You can’t publish a headline like “10 Best Annuity Companies In the US” and NOT get my attention.
February 22, 2023 by Sheryl J. Moore
I was all over this one on Yahoo Finance! After all, you can’t publish a headline like “10 Best Annuity Companies In the US” and NOT get my attention.
Now, before we you go on to the list of top annuity companies, you have to know the following:
1. The author of this article, Insider Monkey is “a New York-based financial blog that offers insight and information to individuals who are interested in profiting from public insider trading and hedge fund transactions.”
Weird. This seems to have NOTHING to do with annuities or insurance companies.
2. This firm’s first criteria for the list is using AM Best Rating Services of B+ or higher.
There are many that would argue this metric. Regardless, it means that we are including EVERY company operating in the annuity space, which has a financial strength rating from AM Best.
3. This firm’s second criteria for the list is the insurance companies having “fixed annuity rates of over 4%.”
Pretty arbitrary using FIXED annuities for a criteria, as well as a fixed interest rate of 4%. Pretty misleading that this is not disclosed in the title of the article though.
Note that the source for the aforementioned metric is using Jason Caudill, MBA‘s MyAnnuityStore as the publicly-available source for annuity rates.
Not throwing shade on my buddy Jason, but this is an insurance agency’s website; they do not represent every insurance company in the annuity market.
Overall, this is the basis for the ten annuity companies on the list, which are suggested to be the “10 Best.”
What’s interesting is that when we check Wink, Inc.‘s AnnuitySpecs tool, and include all companies offering fixed annuities, there are actually 68 companies that should be on this list, according to Insider Monkey’s criteria.
Is this some form of lead generation? I think so.
SN: the most interesting part of the whole thing is the disclosure at the bottom of the article, “Disclosure: None.” Excuse me, while I LOL. -sjm
