Annuity Resources

Consumer Annuity Report

Special Consumer Report

The 15 Biggest Traps to Avoid Before Buying an Annuity — and How to Avoid Them

Plus: 6 annuities that survived our 15-point screening process

By Scott Brooks, CFP® — Founder, Annuity Resources, LLC

Updated May 2026  · Long read - worth it

As Advertised on Fox News · CNBC · MSNBC · BBC

If you could read just one article to avoid the most costly traps when buying an annuity, this is it.

The Traps

15 Annuity Traps That Cost Buyers Thousands 

Trap #15 — The Trust Trap

You’ve worked hard for your money. Now you want your money to work hard for you. 

Don’t take anyone’s word that their product is the best. 

Make them prove it. 

Ask for third-party research. 

Ask for the specimen contract. 

Ask for their renewal rate history. 

The agents who can’t answer those questions are the ones to walk away from.

Ask for the specimen contract before you sign anything. See Trap #13 for exactly why.

Trap #14 — The Phantom Balance Trap

Many index annuities include income riders showing an “income account value” growing at six, seven, or eight percent a year. 

Buyers often believe this is their actual balance.

It is not.

The income account value exists only to calculate future income payments. You cannot withdraw it. You cannot pass it to your heirs. 

Your real money — the actual account value — is usually much lower.

The trap gets worse.

The income rider charges an annual fee every year. 

If your account earns 2% and the rider fee costs 1%, half of your growth is gone.  Do that for 10 years, and you will understand why people wake up a decade later, and their balance hasn't grown.  

The income value keeps rising on paper. Your real balance may barely move.

Years of fees. Very little real growth.

An income rider is a long-term commitment. 

If you want the promised income math to work, you have to keep paying the fee and hold the contract long enough to use the income stream. 

You are marrying the insurance company, not dating them. 

If your plans change and you want out early, surrender charges may still apply.

How to avoid it: Understand what you're actually buying before you commit to it. 

This product only works if you're willing to pay the rider fee every year and hold the contract long enough to eventually use the income stream. 

If guaranteed lifetime income is truly the goal, an SPIA or DIA may be the cleaner solution. 

There are no annual income rider fees, no phantom balance, and no confusion about which number is real. 

The trade-off is still serious. You are giving up principal liquidity in exchange for guaranteed lifetime income, but at least the structure is transparent. 

If you simply want a guaranteed rate locked for a fixed term - similar to a CD but with higher rates and tax-deferred growth — a MYGA (Multi-Year Guaranteed Annuity) is worth understanding before you look at anything else.

Trap #13 — The Renewal Rate Trap

This may be the biggest trap of them all. The product may be sold with a strong rate, cap, or participation rate in year one. 

But what happens in year 2? Year 3? Year 7? Year 10? Year 12? Year 14?

Most buyers never ask. They only look at the cap in the current proposal. But the real answer lies in the contract. 

Almost all index annuities allow the insurance company to lower caps, lower participation rates, or increase spreads after the first year. 

In many contracts, the minimums are dramatically lower than the numbers shown in the sales illustration.

How to avoid it:

Start by requesting the specimen contract — a sample of the actual legal agreement available before you sign or transfer any money. 

We recently spoke with a contact who oversees 2,500 annuity agents. Out of all of them, their group receives roughly 1 request for a specimen per month. 

Most buyers never ask for it. Most agents never offer it. You're about to be the exception. 

Here’s why this matters: in most annuity transactions, the contract arrives after the paperwork is signed and after the money has already been transferred. 

Sixty to seventy percent of annuity buyers are moving retirement funds — IRA money, 401k rollovers — that are not simple to reverse. 

Undoing a qualified transfer means lost interest, potential tax complications, and weeks of paperwork. 

The specimen contract lets you see the minimums before any of that happens.

Look specifically for the contractual minimums and maximums for caps, spreads, and participation rates. 

These are the floors and ceilings the insurance company is legally allowed to move to after year one. 

The difference between what the illustration shows and what the contract allows is often eye-opening.

An illustration might show a 10% cap. The contract might allow the company to lower it to 1%. 

Both numbers are in the document. 

Only one of them is in the illustration.

Ask for the specimen contract before you sign anything. A legitimate agent will provide it without hesitation.

Based on our conversations with industry insiders, roughly two-thirds of annuity agents don’t know what a specimen contract is. 

Of those who do, almost none use it in practice. In many years of industry experience, one of our contacts had never once been asked to provide one.

If your agent doesn’t know what a specimen contract is — run.

Then ask the agent to show you the company’s actual renewal rate history. Most won’t have it. 

Very few companies publish their renewal rate history. Fewer than you would expect. And most will only provide it if you know to ask. 

The rest keep it under lock and key.

Ask your agent to produce it. 

If they cannot, ask why. 

A carrier that is proud of its renewal rate track record will make that history available. A carrier that isn’t will make excuses.

There are only two real solutions. Find a product where the rates are locked for the term - no renewal rates, no surprises. Or find a company that publishes its renewal rates openly. 

In our free analysis, we can show you which companies have a documented history of doing exactly that. 

