You don't date an annuity, you marry it. An annuity isn't a mutual fund that you buy today and sell tomorrow. Nor is it a certificate of deposit, ready for any new use at maturity. When you buy an annuity, you are making (or ought to be making) a 15- or 20-year commitment, at least.
The motivation to start the infrastructure business was to have at least one business that gives you annuity income. Others are services businesses that don't give you annuity income. If you keep the customer happy, you make money. But in a household, if there are five people, keeping all of them happy is also difficult.
Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.
For example at the moment there is a compulsory requirement to buy an annuity. That is something we would get rid of. It puts some people off saving.
People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.
The older you are when you buy an annuity, the shorter your life expectancy will be - so the greater a monthly paycheck the same sum of money will buy you. When interest rates are higher, the size of the paycheck for the same sum of money will rise also.
An annuity is a very serious business.
people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them
Shopping for an annuity with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake can be daunting, even for an economist.
Content pays an ongoing information annuity that other forms of marketing simply do not.
The best tool today is longevity insurance - they call it income insurance. Most people know the value of life insurance. But what if you live? So instead of trying to guess one or the other, you plan for those 20 years and you get this income insurance. If you live beyond 85, you have money that's guaranteed for as long as you live in the form of an annuity.
People worry that if they buy an annuity and then die before the policy starts to pay off, their heirs will lose out. I tell them, "What you should be more worried about is if you outlive your money, you will have to move in with your kids. Ask your kids which of these outcomes they are more worried about."
When fresh sorrows have caused us to take some steps in the right way, we may not complain. We have invested in a life annuity, but the income remains.
Thankfully, in my youth I had the best financial advisor a son could ask for: my dad Walter. When I got that first signing bonus in 1978, Dad took my cheque, announced, 'This is what we're going to do,' and bought an annuity with it.
You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff. And if you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.
People only buy when they're ready to buy. Not when you're ready to sell
Abbott Labs absolutely are on the mend. You were able to buy 15 percent growth over the last five, 10 and 20 years at 13 or 14 times earnings, ... It's a great opportunity. Buy on this dip. We think a year from now the chart's going to be a mirror image on the up side.