Welcome to the Jill On Money show. It's Sunday, August 7th. And we are here every day, seven days a week, answering financial questions or maybe just giving you another set of ears and eyes on your financial situation or a particular question or something that's bugging you, anything like that, all you

need to do is go to jillonmoney.com, click the contact us button. Don't forget to let us know if you

want to come on the air. And Mark does everything else. Today, we are talking to Phil from Tennessee.

So, I don't know, 15 years or so ago, my employer, you know, like a lot of other employers,

decided to get rid of the traditional defined benefit pension and, you know, move everybody to a 401k.

You know, and they up there matching and all, which was nice. They didn't have to do that, I guess.

But one thing they did do was they created this thing they called a personal pension account.

And it seems to act or has acted like a savings account and grown very slowly, but it never went down.

But anyway, I'm 58, and I'm looking to retire and start a new career.

I've got this choice to make of what to do with this account.

They're basically saying I can take a lump sum.

They will purchase an annuity for me.

And, you know, there's like a hundred different flavors of the annuity between me and my wife.

And, you know, does it disappear when I die? Does it disappear

when she dies? Does it stay level? So the last one dies, you know, all that kind of thing. In the

fine print, it does talk about that it subsidized for people that are retiring early and implies

that the subsidy gets smaller and smaller, the closer you get to 65.

I found a calculator on the Internet somewhere where I could compare a lump sum of an annuity

and put all the interest rate to kind of see what might be the best choice.

And for somebody 58, like myself, if I was to live 30 years, I just took one example.

If I just did it for myself until I die, say I lived 30 years, it would pay $1,552 a month.

And according to the calculator, that's about 7.3% interest rate.

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