The index annuity we’ve selected for this month’s list locks the crediting rate for the entire seven-year term. 

No annual adjustments. 

No surprises. 

No excuses.

Trap #12 — The Overconfidence Trap

The most dangerous annuity buyer is not the one who knows nothing. 

It’s the one who knows enough to feel confident but doesn't know exactly what they should ask.  Those questions are what this page is all about. 

Ask the right questions before you buy. 

What type of annuity? Are there fees? What is the surrender schedule? Is there an MVA? What are the rider costs? What is the rating? How long is the rate or crediting method guaranteed? How much can you withdraw each year? How is the gain calculated? Will my beneficiary pay a fee if I die? How long is the term? Does it auto-renew at maturity? 

That’s just some of what you should ask.

And always read the fine print. 

The contract is the only document that matters.

 Everything else — the illustration, the proposal, the agent’s explanation — is a sales tool. 

The contract is the legal agreement. 

Trap #11 — The Illustration Trap

Do you ever feel like the proposal you receive is too good to be true? They look good because of what they hide.

Variable annuity proposals will show potential, but never the 2-4% they're taking out of every single year. 

The biggest problem with index annuity proposals is that they omit renewal rates entirely. 

It doesn’t matter if an index rises 15% per year if they slash your cap to 2% and keep it there. 

Ask what is guaranteed and what is hypothetical. Ask how low the cap, spread, and participation rate can go after the first year. 

Ask where the company publishes its historical renewal rates — not future projections, actual history. 

Volatility-controlled indexes are designed to limit movement. A high participation rate on an index that doesn't move produces little growth. 

MYGAs, SPIAs, and DIAs are contractually guaranteed, and their illustrations are reliable. 

Trap #10 — The Shell Company Trap

In business since 1930 might really mean in business since 2023.  Here's how. 

There are shells — legal entities created decades ago, sometimes 70 to 120 years ago, that existed on paper but never built a real business or a real claims paying track record.

A financial holding company acquires one of these shells, rebrands it, and begins marketing it as though it has a century of history behind it. 

Technically, the filing date is accurate. 

Practically, the company managing your money today may have been operational for eighteen months.

A company that has genuinely been in business for 100 years is not the concern. A shell that was filed 100 years ago and acquired recently might be. 

Before you buy, ask: 

When was this company acquired by its current owner? Who owns it today? Has it changed names in the last ten or 20 years? How long has the current management team been in place? 

A company proud of its real history will answer every one of those questions without hesitation.

Trap #9 — The Replacement Trap

Some companies advertise, “Are you stuck in a low-rate annuity?” 

Don’t fall for their trap and pay surrender charges to exit your annuity until you carefully compare the cost of leaving, the new surrender period, the new commission, and the real benefit of switching.

Bonus Trap #1

The Bonus Annuity Trap 

A bonus sounds like found money. 

It is not. 

Insurance companies do not give away ten percent of your premium out of generosity. That bonus has to be recovered somewhere. 

In many bonus annuities, the company recovers it by slashing the renewal rates for the remainder of the contract. 

The bonus gets your attention in year one. The suppressed renewal rates quietly take it back for the rest of the contract. 

You got a bonus. 

The insurance company will get it back. With interest.

The second trap inside bonus annuities is less obvious and more dangerous.

When an agent shows you a bonus annuity illustration, ask one specific question: is the bonus credited to my account value or to my income account value?

These are not the same thing.

Your account value is your actual money — what you can access, withdraw, or pass to your beneficiaries.

Your income account value - as we covered in trap #14  - exists only on paper. 

Many bonus annuities credit the ten percent bonus to the income account value — not your actual account. The illustration looks impressive. The real number is smaller.

How to avoid it: Ask which account the bonus is credited to. Ask what the minimum renewal rates are for the remainder of the contract after the bonus year. 

Trap #8 — The Approved List Trap

Many banks and investment firms do not show you the full annuity market. 

They have an approved list — a small selection of products their institution has vetted and agreed to sell.

Our sources indicate that most banks offer between three and seven annuity options. 

Walk into a bank and you are losing out on over 90% of the market. 

As of May 2026, Fidelity offers six fixed annuity options for a five-year term and Schwab offers five - based on information published directly on their websites. 

In some cases, insurance companies pay fees to be added to these approved lists. This doesn’t mean the products are bad. 

But it does mean the selection you’re shown has been filtered by institutional relationships — not necessarily by what’s best for you.

We work with more than 40 carriers — independently appointed, with no institutional approved list limiting what we can offer. 

When we show you a product, it’s because it survived our screening process. Not because it paid to be on a list.

How to avoid it: Ask how many companies your advisor or institution can actually offer. Ask if they are independent. Ask if they can compare products outside their approved list.

Trap #7 — The Beneficiary Trap

Some contracts charge surrender fees even after death — meaning your beneficiary receives the surrender value, not the accumulated value. 

Those are not the same number.

The accumulated value is what your annuity has actually grown to. 

The surrender value is what remains after the carrier deducts the surrender charge. 

