The 401k Rollover Mistake You Can't Afford to Make

If you've got an old 401k or any retirement account sitting with a former employer, fully exposed to the market, and nobody's looked at it for years, or you're at least 59 and a half and have a 401k with your current employer, you need to hear this. There is a way to protect that money from the next market crash without pulling it out of the market for good. And the reason most people have never even heard this exists is that a few very loud voices in personal finance have spent years convincing an entire generation that the product that does this is a bad word. Most people rack up multiple old 401ks over a career. Every time you leave a job, that account usually just stays. Same allocation you picked years ago, nobody rebalancing it, nobody watching it, it's just sitting fully exposed to whatever the market does next. And most people generally could not even tell you what's actually invested inside it. Today we're going to talk about how to protect your retirement savings from losses. Click on the link in the description below to schedule a consultation with me. Markets are cyclical. Corrections happen. That's not a prediction. That's just how markets have always worked. And an old 401k sitting entirely in stock and bond funds rides every one of those swings with no protection from losses. The risk isn't just the market goes down, it's when the market goes down. And if a downturn hits right before or right after you start relying on that money, you can lock in losses you never get the chance to recover from. That's called sequence of returns risk. And it's one of the most damaging things that can happen to a retirement account regardless of how the market performs on average over time. An old 401k nobody's watching has zero protection against that. It's just riding the wave whichever direction it breaks. A lot of people do not know that there is a product built specifically to solve this problem. It is called a fixed index annuity. And it lets your money track a market index so you still participate when the market goes up, but it has a zero percent floor so you can never lose your principal or interest earned. If the index goes up, you earn interest. If the index has a negative return, your account value doesn't go down with it. Here's how a fixed index annuity works. You put in a lump sum into the annuity. It could come from savings, a 401k rollover, an IRA or other assets. That money is protected. It cannot go down due to market losses because the floor is zero so you can never lose your principal or interest earned. When the market goes up, your annuity earns a portion of those gains. When the market crashes, you don't lose a single dollar. Over time, your account grows. And when you're ready, whether it's in five years or 10 years, you can flip a switch and turn on a guaranteed income stream, a check that comes every single month for the rest of your life. Even if you live to over 100, the annuity cannot run out. So how is it that most people don't know about this or are afraid of annuities? Here's where this gets personal for me. Dave Ramsey says annuities are a ripoff. Ken Fisher built an entire ad campaign around the words, I hate annuities. Susie Orman has spent over a decade warning her audience away from them. Why? Because they say they are risky and expensive. But here's the important question. Which annuities were they talking about? Here's what they don't tell you. They are talking specifically about variable annuities, which are risky and loaded with fees. It's a real shame that the biggest names in personal finance have functionally trained an entire generation to hear the word annuity and run away. When the other types of annuities are not risky, have no fees, can provide you with a to protect your retirement savings from market losses, give you a guaranteed income stream for life, and a place to park your money, like a CD, but with higher interest rates. A fixed index annuity has no fees, unless your agent adds an optional rider, and no market risk because due to a zero percent floor, you can never lose your principal or interest earned. Modern annuity index link crediting strategies have turned this into a fundamentally different product category than what existed even a decade ago. If the last time you looked at an annuity was pre-2020, you're evaluating a product that doesn't exist anymore. We were in a completely different interest rate environment than the one we're in right now. Go back about 10 years and interest rates were sitting near historic lows. Today's higher interest rate environment has allowed annuity companies to offer significantly higher rates than were common a decade ago. So I'm not saying everyone watching this should buy a fixed index annuity. I'm saying everyone should know they exist before deciding they're not right for them. If you've got money sitting in an old 401k, an IRA, or a TSP, or other retirement account, and you'd like to see whether this type of strategy could fit your situation, click on the link in the description below and schedule an annuity consultation with me.