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Are there any financial advisers on here with a good knowledge of annuities. Got a situation with lump sum offer and have no idea what to do. Yes, I've read everything I can read, and yes, I've exhausted other resources before posting here, plus my original adviser died. This is a last resort and I'd rather give my business to a FReeper anyway. Please private reply if we can talk/zoom/email. You will be vetted! Sorry for the vanity!

Congress is making another push on legislation that could make it easier for small companies to offer 401(k) plans and for workers to guarantee themselves an annual income after they retire. A bipartisan group of lawmakers including Rep. Richard Neal (D., Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, announced Friday the legislation would repeal the age cap for contributing to individual retirement accounts, currently 70½. It would also increase the age at which owners of tax-deferred retirement accounts are required to start taking withdrawals from those accounts to 72 from 70½. Because the measure has support from key...

Ground was broken this month on an anxiously awaited highway project outside of Washington, D.C., one of the latest examples of the public and private sector acting as partners to advance critical state and local infrastructure projects. The June 6 launch of the Fredericksburg Extension Project – a 10-mile extension of express toll lanes on the Interstate 95 corridor in Northern Virginia nicknamed the “FredEx” – featured the leadership of a public-private partnership (P3) that will get the $565 million job done by the end of 2022. The state’s governor and its transportation secretary launched the project as the public...

The second-longest bull market in American history hasn’t stopped the deterioration of state and local pension funds, whose unfunded debt has almost quadrupled—by their own accounting—from about $360 billion in 2007 to $1.4 trillion today. Having relied on overly optimistic and inaccurate financial assumptions for decades, public pension administrators are now forced to acknowledge that the systems owe much more than previously thought. Even as local governments struggle to pay for this debt, it keeps growing. Concerned that mortality tables for private-sector workers don’t accurately reflect what’s going on among retired government employees, the Society of Actuaries conducted a three-year...

Immediate annuities promise that your money will be there when you need it. But many investors are questioning how good those guarantees really are. The reality is that insurance companies offering annuities can, and have, failed. But policyholders can take comfort from a well-established, industry-financed safety net. Although investments aren't always covered in full, history suggests these annuities are about as safe an investment as you can get without the full backing of the U.S. government. That said, there's no reason to court trouble. The current environment shows why -- even in good times -- investors should seek out the...

Money Magazine) -- Last December, Tom Donofrio decided it was time to get serious about retirement. So with the help of a financial adviser affiliated with MetLife, the 39-year-old father of two transferred money that had been sitting in a 401(k) at a previous job into an IRA rollover account invested in mutual funds. Or so he thought. Donofrio didn't understand that the bulk of his retirement savings - some $22,000 - had actually ended up in a variable annuity, an insurance product that puts your money into a fund-like portfolio but typically carries fees that are much higher than...