If you die during the surrender period and your contract pays the surrender value, your beneficiary absorbs a penalty you never would have paid yourself if you had simply lived to the end of the term.

How to avoid it: Ask specifically whether the death benefit is paid on the accumulated value or the surrender value. Look for contracts that waive the surrender charge at death and pay the full accumulated value to your beneficiary. 

Not all carriers do this. 

Trap #6 — The Maturity Trap 

Does your annuity renew automatically at maturity?

 Some annuities offer a 30-day grace period to withdraw your money. If you are out of the country, miss your mail, or are unavailable to answer, your contract could be automatically renewed at the minimum rate they’re contractually allowed to pay — which can be dramatically lower than what you were earning. 

We prefer contracts that do not automatically renew. 

This is even more important as you get older. 

Trap #5 — The Simple Interest Trap

Have you seen a fixed annuity rate that looks too good to be true? It might be simple interest.  

$100K - A 5% simple interest rate and a 5% compound interest rate sounds identical. 

10 years later one account has $16,000 more than the other. 

Albert Einstein called compounding interest the 8th wonder of the world. Require it. 

Trap #4 — The High-Pressure Agent Trap

You would be shocked how many financial advisors and insurance agents only sell 1–3 annuities. 

Avoid these 1-trick ponies. 

And avoid anyone who pressures you into buying on your first visit or tries to get you to invest a large portion of your savings in anything, including annuities. Avoid these high-pressure agents who don’t have your best interest in mind.

Trap #3 — The Overexposure Trap

After years of strong market returns, some retirees put money they cannot afford to lose into the stock market. 

When the market drops, so does their peace of mind — and sometimes their principal. Safe money should be safe. 

A fixed annuity exists specifically to separate what you cannot afford to lose from what you’re willing to risk.

Trap #2 — The Commission Trap

Variable annuities, index annuities, and RILAs pay the highest agent commissions. Fixed annuities (MYGA), SPIA, and DIA pay the lowest commissions. 

Are you surprised that everyone wants to sell you an index annuity, RILA, or variable annuity?

Don’t be. Many index annuities are built on a ten percent commission chassis. 

That means for every $100,000 you invest, ten percent goes into the financial services industry before your money starts working for you.

Fixed annuities — MYGAs, SPIAs, and DIAs — are built on a 3-4 percent commission chassis to all parties.  

The industry talks least about the products that pay it least. Now you know why. 

There is another layer in the system most consumers never see - marketing organizations sitting between companies and agents, collecting production bonuses when premiums hit certain thresholds.  

These bonuses can reach seven or eight figures. 

Most index annuities sold today have ten-year surrender periods. 

The longer the surrender period, the higher the commission paid to the agent. 

Our agency focuses on MYGAs, SPIA, and DIA.  

We could triple our commissions by doing nothing more than selling 10-year index products. We choose not to. 

That choice is the reason this list looks the way it does.

Trap #1 — The Asset Risk Trap

We would recommend avoiding insurance companies owned by private equity firms, as they are more likely to take on risk in private credit and other higher-risk investments. 

After the private credit market goes through a much needed cleansing, the surviving carriers may be worth a second look. 

Bonus Trap #2

The High-Rate Trap 

Most buyers ask, “Who has the highest rate?” 

That’s not the best first question. 

The better question is: “What contract am I getting for that rate?” 

A high rate may come with simple interest, a weaker carrier, less liquidity, a longer surrender period, a charge at death, and other trade-offs.

“The best annuity is not the one with the highest rate. It’s the one with the best contract for your situation.”

The most common version of this trap is not an agent pushing a product on an unsuspecting buyer. 

It is a buyer who has done their research, seen two annuities side by side, noticed that the lower-rated carrier pays a full percentage point more, and decided the rating difference doesn’t matter.

It matters.

Not long ago, one of the highest rates on annuity comparison websites was ordered by multiple state insurance departments to stop writing new business. 

We had removed them from our platform six months earlier. The rumors in our industry were enough. We didn't wait for confirmation. 

Applications had been flowing to that carrier based on its rate. 

The buyers who chose it based on rate had no way of knowing that regulators were already looking at them.

A higher rate from a weaker carrier is not always a better deal. It is a different risk that most illustrations never show you.

Before Our Picks

Before we show you our picks, it’s worth saying this clearly.

The right annuity is one of the most powerful retirement tools available. Not because of hype. Because of math.

Guaranteed income you cannot outlive. Principal protection that doesn’t depend on the market. Tax-deferred growth. 

Rates that currently outperform most CDs and savings accounts. 

The ability to turn a lump sum into a monthly check that arrives for the rest of your life, regardless of what the stock market does. 

Unlike bond funds, a fixed annuity shifts interest rate risk to the insurance company. Your principal is contractually guaranteed even if rates rise.

Three trillion dollars sits in annuities in America because for millions of retirees, a guaranteed return on safe money is exactly what retirement requires.

And yet — this industry has not always served buyers as well as it could. Which is why we wrote this.

Twenty-five years ago, fixed annuities were playing the same game that index annuities play today — just with a simpler mechanism. 

