Welcome to the Better Off Bonus Call of the Week.

We're sponsored by Betterment, the largest independent online financial advisor.

I love dropping this extra episode every single week. It is a chance for us to dive

deep into your financial life and also to kind of hear what's on your mind that helps us create the content that we think you want.

So if you'd like to get on the program with us, just send an email. Ask Jill at betteroff podcast.com. That's what Phil did. He's from Tennessee.

Phil welcome to Better Off. What can I do for you? Well thank you. 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 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.

Like even during the financial crisis you know it just kind of grew.

It's very small for interest rate.

But anyway I'm 58 and I'm looking to retire and start a new career and I've got this choice to make of what to do with this account.

They're basically saying I can take a lumbum. 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 died does it disappear when she

dies does it stay level so the last one dies you know all that kind of thing but in the

fine print it does talk about that it subsidize 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

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