Retirement Strategies

Annuities typically offer tax-deferred growth of earnings and may include a death benefit that will pay your beneficiary a specified minimum amount, such as your total purchase payments. While tax is deferred on earnings growth, when withdrawals are taken from the annuity, gains are taxed at ordinary income rates, and not capital gains rates. If you withdraw your money early from an annuity, you may pay substantial surrender charges to the insurance company, as well as tax penalties.

May times these products can offer guaranteed rates that are much higher than what you may be able to get at your financial institution!

 Indexed annuities are a type of fixed annuity which are regulated and distributed in the same manner as fixed annuities . Indexed annuities are a conservative safe money place for retirement dollars.

Indexed annuities usually provide a purchaser with various options for interest crediting. A buyer does have an option to elect a declared interest rate, which generally allows an allocation of anywhere from 0-100% of the account value, and functions the same as a traditional fixed annuity. However, the annuity is designed for higher potential interest rates, and provides other allocation options which consider the performance of an outside stock index (such as the Standard and Poor's 500, a.k.a. S&P 500) to determine the rate of interest. These options pay interest at a rate determined by a formula which considers any increase in the outside index, often subject to a “participation rate”, and/or “cap, and/or "spread”. 

 A 403(b) plan, also known as a tax-sheltered annuity (TSA) plan, is a retirement plan for certain employees of public schools, employees of certain tax-exempt organizations, and certain ministers. Individual accounts in a 403(b) plan can be any of the following types.

• An annuity contract, which is a contract provided through an insurance company,
• A custodial account, which is an account invested in mutual funds, or
• A retirement income account set up for church employees.

 A 401(k) plan is a type of tax-qualified deferred compensation plan in which an employee can elect to have the employer contribute a portion of his or her cash wages to the plan on a pretax basis. Generally, these deferred wages (commonly referred to as elective contributions) are not subject to income tax withholding at the time of deferral, and they are not reflected on your Form 1040 since they were not included in the taxable wages on your Form W-2 . However, they are included as wages subject to social security, Medicare, and federal unemployment taxes. 

 Traditional IRA:

Contributions are often tax-deductible (often simplified as “money is deposited before tax” or “contributions are made with pre-tax assets”), all transactions and earnings within the IRA have no tax impact, and withdrawals at retirement are taxed as income (except for those portions of the withdrawal corresponding to contributions that were not deducted). Depending upon the nature of the contribution, a traditional IRA may be referred to as a “deductible IRA” or a “non-deductible IRA.”

Roth IRA:

contributions are made with after-tax assets, all transactions within the IRA have no tax impact, and withdrawals are usually tax-free. Named for Senator William V. Roth Jr. The Roth IRA was introduced as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997

For small business owners, the Simplified Employee Pension IRA (SEP IRA) is a very common and attractive arrangement for providing retirement benefits to the owners of the company as well as the employees. 

The benefits of the SEP IRA? There is almost no administration required with these plans as well as the fact that you can contribute multiples of what a Traditional IRA will allow you to contribute.