I spoke with NW mutual and I spoke with vanguard and neither seemed to think I would trigger a tax event. . . and neither charges for the transfer.
Regarding returns, they have two columns in the illustrations, one is 'guaranteed' which and I'm not sure how I goofed it this before, has me going from a cash surrender value of $83,830 to $86,643 this year (3.36% increase) and another column that indicated it is 'Non-guaranteed' and shows me going from $83,830 to $88,181 (5.19% increase) this is a bit less as a percent than this last year. A few years ago they were quoting north of 6%. . .so there is an upside and essentially a floor of a bit over 3%. I ran a number of different years through excel and it isn't 3.36% in future years, it reduces slightly, I'm guessing because a mortality rate is buried in it which increases with age. In 20 years the guaranteed rate is 2.74 and in 40 years the guaranteed rate is 1.74%.