Who buys variable annuities?
"An annuity makes sense in a few different scenarios: In general, they are not the best deal around (and are often ripoffs), and will almost certainly be a bad deal if pitched by a tax preparer, insurance salesman, etc.  Keep in mind that any ""guarantees"" offered are guarantees made by an insurance company. The only backing up of that claim in the event of a company failing is protection from your state's Guaranty Association. (ie. not the Feds)" There is always some fine print, read it. I doubt there is any product out there that can guarantee an 8% return.  As a counter example - a 70 yr old can get 6% in a fixed immediate annuity. On death, the original premium is retained by the insurance company.  Whenever I read the prospectus of a VA, I find the actual math betrays a salesman who misrepresented the product. I'd be really curious to read the details for this one. "Two types of people: (1) Suckers (2) People who feel that investment advisors/brokers make too little money and want to help out by paying insane commissions. Think I'm kidding. Check out this article: ""Variable Annuity Pros and Cons"" Seriously, for 99% of us, they are a raw deal for everyone except the person selling them." I wrote a detailed answer about variable annuities on another question, but I want to include one specific situation where a variable annuity may be the right course of action. (For the sake of simplicity, I'm quoting directly from that answer): Three-quarters of US states protect variable annuity assets from creditors. Regular IRA's don't benefit from protection under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and may therefore be more vulnerable to creditors. If you're a potential target for lawsuits, e.g. a doctor worried about medical malpractice suits, variable annuities may be an option for you. As always, you should consult a legal/tax professional to see if this might be a good option for you to consider. The SEC also has a fantastic publication on variable annuities that provides a great deal of information. It's not directly related to this question because it doesn't necessarily focus on the circumstances in which they might be a good fit for you, but it's educational nevertheless and should give you more than enough information to properly evaluate any policy you're looking to buy.
"This answer is provided mostly to answer your question ""what is it?"" A variable annuity is a contract between you and an insurance company. The insurance company takes a bunch of money up front as a lump sum, and will pay you some money yearly - like earning interest. (In this case, they will probably be paying you the money into the account itself). How much they return is, as the name suggests, variable. It can be anything, depending on what the contract says. Mostly, there will be some formula based on the stock market - frequently, the performance of the Standard & Poors 500 Index. There will typically be some minimum returns and maximum returns - if the stock market tanks, your annuity will not lose a ton of value, but if the stock market goes up a lot in one year (as it frequently does), you will not gain a lot of value either. If you are going to be in the market for a long amount of time (decades, e.g. ""a few years out of college"" and then a little), it makes a lot more sense to invest in the stock market directly. This is essentially what the insurance company is going to do, except you can cut out the middleman. You can get a lot more money that way. You are essentially paying the insurance company to take on some stock market risk for you - you are buying some safety. Buying safety like this is expensive.  Variable annuities are the right investment for a few people in a few circumstances - mostly, if you're near retirement, it's one way to have an option for a ""safe"" investment, for a portion (but not all) of your portfolio. Maybe. Depending on the specifics, a lot. If you are under, like, 50 or so? Almost certainly a terrible investment which will gradually waste your money (by not growing it as fast as it deserves to be grown). Since you want to transfer it to Vanguard, you can probably call Vanguard, ask to open a Roth IRA, and request assistance rolling it over from the place it is held now. There should be no legal restrictions or tax consequences from transferring the money from one Roth IRA account to another." Until you find a job, I would recommend doing nothing more than a bank checking account or a checking and savings account.  Some alternatives, such as savings bonds, would be okay if you were perfectly sure you did not need the money in the next six months.  Consider working for a place such as McDonald's in the meantime. Once you have stable employment, there are two paths you could take.  The first is a bond fund.  It would provide fair market returns for the time between now and the collection of social security.  The second would be a traditional annuity.  You have to be careful with them.  If it sounds much better than what others are offering, it is probably a scam.  Your interest in an annuity is that it will pay you money for as long as you live.  If you live to be 105 you will still be getting payments.  A bond fund would have run out of money long ago by that time. The biggest thing for you right now is getting to when Medicare takes over from private health.  Looking for any job is important right now to preserve cash. Although I do not normally recommend annuities, I do with smaller amounts of cash.  It is unlikely you will ever recover this sum again and the time remaining to save is very short.  The greatest challenge with an annuity is regret.  You can't get the money back once you have turned it into an income stream.  