do it. As Don just said, you can go to your computer, go to talkingrealmoney.com, and you can record a question right there. It's that easy.
It says ask a question. You can see it in the button area.
If you want to join me in taking down those big trees, uh you can type a question. Yeah. Or you can call us, 855-935-Talk. Any of those ways.
Each question gets printed on a piece of paper and then printed on four more so he doesn't lose them. He says a duplicate.
Because the tree limb tried to kill my wife. And uh and so I'm coming after you guys. And if you want some one-on-one help, you can go to the same aforementioned talkingroomdy.com, click on meet an advisor.
Happy to do it. You have it right there. Oh, and also you can call in your questions at 855-935-talk. 855-935-8255. So ask away and listen every day. Oh, that was poetic, wasn't it? Ask away, listen every day to Talking Real Money.
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