Tag Archives: retirement income

Life Annuities: What to Watch Out For When You Buy

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Chantal Marr

By Chantal Marr,

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

An annuity is a type of investment sold through insurance companies. You can think of a life annuity as a life insurance policy in reverse — you pay the insurance company a large lump sum of cash and in return the insurance company pays you monthly premiums for life.

This can act as a form of retirement income after you leave the work force. Although life annuities can be a great option, here is some advice on the things you should look out for when it comes to life annuities.

Know the Difference between Immediate and Deferred Annuities

You should understand and watch out for the language in an annuity agreement. There is language that will signal if the policy is an immediate or deferred annuity. As its name implies, an immediate annuity means that you will obtain your fixed payments right away. There will be no delay in receiving your money. A deferred annuity is different. Continue Reading…

The Hub’s Weekly wrap: Bag lady fears, fast-casual dining stocks & more

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Woman in povertyLaunched last week, the Hub’s Weekly Wrap aims to be a weekend read with brief commentary and links to some of the more interesting items touching on Financial Independence that appeared in North American cyberspace in the past week or two.

We aim to split these roughly half from American blogs and online media and half from Canadian. (That roughly corresponds to current traffic levels at the Hub.)

We’ll begin with this piece from Next Avenue: Unemployed, 55 and Faking Normal. This blog about the common fear of becoming a bag lady (financially speaking) was widely tweeted, including by a few women I suspect were in similar circumstances. No doubt about it, a combination of divorce and job loss can add up to a tough go, especially if you’re still not old enough to qualify for Social Security or the Canadian triad of CPP/OAS/GIS.

Fast-casual dining

Moving on to the more fortunate comes this piece from the Washington Post, mentioned on the Motley Fool’s Market Foolery podcast on Tuesday. The Chipotle effect: Why America is obsessed with fast casual food is an analysis of the trend to “Fast Casual” dining and the stocks of the major players capitalizing on this change (Chipotle and Panera to name two.) This is a threat to the old-time fast food joints like McDonald’s: ironically, McDonald’s incubated Chipotle in its early days.

4 reasons to pay your credit card bill early Continue Reading…