No complex crediting methods. No caps or participation rates. They simply renewed the rate at whatever they wanted.

The industry eventually cleaned itself up. MYGAs — with straightforward guaranteed rates locked for the full term — became the dominant fixed annuity product. 

The teaser rate trap largely disappeared.

We believe index annuities can make the same journey. 

The mechanisms are more complex today — caps, spreads, participation rates, income account values — but the game is the same. Impress in year one. Quietly adjust the rest of the contract. 

When buyers understand what they’re actually getting — and what they’re not — the market tends to respond.

The fifteen traps above exist not because annuities are bad. 

They exist because the wrong annuity — sold by the wrong agent for the wrong reasons — can take something genuinely valuable and turn it into a twelve-year mistake.

The six products below are the ones that survived our screening process - one for each of the most common situations we see. 

Anything worth knowing in the contract is included in your free analysis. 

You should not have to sort through thousands of annuities to find a good one. So, we did the work for you!

Here’s how we built this list.

We started with thousands of products across the two largest annuity databases in the country. 

We filtered for AM Best ratings of A or better, then screened every remaining product against the 15 traps above.

What you’ll find below are the six products that survived that process. There's one for each of the most common situations we see. 

Three MYGA terms, one index annuity with a locked crediting rate, one income annuity, and one higher-rate option for buyers seeking the highest guaranteed return from an A- rated carrier or above.

We update this list when better products become available. The rates and details below reflect what we found this month.

Annuities are state-regulated. The six products below represent the best options available nationally, but availability varies by state. Your free analysis will be customized for your state, your goals,  and your situation. 

Request the free analysis for any product below, and we’ll send you the complete breakdown — current rates, carrier rating, and anything in the contract worth knowing — within 1 business day. 

No sales call unless you ask.

Sincerely,

Scott Brooks, CFP®

Founder, Annuity Resources — Licensed in all 50 states

Our Current Shortlist

6 Annuities Worth Reviewing Right Now

Each option below survived our 15-point screening process. Here’s why we selected each one.

No Pressure. No Obligation.

What Happens When You Request The Free Analysis?

Free · No Obligation · No Pressure

See Which Annuities We'd Recommend For Your Situation 

We’ll send the complete breakdown within 24 hours. No call unless you ask.

Annuity Resources

Scott Brooks, CFP®

Founder, Annuity Resources · Licensed in all 50 states

5900 Balcones Drive, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78731

(800)540-6109

support@annuityresources.com

Annuities are insurance products. Guarantees are backed by the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurance company. Product availability, rates, features, and terms may vary by state, age, premium amount, and insurer rules. This page is for educational purposes and does not guarantee that any product is right for your situation.

© 2026 Annuity Resources · All Rights Reserved

DISCLAIMER: The information on this website is for educational purposes only. This website is not intended to be a recommendation for you to purchase an annuity. Please consult with a qualified financial planner, advisor, tax, and legal advisor to determine if an annuity is right for your situation. Annuities are not offered by the US Government, not government-guaranteed, and are not FDIC insured. All guarantees are backed by the claims-paying ability of the insurance company. The reviews and annuity information on this website may not be current and may not apply in the state you live in. Product availability varies based on the state you live. The materials, names, logos, brochures, etc used in our annuity reviews are property of their owners and not those of AnnuityResources.com. Annuity information on this site may not be current or applicable in your state. Please contact us to receive the latest brochure. When you contact us you may speak with a licensed insurance agent in your state. They may offer an annuity to you for sale. Annuities are distributed by Annuity Resources, LLC. Annuity Resources, LLC is a licensed annuity producer in most states. We focus on selling MYGAs, SPIAs, and DIAs and a few select index annuities. We do business as Annuity Resources Insurance Services in CA. License 6003435.

Because when it comes to buying an annuity it’s not what you know that gets you into trouble.

It’s what you know for sure that just isn’t true.

The scary part is this: many of the biggest traps are not obvious.

They are hidden in the contract. 

They are hidden in the illustration.

They are hidden in the renewal rates.

They are hidden in the fine print.

I dare you to read this entire page without changing the way you view annuities. How open-minded are you?

In September 2012, one of our clients — a retired realtor in Hawaii — purchased an index annuity from one of the largest insurance companies in the country. 

She was no stranger to contracts. 

She’d spent her career reading them, negotiating them, protecting her own clients from bad deals.

She put in $200,000.

The agent showed her impressive illustrations — if the market indexes went up, she’d participate in the gains. If it went down, she was protected. 

The contract included an income rider she never asked for, charging her 0.95% of account value, every single year, taken directly from her balance. 

And that was just the fees she could see. 

The caps. The spreads. The participation rates. Every one of these can be changed by the insurance company after purchase — legally, quietly, and without her approval. 

The illustration showed her $200,000 growing toward $400,000 and beyond.  It said nothing about years two through fourteen, and it didn't factor in renewal rates. 

From September 2012 to the end of 2024, the S&P 500 more than tripled — over 300% including dividends.

Her account grew from $200,000 to $210,705.

