Income Annuities in Retirement: EDU #2621
The Retirement and IRA Show
Jim Saulnier, CFP® & Chris Stein, CFP®
4.3 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chris’s Summary
Jim and I discuss income annuities in retirement as a lead-in to National Annuity Awareness Month, using a Fidelity Viewpoints article to frame the discussion. We walk through the article’s points on essential expenses, paycheck-like income, and management simplicity later in retirement. We also distinguish traditional income annuities from more complex annuity products and address liquidity, inflation protection, insurance company risk, and death-benefit trade-offs.
Jim’s “Pithy” Summary
Chris and I use a Fidelity Viewpoints article on income annuities in retirement to get an early start on National Annuity Awareness Month. The article points out that an income annuity may help when Social Security and pensions do not fully cover essential expenses, may provide some peace of mind around income that lasts for life, and may make retirement easier to manage later on. Those are not new ideas around here!
Those essential expenses the article discusses is what we refer to as the Minimum Dignity Floor
: food, utilities, transportation, housing, and healthcare. If Social Security and pensions do not fully cover those expenses, a simple income annuity may be worth understanding because if the basics are projected to outlast the income already in place, the question deserves more than a knee-jerk yes or no.
We also spend time on what happens when the paycheck stops. People can have plenty of money and still miss the safety of income showing up on schedule. That is where the bottomless cup of coffee idea comes back in, and why spending during the Go-Go years can feel different when the basics are covered. Chris also gets into the simplicity point: aging, confidence, fraud risk, and why the older you, or a surviving spouse, may not want every decision tied to a portfolio. We also get into the article’s trade-offs, including loss of liquidity, lack of inflation protection, insurance company credit risk, and what happens if someone dies earlier than expected.
Show Notes: Fidelity Article – “How to feel financially secure in retirement”
The post Income Annuities in Retirement: EDU #2621 appeared first on The Retirement and IRA Show.
Transcript
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| 0:47.1 | This is the retirement and IRA show coming to you from beautiful Northern Colorado. |
| 0:52.1 | Join us as certified financial planner Jim Sondier, as well as Colorado State University Finance Instructor and Certified Financial |
| 0:55.1 | Planner Chris Stein teach you about IRAs, borrow-en-case, annuities, Social Security, |
| 1:01.1 | pension plans, and estate planning in a fun and enjoyable show. |
| 1:05.3 | Whether you are listening live in Colorado or streaming from their website or iTunes podcast, |
| 1:10.7 | Jim and Chris want you to know that |
| 1:12.3 | they're available to help you plan for your retirement. Just visit their website at Jimhelps.com. |
| 1:18.4 | That's Jim H-E-L-P-S.com and click the Meet the Team button on the homepage. Now here's Jim |
| 1:25.6 | and Chris with today's show. |
| 1:34.3 | Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Retirement and IRA show EDU edition for this week. |
| 1:42.4 | What we're going to do this week is, I guess, kind of a precursor for the month of June, |
| 1:50.5 | where we focus not entirely, but substantially on annuity education, |
| 1:56.4 | we'll call it, and that is in honor of National Annuity Awareness Month. We've been doing this for a number of years. So I know it's not June quite yet, but we had several of our listeners send us in a article |
| 2:09.2 | that was released not too far back. |
| 2:13.2 | I think it was in March or so, so just a couple of months ago. |
| 2:17.1 | And it was released by Fidelity Viewpoints, which is, it's kind of a blog, you know, little |
| 2:24.8 | articles that Fidelity releases with their thoughts on a number of topics. |
| 2:29.3 | And they happen to release a topic that references their views on how an income annuity might be useful or valuable in retirement. |
... |
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