Can This Annuity Ease Social Security Claiming Pressure?

The thinking: Tyler said the two-income-level annuity strategy has been a great niche product and works well for many middle-income clients as well as more affluent clients.

“We found a lot of adoption of the Personal Income Annuity in the federal worker space,” he said.

At the U.S. Postal Service, for example, many workers can retire at 58, and, especially on the East Coast, they might be in couples with a total household income of about $200,000, he noted.

For many of those workers, he said, the dominant view of income and investment risk is, “I need income now; I’d like to give the risk to somebody else.”

The median premium paid is about $100,000, and the average is about $155,000.

The amount of premium paid tends to correlate with what a worker has saved in a 401(k) plan account, Tyler said.

The advice: Tyler said one challenge for Nassau has been persuading financial professionals to consider offering a new type of annuity.

When confronted with change, “agents pause, even when it’s something good,” Tyler said. “Agents are used to the concept of selecting one check forever. Now they have to explain two checks.”

He said the major challenge for financial professionals is explaining Social Security realities to the clients.

“People are sometimes surprised by how small the check is,” Tyler said.

He said clients are also shocked by how much of their Social Security checks they have to use to pay for Medicare and supplemental insurance products.

But “the longer you wait, the larger the check is,” and that helps sales of products designed to push the Social Security claiming date back, Tyler said.