Twelve years. A market that tripled. Less than $11,000 in actual growth — while she paid nearly $24,000 in rider fees for a benefit she never used and never wanted.

The contract also showed a “living benefit value” of $286,378. 

That number looked impressive. She could not withdraw it. She could not pass it to her heirs. It existed only on paper — a phantom balance generated by the rider she never asked for.

She came to us in 2025. She was still inside the surrender period — a fourteen-year contract issued in September 2012. 

She paid a surrender charge to get out. We calculated it together. It was 2% or approximately $4,200. 

She decided the exit fee was a fair price to stop the bleeding and start over with a product that actually worked. 

She lost twelve years of growth and paid a penalty to escape. 

She spent twelve years paying for a rider she never asked for. 

And the insurance company showed her a phantom balance of $286,378 while her real money sat at $210,705.

Her story is not unusual. We hear it all the time.

One more thing worth noting. 

The carrier she purchased from was not known for poor renewal rate behavior. 

If this is what happened with one of the better companies, imagine what is happening with the rest.

What you’re about to read is exactly how that happened and what you should look for before signing anything.

A Note From Scott — Why This Page Exists

The 15 traps above did not come from theory.

They came from 25 years of watching what happens when people trust the wrong promises, the wrong incentives, and sometimes the wrong institutions.

If you want to understand why I care so much about these issues, this is the story.

I got tired of watching people get abused by a system they trusted.

There has to be a better way. And that better way has to be founded on truth.

I also believe something most people in this industry won't say out loud — insurance companies will improve their products when consumers wise up and force them to. Not because they want to. Because they have no choice.

That's what this page is trying to do.

Here's how I got here. 

1998. Edward Jones. Carlsbad, California.

I chose Edward Jones because I already trusted them.

When I was in college in Austin, I had bought mutual funds through an Edward Jones broker. I liked their conservative philosophy. When it was time to get into the industry, it felt like a natural fit.

Looking back, moving to California was probably the dumbest career decision I ever made. 

My dad had been a practicing attorney in Houston for thirty years. He had relationships with accountants, other attorneys, and clients. A network that would have taken most people a lifetime to build. The smart move — the obvious move — would have been to set up shop there and grow into it all.

But I was 24 years old, and a friend of mine had moved to San Diego nine months earlier. I went to visit him. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. 

My heart wanted to live on the beach. So off to California I went. 

I took over the Edward Jones office in Carlsbad. It had seen a different advisor every year for the previous four years. I was going to be the one who made it work. 

I remember my first regional meeting. The regional leader — Rob — put up a list of all 150 Edward Jones regions in the country. 

Ours was dead last. 

He told us this was good news. We had nowhere to go but up. 

He wasn't wrong — but he was also glossing over the reality. Edward Jones was a household name in the Midwest. In California in 1998, almost nobody knew who they were unless they'd moved from somewhere else. We weren't just building a client base. We were building brand recognition from scratch in a market that had never heard of us. 

Edward Jones had a simple philosophy for building a client base: knock on doors. 

Literally. You walked through the neighborhoods near your office, introduced yourself, left a newsletter and a business card, and hoped for the best. 

I remember knocking on one man's door. He didn't answer. I left my card and the newsletter and moved on. 

A few days later, he walked into my office. 

He had been so surprised — maybe alarmed is the better word — by the sight of a young man in a suit knocking on his door that he had to come see for himself. He was convinced that nobody my age should be running anything. 

He wasn't entirely wrong to be skeptical. 

I was 24 at the time, but I looked closer to 16. Carlsbad was full of people in their seventies and eighties. The most common objection I heard those first months wasn't about rates or products or Edward Jones's track record. 

It was that their grandchildren were older than me. 

My office assistant, Kelly, thought this was absolutely hilarious. 

In April 1999, I was quoted in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine. The way it happened was pretty cool — I had been commenting in an AOL finance chat room, and a writer from Kiplinger's reached out and asked if he could quote me. 

Not a bad thing to happen when you're 25 years old and look 16. 

The market was extraordinary at that time. Tech stocks were doing things that had never happened before. Valuations that made no sense by any traditional measure kept going higher anyway. 

The story was that this time was different. The internet was changing everything. Old rules didn't apply. 

Everyone believed it. The research said so. The conferences said so. The clients wanted to believe it. 

I had no reason not to either. 

It was also during my time in Carlsbad that I first met Douglas Norman. He was building a company called World Transport Authority — a revolutionary vehicle manufacturing concept with what he described as a global future. 

I spoke with him a few times. I tried to get his business. He said no. 

But the concept was interesting enough that I kept watching the company.

In late 1999 I moved to Texas.

Late 1999. Bank United Securities. Plano, Texas.

I was midway through my second year at Edward Jones when reality set in.

After the first twelve months, they put you on straight commission. No draw. No salary. Nothing. 

I was working seven days a week and making somewhere around $600–$700 a month. That wasn't enough to live on in 1999. One of my good friends at Edward Jones had actually moved into his office because he couldn't afford rent. He slept there for months. Edward Jones never knew.

