Annuity Guarantees

[Chad Fratto]

I work as a financial advisor and sell insurance and annuity products through other insurance companies. A new product that has become very popular with investors are these annuities with guarantees attached to them. Your money is invested into the market at the same time. So if the market drops, we have an annuity guaranteeing 7% a year for 10 years. This portion of the guaranteed amount is used only for a stream of lifetime income payments. I'll leave it at that because it can be very confusing to explain over this. There are fees of course to pay for this type of return, but I was just interested if any of you are familiar with this type of investment product offered through insurance companies and what you think about it?