Inflation-Adjusted Guaranteed Income

To help retirees keep pace with inflation and still have guaranteed income, Minneapolis-based Thrivent Financial for Lutherans introduced this month a new single-premium immediate annuity.

The product includes a payment type adjusted for inflation, the company said in a statement, which is linked to the consumer price index (CPI) and is guaranteed never to decrease. If deflation, rather than inflation occurs, annuitants will never receive less than the amount they received the previous year, Thrivent said.

Using historical CPI data and inflation adjustments calculated according to Thrivent's new product, a monthly annuity payout that had started in January 1996, for example, at $1,000, would have grown throughout the following 10 years to an annuity payout in January 2006 of $1,296.08, a total increase of more than 29%, Thrivent said.