Go to the Sidelines With Annuity Contractual Guarantees: Shootin' It Straight With Stan

Welcome to Shootin' It Straight With Stan. I'm your host, Stan The Annuity Man, America's annuity agent, licensed in all 50 states, sporting the fresh annuity goatee that is sweeping the nation as a fashion statement for facial hair on financial professionals. I think. My youngest daughter says, "Dad, living near you is like watching a midlife crisis in real time." Midlife crisis? That means I'm going to live to like 120. That's not going to happen.

‌Today's topic is a good one. Go to the sidelines with contractual guarantees. And you're saying, "What are you talking about, Stan? You're talking about football sidelines, like college football?" No, I'm talking about investment sidelines. At the time of this blog, check the date. There's a little bit of chaos going on. There are multiple wars. There's always political chaos, and I could care less either way because both parties seem to be, let's just say, not hitting on all cylinders. But from an investment standpoint, these are wild times. I've been doing this for decades and decades and decades. That would be three straight decades, and this is a weird time. Now, I know all you historians are out there going, "Well, Stan, there's always weird times. There's always those times like that."

‌Make Money Contractually

‌Okay, great. I know I'm talking like Gene Stallings, the Alabama ex-head coach who they have a statue. For all you football people, you know who that is. Anyway, but up until, I don't know, a few months ago, and actually at the time of this blog, looking back into the previous year, when interest rates did move significantly, you can now go to the sidelines and make money contractually. In the past decade-plus, look at the date on this blog, when you went to the sidelines, you got hurt. You didn't make that much money.

‌Money markets weren't paying that much. CDs weren't paying that much. MYGAs, Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities, the annuity version of a CD, weren't paying that much. Treasuries weren't paying that much. I get the issue with interest rates. 33 trillion in debt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's ugly. I get it. But you got to make hay, as they say, at the time we're making hay. I need to look that up on why we're saying making hay. I don't know. I guess it has to do with harvesting. I guess it does. You're harvesting safety, you're harvesting yield, and at this point in time, you can harvest yield. You literally can go to the sidelines and get a good contractual, not a hypothetical, not a theoretical, not a back-tested, not a, "Mr. Jones, if you'd owned it 10 years ago, look what you'd have made."

‌Fixed Rates

‌Please don't be that stupid when you can go out and get contractual guarantees. I always say the trifecta of principal protection: CDs, treasuries, and MYGAs. Now, of the three, I sell one: MYGAs. You can go to my site, and see a live feed in your state filtered by state and duration of the best MYGA fixed rates on the planet. They're not indexed; they're not variable. It's a fixed rate. It's a guaranteed interest rate for a specific period of time that you choose: one year, two year, three year, four year, five year, six year, seven year, eight year, nine year, and 10 year; you can lock in. You can actually go longer than that, but you got to put a gun to my head and tell me why.

‌I don't want you to think when you put money in the market, or when your master of the universe tells you to put money in the market, "Well, we're going the sequence of returns, and if you don't, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," that's fantastic. And it's true from the standpoint of long-term investing. But a lot of you out there are getting ready to go into chapter two of your lives, are in chapter two, or don't have either the stomach anymore or the age left to weather another downturn. So, should you take money out of the market, should you do this and that, should you?

‌Contractual Guarantees

‌Now, the person charging you an annual fee to manage it, what do you think their answer will be? "Well, no. Don't sell because these seven days, if you'd have just hung in there, you'd have made..." You know all the stats; you've seen all that junk. And I used to be with Dean Witter, Paine Weber, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Union Bank of Switzerland. I was doing non-guaranteed stuff, which is why I'm over here doing guarantees because I come from rural North Carolina. I don't like losing money. Warren Buffett has two rules I love. Number one, never lose money. Rule number two, never forget rule number one. That's what The Annuity Man is all about. We're about contractual guarantees. We never look at hypotheticals, theoretical and back-tested, and unicorns chasing the butterflies.

‌Is It Worth It?

‌But I want you to think for a second. When you put money in the markets and try to get a reasonable rate of return, 7% or 8%-ish, you're putting your money at risk. And hedge funds, private equities, offices, and family offices getting the two and twenties and all those fees, if they're getting 7%, 8%, they're doing great. They're beating the benchmark. Well, at the time of this blog, you can lock in a contractual yield of over 5%. I know in the future you're going to read this and go, "What's he talking about, Marlon? I don't know what he's talking about." Look at the date. At the time of this blog, you can lock in over 5%. So, my question to you is this: is it worth putting your money at risk to get the other two or three percentage points? Do you really need to hit that triple? Are you good with a standup single?

‌Not Callable

‌That's where we are right now in the financial world. People have found out that bonds can go up and down. Nothing wrong with bonds, but they can go up and down. The underlying value of those seesaw effects with interest rates. But with CDs and MYGAs, which are the annuity industry version of a CD, MYGAs are not callable. You can buy CDs that are not callable. What does that mean in English? That means you can lock in long-term rates and know they will be there when interest rates go down again. And they have to go down again because we can't service the debt as a country at these rate levels regardless of what Boog Powell says, all your Orioles fans out there. I got a lady the other day who goes, "Please stop calling Chairman Powell Boog Powell because he was one of my favorite Orioles players of all time."

