Advisor Annuity Conversations Often Lead to Transactions: Global Atlantic

Moderately affluent retirement-age U.S. residents who talk to their financial professionals about annuities often end up moving cash into annuities.

About 47% of the clients surveyed said they had had conversations with their financial professionals about annuities.

Just 9% of the clients in that group dropped their annuities as a result of the conversations; 52% ended up buying annuities or adding cash to in-force annuities.

A team at Global Atlantic put data on those findings in a new report summarizing the results from an online survey of 1,018 U.S. retirement savers ages 55 through 75.

What it means: About one-quarter of financial professionals' moderately affluent clients believe they have made more use of annuities because of interactions with their financial professionals.

The survey: All of the survey participants had life insurance agents, investment advisors, financial planners or other investment professionals, and they all had $250,000 to $1 million in investable assets.

All participating households had an individual retirement account, a 401(k) plan account or a mutual fund or brokerage arrangement.

Global Atlantic posted a condensed version of the survey results on the web.

Philosophy: When asked to choose between asset protection, return performance and return consistency, 46% of the participants ranked asset protection first, and 31% ranked performance first.

In response to another question, 90% of the participants rated choosing "investments that provide a consistent, stable rate of return" as a top priority.

"Investments that have opportunity to make money but have higher risk" came in last on the priority list.

Long-term care planning: Roughly 41% of the clients surveyed said they had discussed long-term care planning with their financial professionals.

Only 23% own long-term care insurance or other LTC planning products; 19% hope to buy LTC planning products in the future.

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