Around the same time, a friend of mine from college — Jorge — had gone to work for Bank United Securities. One month he called me to catch up. 

He had made $60,000 that month. 

I had made $600. 

We were similar people. Similar work ethic. Similar backgrounds. The difference was the business we were in. 

I remember thinking — why am I still on the beach? 

A few months later, Jorge called again. There was an opening at their Plano, Texas location. He put me in touch with his boss. We had a good call. 

One thing led to another.

 I was moving back to Texas. 

I moved to the bank side. The bank had plenty of clients. 

But there were fifteen who had all made the same mistake before I arrived.

They weren't my clients. They had purchased a bonus annuity from whoever had been at that desk before me. By the time I got there the damage was already done. 

Retirees, most of them. People who had done everything right — saved carefully, trusted a major insurance company, signed the contract, collected their first-year rate. All fifteen had purchased the same bonus annuity product. 

That rate had been impressive. 

The annuity came with a bonus — a teaser rate that beat CD rates by two, maybe two and a half percent at the time. When everything else at the bank was paying four or five percent, this product was paying six or seven. 

It wasn't just competitive. It was the best rate available anywhere. 

The product had been engineered to look that way. That gap — that extra two percent — was what motivated fifteen people to sign a contract they couldn't easily get out of. 

That last part turned out to be the tell.

 Insurance companies don't give away bonus points out of generosity. The bonus has to be recovered somewhere. In this case, it was recovered the way it almost always is — through suppressed renewal rates for the remainder of the contract. 

The bonus got their attention in year one. The renewal rates quietly took it back every year after. 

In year one, the teaser bonus had given them something like six or seven percent — two percent better than anything else available at the time. That gap was the whole sales pitch. 

That's what got them to sign. 

Then year two arrived. And year three. And every year after that. 

The renewal rates had dropped to one percent. Meanwhile, the same bank was offering five or six percent on CDs. Products anyone could walk in off the street and buy without a surrender charge, without a contract, without being locked in. 

They had signed a multi-year contract to earn one percent in a five or six-percent world. And they couldn't leave without paying a penalty. 

They were furious. Rightfully so. 

One woman in particular — I don't remember her name — sat across from me and let me have it. 

Anger. Fire. Every word landed like she'd been saving it up for years. 

It felt like a Mike Tyson uppercut to my soul. 

I hadn't sold her the product. It didn't matter. I was there. I was young. I was the face of an industry that had quietly taken back everything the bonus had promised. 

I didn't have a good answer for her. There wasn't one. 

She was the first of many examples I would see. 

I drove home that night upset. I got into this business because I wanted to add value to people's lives. That woman screaming at me was a reminder that decisions have consequences. Bad decisions have consequences. 

Those fifteen people deserved better than what they got. 

Insurance companies, left to their own devices, will seek maximum profit. That's not cynicism — that's just what institutions do. The same industry that routinely denies verified homeowner claims is the one asking retirees to hand over their savings for thirty years and trust the contract.

Understanding that doesn't mean avoiding annuities. It means shopping for them with your eyes open. 

Which is exactly what most buyers don't do — because no one tells them they need to. 

Late 2000. Fidelity Investments. The bubble breaks.

Washington Mutual bought Bank United and cut our commissions by thirty to forty percent almost immediately. 

That made the decision easy. 

I was tired of straight commission anyway — the bank was keeping eighty percent of it. Fidelity made more sense. A salary, a less stressful environment, and enough breathing room to focus on finishing my MBA and studying for the CFP. 

I was grateful for the opportunity. 

Fidelity was a different world from the bank. I had never worked in a cubicle before. Nice people around me. A good team. The job itself was actually pretty easy — Fidelity had enormous consumer trust, and that opened doors. 

I enjoyed it overall. 

But what I was hearing on those calls every day was something else entirely.

 My job involved making outbound calls to people who were retiring or changing jobs. Not all of the calls were negative. But during the bear market there were a lot of hard conversations. 

People whose account values had shrunk and who didn't know if they'd ever come back. A lot of them were selling at the absolute bottom because they had lost all belief in a recovery. 

That's what bear markets do. They're finished when everyone is finished selling. By the time most people give up, the bottom is already in. 

But when you're in the middle of it you can't see that. You just feel the pain.

 A lot of those people had the majority of their retirement savings in company stock. When the bear market hit and their company's stock dropped eighty, ninety, ninety-five percent, they were left with account values lower than their total contributions. 

They had worked for years, put money in faithfully, and ended up with less than they started with. 

Now they had to decide — hold the stock and hope, or move it and lock in the loss. 

There is no good answer to that question. I had to have that conversation more times than I can count. 

Retirements were wrecked. Not because people had been reckless. Because they had done what they were told. 

Buy and hold was the philosophy. Until it wasn't.

 Mike Tyson says everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. The stock market punched everyone in the face. And a lot of people didn't have a plan for that. 

They had never needed one. 

I wasn't immune to it either. 

I had my own money in tech stocks from my Edward Jones days. I lost somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. That stings to write. 

But it's the truth. 

Then I made it worse. 