‌Lock It In

‌I'm like, okay, but I love Boog Powell. He's one of the biggest first basemen of all time. He's so big he had to tear his sleeves. His arms wouldn't go in the sleeve, so he had to tear them to get his arms in. That's when you know you're big. I never had to do that. Just a spoiler alert with my basketball stuff. I'm good. I had to actually take the uniform in. I was so skinny. But if you're considering going to the sidelines with some of your money, you can't put all your money in annuities. Of course not. I wouldn't allow you to anyway. But right now, you can get really good, fair, contractual guarantees, and not pay any fees, and not pay any management fees or account fees or anything like that. You can lock in good rates.

‌We're finally here. Jimmy Carter's still 99 years old, bless his heart at the time of this blog, still alive. We're not going to get to those interest rate levels, but we're at levels that are fair. Everyone asked me, "Well, what do you think, Stan? Do you think interest rates are going to rise again? What do you think we should do?" First of all, if I knew where interest rates would go, I wouldn't be talking to you. I wouldn't be doing these blogs and videos. I'd be on a Learjet trading interest rate futures. Nobody knows. Stop trying to thread the needle. Stop trying to look for an arbitrage moment. Stop trying to wait for the bell to ring. It doesn't ring at the top or the bottom. Trust me. If you think the guarantees are fair, then lock them in. And at this point of this blog, you can go to the sidelines and watch the chaos in the markets and still get a very good return on your money.

‌Client Example

‌I did a video called You've Won the Game, Why Are You Still Playing? Many of you out there have enough money to live off the interest. The other day, I got a call, and the person wanted to place multiple millions of dollars into an Immediate Annuity. Someone's trying to sell them an Index or Variable Annuity. I'm like, slow, slow, slow down there, Chester. How much income do you need? And it was enough to where he just bought CDs and MYGAs. That's all he bought. He protected the principal, peeled off the interest, and it reached his income goal. With many people out there, you can just live off the interest and never touch the principal. Never.

‌People ask me, "Stan, what do you do with your money?" That's what I'm doing. I have enough money. We're not living off the interest, but the interest, I think, is good. We're locking it in long-term, longer on the yield curve than I would in the past. Why? Because MYGAs are not callable, and the CDs that I buy, I buy them not callable, and yes, I do buy CDs. Listen, you can't put 100% of your money in annuities. And I'm Stan The Annuity Man, America's annuity agent, licensed in all 50 states, sporting the annuity goatee, which will take the world fashion by storm. Listen, you'll look in Paris, like the runways, and you'll see both male and female sporting annuity goatees. Now, my wife's not a huge fan of that, but she's been married to me for 35 years. She'll get over it. She's going to get it all.

‌The other day, she was mad at me, and I put her in the middle room. I said, "I need you to spin around like a ballerina." And she did. I said, "Guess what? All of that's yours. All of it. All of it's yours." Now, don't off me because I do have a lot of life insurance, but it is what it is, and I digress.

‌If you want to go to the sidelines, go. There's no reason to hesitate because you can get great contractual guarantees. Wherever your money's at, at the brokerage firm or the large online firm, I won't give them props because they don't pay me, but ask them what their CD and non-callable CD rates are.

‌Go to my site, pull up the MYGA live feed, Multi-Year Guarantee Annuity. Pull those up and see those guarantees. Those are not callable. Those rates are locked in for the duration. You can go to the sidelines and high-five as you go off, like a basketball player who just won the game. They run off and go, "Hey," they high-fived the coach. Why are they high-fiving? Because they won the game. You've won the game. High-five. Run off the court, high-five, you've won the game. And if you want to go back into the markets, go back in when your neighbor walks out the door and vomits after seeing the market losses because I don't know if you're watching the news, and who can believe anything, but it looks pretty chaotic to me. It looks pretty chaotic in the Middle East. It looks pretty chaotic in Russia and Ukraine. It looks pretty chaotic in DC.

‌We've been on a pretty good run here. And I'm not a market maven at all, so don't take that as advice, but if your stomach's getting a little queasy, go to the sidelines, and go to the sidelines with confidence with contractual guarantees. Go to my site, pull up the live MYGA feed, watch the MYGA videos, and read the MYGA owners' manuals. Schedule a call with us so we can listen to you. We can answer your questions, help you out, and place you in the right annuity type that will solve for your specific solution.

‌But if your solution and goal is to go to the sidelines and get a contractual guarantee, then do it. Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities are one of many types of annuities out there, but that's the annuity to go to the sideline with. Not indexed or variable, nothing against them, but MYGAs, M-Y-G-A, Multi-Year Guarantee Annuity is your sideline annuity. That's the annuity you go to the sideline with confidence because that yield is contractual, and that yield is not callable.

‌Wasn't that invigorating, factual, informative, and inspirational? Sporting the annuity goatee, my name is Stan the Annuity Man. I'll see you next time.

Never forget to live in reality, not the dream, with annuities and contractual guarantees! You can use our calculators, get all six of my books for free, and most importantly book a call with me so we can discuss what works best for your specific situation.