In preparation for our upcoming 10th anniversary issue of Senior Market Advisor magazine, we decided to consult with a couple of industry experts to take a look at the big picture: how sales of annuities, the cornerstone of our industry, have changed over the years.
First was "Annuity Advisor" columnist Jack Marrion, who's been with the magazine since we started.
"Depending on the type of annuity, producers have experienced either a roller-coaster ride or a promising leap followed by a plateau over the last decade," he writes. "Sales of multi-year annuities have dramatically soared and crashed as CD rates did the same, leading to 2008-09 record fixed rate annuity sales as CD rates plunged to their lowest levels ever. Index annuity sales roughly doubled in the first part of the decade when the stock market looked scary, sales stalled in the middle years as the stock market appeared stable, and then jumped up again due to the '08 crash. The new normal times of the next decade foretell promising years for annuity purveyors," he wrote.