I had been tracking World Transport Authority since my time in Carlsbad. When I was living in Dallas I started buying the stock. Norman's WorldStar car, the micro-factory system that could be set up anywhere in 90 days, the announced license deal with China for $40 million, projected revenues of $900 million over three years — the story had only gotten bigger since I first heard it.

 It ran. 

At one point my investment had become $250,000. In Dallas at that time, that was enough to buy a very nice house. 

I was young. I was inexperienced. I thought about taking the profits and didn't. 

I let it ride. 

In February 2003, the SEC filed suit against Douglas Norman for securities fraud. The China license was fabricated. The $900 million revenue projection had no basis in reality. The press releases announcing deals across the globe — China, India, multiple countries over an extended period of time — were all invented. 

The whole thing was a pump and dump scheme. 

Norman was eventually ordered to pay $3.9 million in judgments and penalties and was permanently barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company. 

The $250,000 became almost nothing. In a single day. 

When I found out I was in complete shock. You don't assume that multiple press releases over months are all fabricated. You just don't. The story had seemed real for years. 

But what really got me was this. 

A friend of mine from college had gotten a group of people from his fraternity to buy the stock. I was the one who had told him about it. 

I was the gateway. 

I felt responsible. I still think about that. 

Smart people get fooled by good stories. Especially when the story keeps getting bigger and the press releases keep coming and the person behind it looked you in the eye and seemed completely credible. 

I spent the remainder of my time at Fidelity watching the slow recovery of 2003 and 2004 from the inside. By the time I left in mid 2005 I had my MBA, my CFP, and a very clear picture of how large financial institutions think.

Fidelity is a good company. I had good experiences there.

But I am not a corporate person. I never have been. I'm wired to do the right thing by people — not what an institution tells me to do if those two things are in conflict.

That's hardwired. It came from my dad, who was self-employed. It came from my grandfather, who was self-employed. It came from somewhere deeper than either of them.

I needed to leave so I could become what I was actually supposed to be.

December 27, 2005. Houston. Everything changes.

I had a plan.

Set up an RIA — a registered investment advisory firm — and build it through my dad's network and contacts in Houston. He knew people. He had relationships I could grow into.

It was a real plan with a real foundation.

I moved to Houston in 2005 to make it happen.

My dad passed away on December 27, 2005. 

He had been my best friend. We had spoken every day for the previous four years.

I wasn't ready to build a business. I was just trying to survive.

I set up the RIA anyway — the plan had already been in motion — but I never really got it off the ground. I spent 2006 at Comerica Securities instead.

I needed somewhere to be while I figured out what came next.

2007. Rollover Coach. An education I didn't plan on.

I left Comerica and started RolloverCoach.com — a training and education platform for financial advisors working in the 401k rollover market.

The timing, in retrospect, was extraordinary.

I trained more than 7,000 financial advisors through paid programs and ongoing content while the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression unfolded around all of us.

I watched 2008 from the advisor side — talking every day to the people who were sitting across from clients trying to find something honest to say. The fear. The anger. The accounts cut in half.

I had now watched this happen twice.

Once from inside a major investment firm. Once from inside the advisor community training the people trying to help clients survive it.

What I kept hearing from the advisors I trained was a version of the same thing: we need help reaching more people. We need better ways to connect with the clients who need us.

2010. Annuity Resources. 

Annuity Resources started as a resource to help financial advisors and agents grow their business — connecting them with people who were interested in learning more about annuities. 

That was it. Straightforward. 

I set up the marketing side under Brooks & Co in 2010 and began advertising nationally as Annuity Resources in 2011. 

Along the way, we have worked with over 3,000 insurance agents, financial advisors, insurance carriers, and dozens of organizations that sit between them. 

In 2021, we launched the direct-to-consumer agency. 

I didn't write this page. Twenty-five years wrote it. 

Why any of this matters to you.

I'm conservative by nature. Always have been. 

The experiences above didn't create that instinct — they confirmed it, expensively and repeatedly. 

I lost real money in tech stocks. I watched $250,000 become almost nothing in a single day. I watched fifteen people get burned by a product that was engineered to look better than it was. I trained 7,000 advisors through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and heard what it did to real people on both sides of the table. 

At some point you start taking risks seriously. 

A lot of my clients have reached the same point. They've lived through 2000 to 2002. They've lived through 2007 to 2009. They've watched account values cut in half and felt what that does — not just to a portfolio but to your sense of what retirement is actually going to look like.

People think they're comfortable with risk until a real bear market shows up and stays awhile.

Most financial advisors practicing today have never experienced a real and lasting bear market. Someone with fifteen years of experience entered the industry in 2010 or 2011 — well after the markets had already bottomed. Every correction they have witnessed has been resolved in weeks. The COVID crash of 2020 was down and back in roughly six weeks.

That is the market they know. That is the market that shaped how they think about risk.

They have never sat with a client whose account has been down forty percent for eighteen months with no bottom in sight. They have never felt what a prolonged bear market does to a person — not just to their portfolio but to their sleep, their confidence, their sense of whether the plan is going to work.

