The Secret Ingredient

The best recipes are usually secret because the chef doesn’t want to disclose the ingredients, the chef wants to keep the ingredients secret.

If you don’t have that secret ingredient, your dish will not come out as planned unless you get very lucky. The same thing can be said about your plans for retirement. If you don’t have the proper plan without the proper ingredients, your success may depend on hope and luck, because you will be hoping that you will be lucky. This type of planning, or lack of planning, may create an endless amount of stress, anxiety, and worry, and could potentially lead to a lack of financial success.

During retirement, retirees often want to reduce their overall portfolio risk, manage income taxes, minimize their total fees, increase their income, guarantee their income won’t run out for as long as they live, have the opportunity to earn a competitive rate of return without taking excessive risks, never again suffer large losses like what happened to them in the 2008 Financial Crisis, and leave some money to their beneficiaries. We believe a number of retirees have not been able to accomplish these goals for two (2) main reasons.

1. We believe their lack of success is first due to not receiving the proper information to be able to make the correct financial decisions. They have never before been given all of the data included in our book, Momma’s Secret Recipe For Retirement Success. They never had a “roadmap.” They based a large part of their retirement planning on “old-school” strategies, methodologies, or information that just doesn’t work anymore (like “riding out all stock market losses”). It’s like they are holding an 8-track tape, and they are trying to make it play on their iPhone. It just isn’t going to work that way.

2. We believe the second reason for their lack of success in attaining these goals is they lack one key ingredient to tie their whole plan together. They may have money in the bank which we refer to as Bucket #2, and they may have money in the stock market, which is Bucket #3, but they probably don’t have money in Bucket #1. And Bucket #1 could be the key to retirement success. Bucket #1 is a fixed index annuity with an income rider.

A review of Bucket #1, a fixed index annuity with an income rider, provides:

• Guarantees you will never run out of income for as long as you live, even if you live past age 100, whether you are single or married.
• Guarantees your income for life even if your account value goes to $0.
• Guarantees you will never suffer a principal loss due to stock market losses, because even if the stock market loses -53.8% like it did in the 2008 Financial Crisis, you will lose 0%.
• The opportunity to earn a competitive rate of return based on a low-risk asset.
• Protection of current and future gains against stock market losses, you can’t lose what you earned.
• Income tax-deferred growth of assets until distributions.
• The passing of all remaining asset to beneficiaries at your death.
• Low total fees typically averaging around 1%.
• Income starting immediately or when needed.
• The opportunity for future income increases that are then guaranteed for life.

If you had a portion of your portfolio invested in an asset that really did provide all of these potential benefits, how would you feel? The remainder of this book exclusively discusses fixed indexed annuities with income riders: the most powerful secret ingredient for your own recipe for retirement success.