What Are The Straight Life Annuity Payout Options?

An important decision in purchasing an annuity is deciding how you want to be paid. You can select Straight Life Annuity Payout options for a set period of time or continue for your lifetime. With some options, a beneficiary can be designated to receive payments upon your death. Here is a review of several of the straight Life Annuity Payout Options.

What is an annuity?

An annuity is an insurance product that pays out income, and can be used as part of a retirement strategy. Annuities are a popular choice for investors who want to receive a steady income stream in retirement.

Here’s how an annuity works: you make an investment in the annuity, and it then makes payments to you on a future date or series of dates. The income you receive from an annuity can be doled out monthly, quarterly, annually or even in a lump sum payment.

The size of your payments are determined by a variety of factors, including the length of your payment period.

You can opt to receive payments for the rest of your life, or for a set number of years. How much you receive depends on whether you opt for a guaranteed payout (fixed annuity) or a payout stream determined by the performance of your annuity’s underlying investments (variable annuity).

While annuities can be useful retirement planning tools, they can also be a lousy investment choice for certain people because of their notoriously high expenses. Financial planners and insurance salesmen will frequently try to steer seniors or other people in various stages toward retirement into annuities. Anyone who considers an annuity should research it thoroughly first, before deciding whether it’s an appropriate investment for someone in their situation.

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What are the different types of annuities?

There are two basic types of annuities: deferred and immediate.

With a deferred annuity, your money is invested for a period of time until you are ready to begin taking withdrawals, typically in retirement.

If you opt for an immediate annuity you begin to receive payments soon after you make your initial investment. For example, you might consider purchasing an immediate annuity as you approach retirement age.

The deferred annuity accumulates money while the immediate annuity pays out. Deferred annuities can also be converted into immediate annuities when the owner wants to start collecting payments.

Within these two categories, annuities can also be either fixed or variable depending on whether the payout is a fixed sum, tied to the performance of the overall market or group of investments, or a combination of the two.

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What Are The Straight Life Annuity Payout Options?

1: Straight life: You will get income for your entire life—even after all the money you put into the annuity has been used up. However, if you die before the money in your account has been used up, nobody, not even your dependents, will collect payouts. The straight life annuity might be right for you if you need to maximize the amount of income you receive and either don’t have dependents or are not planning to use the annuity for the purposes of estate planning.

2: Joint and survivor: This type of annuity pays you as long as you live. After your death, it will pay the joint annuitant for the rest of his or her life. You can choose the benefit your survivor will get upon your death, but this option reduces the payout amount you get.

3: Refund annuity: This payout option is gaining in popularity. It provides income for life. If, however, you die before you receive an amount equal to all of the premiums you paid, your beneficiary gets the portion you had not yet collected.

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What happens to my annuity after I die?

It depends on the type of annuity and how your payouts are calculated. There are several different methods.

You do have the option of naming a beneficiary on your annuity, and with certain types of payout options that beneficially could receive the money in your annuity when you die. Other options just pay out during your lifetime, and the payments stop when you die