So when someone who lived through those periods tells them they are done with market risk — many of those advisors read that as irrational. As leaving money on the table.

I don't read it that way.

I lived through both of those periods with my own money on the line. I watched people I knew lose real money and feel what that actually does to a person. I have heard that particular fear described to me more times than I can count.

When someone reaches out through this page and tells me they are done with risk, I don't hear someone who needs to be educated.

I hear someone who has already paid for their education the hard way.

At some point the certainty of a guaranteed return is worth more than the possibility of a higher one. That's not a consolation prize. That's a legitimate decision made by people who have thought carefully about what they actually need retirement to do.

Most of the financial industry quietly looks down on that decision while selling products that aren't as safe as they sound.

I don't. I built something for people who've made it.

What finally made me sit down and write all of this.

Two things happened around the same time. 

The first was watching the internet fill up with AI-generated annuity content. Anyone can build a website within twenty four hours now. Anyone can generate thousands of words of product information that looks like consumer education but is built entirely around the concepts that benefit the seller. 

A lead company in this space launched something that got me fired up. It essentially data dumps product information online — with the emphasis on bonus rates, the highest advertised returns, and the carriers offering the most eye-catching numbers. 

It looks like a consumer resource. 

What it actually does is point people directly toward the products most likely to have the traps I described on this page. 

The information isn't always wrong. That's what makes it dangerous. It explains products accurately enough to sound credible while consistently leaving out the parts that would make a careful buyer pause. 

The renewal rate history. The difference between the income account value and the real account value. The way a bonus gets recovered over the life of the contract. 

There is more annuity information on the internet than any person could read in a lifetime. 

What's missing is a way to interpret it. To read a product illustration or a carrier website and understand what the numbers actually mean and what questions to ask before signing anything. 

That's what the 15 traps are. Not a list of products to avoid. A way of looking at everything you find. 

The second thing was more personal. 

Two A rated insurance companies reached out about a potential partnership. They asked me to sign an NDA before the first call. They were referred to me by a friend of mine, so it felt legitimate. 

Every person who showed up on that call was internal digital marketing staff — the people who run these companies' own online marketing campaigns. 

The people whose job it is to understand how competitors acquire customers. And try to do the same for the insurance company. 

After the first call, the person who organized it sent me an email. We didn't need to do the second call, they said. What they really wanted was to see the internal marketing campaigns we use to generate leads. 

I knew at that point what this almost certainly was. 

I got on the second call anyway. I felt it was the right thing to do. I was very careful about what I said. 

When I hung up I looked them up. One review site had more than fifty reviews about their internal practices — and they were deeply negative. Withheld funds. Blocked transfers. Customer after customer describing one percent returns on index annuities held for years. 

People who felt they had been completely taken. 

I can't tell you with absolute certainty the calls were a setup. I'm about 99 percent of the way there. 

I want to be clear — this isn't about painting the entire insurance industry with the same brush. There are good people in this business. I've worked with many of them. 

But I was genuinely shocked that eight people could get on a Zoom call and think it was acceptable to do what they did. 

I was raised to believe that how you treat people when no one is watching is who you actually are. Eight people on a Zoom call apparently missed that lesson. 

I was angry.  I wanted a pound of flesh. 

So I sat down and wrote this instead. Every word of it. 

I've spent 25 years watching an industry that is capable of doing real harm to real people.

I've always wanted to be a source of something better than that. That's why I wrote the traps letter. That's why I built this. 

It's really that simple.

A note about Annuity Resources. Since launching the direct-to-consumer agency in 2021, we have placed over $41.5 million in premium for clients across all 50 states — working with 40 carefully screened carriers. A significant portion of that came from repeat clients — people who purchased a second, third, or fourth annuity with us after their first experience. 

In an industry where trust is rare, we think that says more than any number could. 

If you made it this far — thank you.

Genuinely. This is a long page, and your time matters. The fact that you're still here tells me something about you. You're not looking for the flashiest rate or the biggest bonus. You're looking for something you can trust. 

That's exactly who this was written for. 

When you're ready, the next step is simple. Request the annuity information that best fits your situation and schedule a call with me directly. Not a call center. Not a junior associate. Me. 

I hope what you read here helps — whether you work with us or not.

Whenever you're ready, we're here.

*Scott Brooks, CFP®* 

*Founder, Annuity Resources* 

*Licensed in all 50 states* 

*Houston, Texas* 

"This is an unsolicited endorsement — Scott never asked for it.
If you stumbled across this website looking for the best annuity rates, you are in luck.
I had already decided an annuity was the safest place for my money in my early retirement years — I just didn't know how to go about it without paying an advisor. Scott Brooks held our hand every step of the way, kept in constant communication, and ironed out every wrinkle during the application process.
My biggest apprehension came when it was time to actually transfer our hard-earned money. Even after speaking with Scott multiple times, I still felt uneasy. At that time, I wished there had been endorsements on this site to ease my fears.
I've now completed two annuities with Scott. Both were flawless.
If you've decided an annuity is where you want to be — I 100% endorse Scott Brooks."
— Jeff W.