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You may not have noticed, but over the summer a “Buckets” war broke out in the retirement income business. It seems that everyone has discovered “Buckets,” a reference to time-segmented asset allocation or “laddered” income-generation strategies.
In June of this year the non-profit National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) launched a retirement income-focused website called [...]

What factors stand in the way of independent advisors and broker-dealers maximizing their success in the retirement income and Rollover IRA markets? It’s a complicated question with multiple answers including the impact of potentially disruptive changes in the regulatory landscape.
One area that I am convinced will really matter is the quality of advisor-client communications. [...]

With so much upheaval in the economy one wonders about what changes may arise in the not too distant future. In that context let me offer two predictions:
Prediction Number One: All advisors will be deemed to be fiduciaries within 1-2 years.
There could be no development more disruptive to today’s financial products distribution landscape than [...]

Nothing happens in a vacuum. If it weren’t for Dateline NBC it’s very likely that the SEC wouldn’t have voted today to characterize indexed annuities as securities. You’ll recall Dateline’s “sting” operation featuring hidden cameras and shills posing as annuity prospects. In the post-Dateline environment the SEC apparently could not fail to act. Chairman [...]

An open meeting took place on June 25 during which the SEC decided to propose a new rule (151A) that would require many fixed indexed annuities (those that count for virtually all of the sales made) to be registered as securities with the SEC. Chairman Christopher Cox made it quite clear that “senior [...]

When I came up with the idea for a blog based, in part, on interviews with executive leaders in financial services I couldn’t have known how popular the one-of-a-kind conversations would become. Nor could I have foreseen that Research Magazine, under the byline David Macchia Interviews, would publish one of my interviews each month in [...]

Last week an Ignites article by Hannah Glover highlighted a study of Boomer-directed websites that found that most companies’ retirement websites fail to live up to their sponsors’ advertising pitches. The report entitled, “Online Support for the New Retirement,” conducted by Practical Perspectives and Gallant Distribution Consulting, found retirement firms’ websites are typically, “…too scant, [...]

As someone who generally plays the role of interviewer, I’m appreciative of Senior Editor, Kerry Pechter, for the interview he conducted with me that appears in the December ‘07 issue of Annuity Market News. Kerry asked my about a variety of issues that are important to me including the state of the variable and fixed [...]

Based upon the number of responses it elicited there clearly was no shortage of interest in Part One of this series. I can understand why. Many annuity agents have been thrust into something of a netherworld by events largely beyond their control.
Annuity agents are experiencing a continuing disruption of their traditional [...]

Earlier this year I published an essay on the burgeoning effort to recruit annuity agents into the ranks of Registered Investment Advisors. While I haven’t written about this issue since that time I’ve thought about it a great deal. So have a lot of other people including some who see an opportunity to create [...]

On the topic of retirement income planning Phil Lubinski is one the most experienced and knowledgeable financial advisors practicing. His virtually exclusive concentration on income distribution over more than two decades places him among a tiny minority of advisors who have mastered the investment and income tax strategies required to properly place retirement assets into [...]

In spite of its warts, the indexed annuity industry and the products it provides may well play an important role in helping Boomer investors maximize their capacity to generate retirement income. People like me who advocate for an improved annuity industry hope that the indexed annuity industry will meet its varied challenges head-on and ultimately [...]