On the other hand, it will last as long as you live. The only important caveat is that if you are in poor health, then the bond fund would be better for you because you may not live to be very old. As I see it the two main considerations are:  Total amount of money received, for which the key variable is life expectancy. 41000 * 0.8 = 32800, so at £86 / week she would only be better off with the lump sum if she expected to live for less than ~7.3 years. Obviously none of us have a crystal ball, but you could make some assessment based on her current health, risk factors etc. to see whether that seemed feasible. Also you do have to bear in mind that the value of £86 in 7 years' time will be less than it is now - but I guess the £86 would be inflation adjusted? Her need for income (versus capital). If she takes a lump sum and invests it in a house, that is great but doesn't provide any income at all. If she has sufficient income from other sources (and forecasts this other income to continue until her death) then the lump sum might be more attractive, but if not then she would need to be sure that she wasn't tying up the money unnecessarily. Another option here would be using the lump sum to buy an annuity, and it might be wroth exploring this, but I doubt whether the rates would be good enough to beat the £86 / week she is being offered as an alternative. Another (lesser?) consideration is her future entitlement to state-funded care if needed in her later years. If you have assets above a certain amount you are expected to fund your own care, in which case having an expensive house might actually be more of a liability than a help. This calculation arrives at the correct answer.  However, it uses the formula for an annuity due.  This means the payments are made at the beginning of the month and the last month of the 10 year period has interest accrued. See the section, Calculating the Future Value of an Annuity Due. The rate is given as an effective rate. with  In Excel, =FV((1+0.12)^(1/12)-1,120,3500,0,1) Good analysis/point, except you're missing the fact that most pensions allocate only a tiny fraction of their overall portfolios to hedge funds. So say you have a $2 billion pension fund, maybe $50 million of that is hedge funds. So basically, yes the pools of money will get smaller, but there's a lot of the overall pie that the hedge funds aren't eating (yet). "For a non-ETF mutual fund, you can only buy shares of the mutual fund from the mutual fund itself (at a price that the mutual fund will reveal only at the end of the day) and can only shares back to the mutual fund (again at a price that the mutual fund will reveal only at the end of the day). There is no open market in the sense that you cannot put in a bid to buy, say, 100 shares of VFINX at $217 per share through a brokerage, and if there is a seller willing to sell 100 shares of VFINX to you at $217, then the sale is consummated and you are now the proud owner of 100 shares of VFINX. The only buyer or seller of VFINX is the mutual find itself, and you tell it that you ""want to buy 100 shares of VFINX and please take the money out of my checking account"". If this order is entered before the markets close at 4 pm, the mutual fund determines its share price as of the end of the day, opens a new account for you and puts 100 shares of VFINX in it (or adds 100 shares of VFINX to your already existing pile of shares) and takes the purchase price out of your checking account via an ACH transfer. Similarly for redeeming/selling shares of VFINX that you own (and these are held in an account at the mutual fund itself, not by your brokerage): you tell the mutual fund to that you ""wish to redeem 100 shares and please send the proceeds to my bank account"" and the mutual fund does this at the end of the day, and the money appears in your bank account via ACH transfer two or three days later.  Generally, these transactions do not need to be for round lots of multiples of 100 shares for efficiency; most mutual fund will gladly sell you fractional shares down to a thousandth of a share. In contrast, shares of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) are just like stock shares in that they can be bought and sold on the open market and your broker will charge you fees for buying and selling them. Selling fractional shares on the open market is generally not possible, and trading in round lots is less expensive. Also, trades occur at all times of the stock exchange day, not just at the end of the day as with non-ETF funds, and the price can fluctuate during the day too. Many non-ETF mutual funds have an ETF equivalent: VOO is the symbol for Vanguard's S&P 500 Index ETF while VFINX is the non-ETF version of the same index fund.  Read more about the differences between ETFs and mutual funds, for example, here." "John's answer is similar to what I was thinking. You should invest in insurance ""because there's an insurance salesman who needs to pay to send his kid to college."" I will never be a fan of any type of permanent insurance, and I think it wrong to sell a single person with no dependents such a policy. I've used the expression ""Variable Annuities are sold, not bought."" I feel the same about these insurance policies.  The best advice I can offer in a short reply is this: If you need life insurance, buy term. Save as much as you can, 10% minimum, more if you are able. A young person should be saving for retirement and to position them self to buy their first house, if that's what they wish. What good is a full up Whole Life policy when you need to raise $40K to put down on a house? Sorry to sound like I'm lecturing, this is one of my hot points." There are lots of options out there  * Buy index funds and non industry-specific ETFs   * invest with financial managers and hedge funds (who are bound by laws)  * Invest in real estate and small business   Etc.  The real abuse comes from buying specific equities poised to benefit from policy. And it's a cancer on both sides of the aisle.