10 year period certain US-based annuity - Looking for a good vendor

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I have about a week to wrap up signing a contract for a 10 year period certain annuity with a US-based annuity vendor. I'm currently a (long term) green card holder and I'll be eligible for social security not long after the 10 year period certain annuity expires; we will use the annuity to build a specific income floor for the next ten years (low-ish five figures annually, in case you're wondering). We will ask vendors how much money they would require to provide that income floor.

The criteria for choosing a vendor can be summed up as four factors: financial viability, reliability in making monthly or quarterly payments, amount they charge to provide the income floor we're seeking, and how much they charge in fees (and how predictable they are about fee charges, on a closely related issue).

Hopefully some here have had good / bad experiences with particular insurance companies / annuity agents and don't mind sharing them here.

I am looking diligently online for resources on my own, as well. But, I've found advice from this forum to be particularly helpful for these kinds of issues and it has helped us make better decisions several to many times. Also, with time being short, hopefully this helps noticeably for speeding up the process.

Thank you in advance for any insights shared.

PS: The full details of why it is so advantageous to create a 10 year period certain annuity in such a short time frame have to do with some arcane parts of US and Canadian tax law and our imminent departure date. Providing all that detail could get this thread off topic. Suffice it to say that no substitutes for a 10 year period certain annuity would be as advantageous; the product is fixed, the amount pre-determined. The only choice left is to find a good vendor. Thank you in advance!

[FLBiker]

I don't have any experience myself with annuities, but if you don't mind, I'd love to hear more about the particular advantages and resources that you've found.  I'm a US citizen and Canadian permanent resident (should be Canadian citizen in ~2 years).  And please feel free to PM me if you don't want to derail the thread with this.  Thanks!

[Financial.Velociraptor]

@EnjoyTheJourney

When my father retired, he had one requirement for where to move his old 401(k) - it can NEVER go down.  "It is everything I've worked for all my life".  Not even short duration bond funds were acceptable.  His risk tolerance was ZERO.  I have put him in a mix of bank CDs and his tIRA is in a RMD compliant SPI annuity.  For the first 7 year period, we shopped several banks to find an annuity.  For the second, we got a much better deal by going with an Annuity Broker.  You can find several reputable ones with a simple Google Search. 

We worked with "Kristin" and selected Sentinel Life as a provider a few years ago.  Her number is 914.815.2523.  Try multiple brokers to find one you are comfortable with.

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Thank you for a starting point. I'll call and see if Kristin is still working in the field and able to help.

FLBiker: We're pretty overwhelmed at the moment and we probably will be for several to many weeks. But, if you send a PM to me I'll let it sit there with "unread" status, so it gets my attention, until things calm down, and then I'll respond. Another reason to wait before responding is that there are a number of issues that are challenging even for tax professionals to fully understand and predict; there is still plenty more to learn before I would want to pass along information.

[ChpBstrd]

Annuities have been a bad deal for such a long time that I don't think there's a deep bench of expertise here on the MMM forums. The standard advice is to avoid them, because you can earn more investing in bonds directly, not pay fees, and avoid at least one layer of counterparty risk. That mentality may need to change if and when interest rates get higher, but still it's hard for me to envision a scenario where an annuity outperforms a portfolio of corporate bonds, or even a portfolio of treasuries and TIPS.

Maybe what you're really looking for is a brokerage account that you can use after you move. This might be an easier problem to solve than looking for a competitive annuities broker, depending on the specifics of the tax issues.

Finally, the cost of hiring a tax attorney and finding a different solution might be a lot less than the long-term cost of the annuity approach.