Despite the plethora of investment- and payout-options with available variable annuity contracts, advisors often focus on the tried-and-true reasons for using them with clients.
Dean Zayed, JD, LLM, CFP and CEO of Brookstone Capital Management LLC in Wheaton, Ill., cites two primary reasons for recommending VAs.
"One is to get a tax-deferred growth vehicle for a client, inside of which we would like to access some of the alternative space," he says. "A typical client there could be a 45-year-old doctor who's in a high tax bracket, doesn't need an income rider or a death benefit, likes the tax-deferral and is looking for maximum growth.
"The second scenario typically," explains Zayed, "is where we're using the income rider where we have kind of a lifeboat built into the VA where it is a growth-engine. You still get tax-deferral but the primary purpose is to have this guaranteed future income stream that you can set up now by buying a rider."
As Zayed mentions, the option to consider alternative investments within a VA is attractive.
Tom Cochrane, CFA, publisher of the Annuity Digest, agrees. "I think that the alternative market is here to stay, and that applies to the retail sector as well," Cochrane says. "That makes sense given what's gone on over the past several years, in 2008, etc.
"People simply don't want to be pegged to what goes on in the broader market," he adds. "They want to have some sense of kind of downside protection and hedging, etc., and it's also a difficult return environment for people."
That interest among advisors and investors has led Jackson National Life to recently introduce its Elite Access VA, which includes alternative investments as a core part of its offering.
The unanswered question, of course, is whether investment advisors will move client assets into alternatives within the VA contracts.
So far, at least, it's been less a flow of funds and more a trickle of assets among VAs that offer alternatives, says Frank O'Connor, product manager with Morningstar's Annuity Research Center.
