The purpose of this website is to inform you of the Settlements reached in the class action and derivative lawsuits that are now pending in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland (the “Court”) relating to certain Janus Mutual Funds (”Janus Funds”).

You or someone in your family may have held, purchased or acquired shares in one or more of the Janus Funds during the period from January 1, 2000 through September 30, 2003, inclusive. You may also currently hold shares in one or more of the Janus Funds.

If this description applies to you, you have a right to know about the Settlements and all of your options, before the Court decides whether to approve the Settlements. If the Court approves the Settlements and after any objections or appeals are resolved, the Claims Administrator appointed by the Court will make the payments that the Settlements allow.

In the lawsuits (the “Actions”), Plaintiffs allege that the Defendants were involved in unlawful market-timing and late trading in the Janus Funds. Market-timing is a term used to describe short-term, “in and out” trading of mutual fund shares, which may be used to capitalize on inefficiencies in the way mutual fund shares are priced. Late trading is a form of market-timing that involves placing orders to buy, sell or exchange mutual fund shares using the prior day’s price to capitalize on information obtained after the close of the market.

In 2003, the first action based on the alleged market-timing and late trading practices was filed in the federal court. In the weeks and months that followed, numerous suits were filed in courts throughout the country. Various other mutual fund families identified as being involved in the regulatory market-timing and late trading investigations likewise were named in numerous complaints filed in courts throughout the United States. On February 20, 2004, the Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation issued an order centralizing all of these actions in one multi-district docket in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland under the caption MDL-1586 – In re Mutual Funds Investment Litigation (the “MDL Actions”). By letters to counsel in the MDL Actions dated April 9, 2004 and April 12, 2004, the Court assigned four Judges a separate track of the MDL Actions, with multiple mutual fund families assigned to sub-tracks within each track. The Janus Sub-track was assigned to the Honorable J. Frederick Motz.

On May 24, 2004, the Court issued a case management order consolidating all class actions and other cases involving Janus mutual funds, and all cases brought nominally on behalf of the funds or corporate parents of the funds or their investment advisors and styled as derivative actions, for pretrial purposes. By this same case management order, the Court appointed lead plaintiff for the consolidated class claims (“Class Lead Plaintiff”) and approved its selection of Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy as lead class counsel for the Janus Sub-track (“Class Lead Counsel”) and Chimicles & Tikellis LLP as lead fund derivative counsel for the Janus Sub-track (“Derivative Counsel”).

Consolidated complaints were filed against persons affiliated with the Janus Funds, including the investment advisor to the Janus Funds and its affiliates, as well as unaffiliated entities including alleged market-timers and parties that were alleged to have participated or facilitated in market timing of Janus Funds. In February of 2005, certain defendants moved to dismiss the complaints.

In August 2005, Judge Motz issued an opinion which denied in part and granted in part defendants’ motion to dismiss. Certain parties began discovery and, thereafter, agreements to settle were reached with the settling defendants.

For more information about the proposed Settlements and your options, including the Notice and Claim Forms, please visit the Documents section of the website.

So I’m going to put myself in your shoes and try and determine why you wanted to know about your pension annuities. Well my first guess is that you would like to know how they work. The answer here is simple enough, a pension annuity is not all that different from an annuity you can buy. Each month your employer is making a deposit into your account and the account grows over time, at the end of the time period you are allowed to take payments out on your money. Pensions are set up by large unions and typically earn really well because the money is pooled together and earns greater levels of interest.

The next thing I think you would like to know about your pension annuities is whether or not you can sell them for a lump sum. This is pretty popular for people who are receiving long term payouts from a settlement or award of some kind. You often see the commercials advertising about ‘selling your structured settlement for cash now,’ and such. The answer is no, you cannot typically sell a pension annuity because it is part of a larger pool of money and cannot be separated out for individual sale.

Those are the two biggest questions I could come up with but if you have more please leave a comment and I’ll be sure to go into more detail for you.

Some Reverse Annuity Mortgage Conditions:

The annuity will never exceed the value of the home itself.

You continue to own the home through the mortgage payout.

The annuity recipient receives slow payments of the equity of the home over time.

You must own the home outright without any additional liens or mortgages.

There will be fees to pay to get the annuity started just like closing and financing a home loan.

The reverse annuity mortgage will NOT affects your social security or medicare benefit payouts.

You can protect other assets and children’s inheritance through a ‘no-recourse’ policy that prevents the bank from seeking other resources should something happen to the value of the home.

You must be older than 62 to do a reverse annuity mortgage.

So is it a good idea for me and my family?

That can be a difficult question to answer because everyone’s financial and family relationships are different. If we consider what the annuity will do that may help you determine whether or not it is something that is in the best interest of your family. First the reverse mortgage is going to drain the equity out of your home. So suppose you own a home that is now worth $250,000, and you are in your mid to late 60′s. Assuming you will live to age 80 you would want to make sure you got payments monthly for 20 years. So lets do a little math.

20 years (*) 12 months per year is 240 months that you will need to receive a payment. $250,000 divided by 240 months means you will receive a little over $1,000 per month. At the end of those 20 years you will no longer own your home, the annuity company will. Now some reverse mortgage’s will allow you to stay in the home until you pass away, but not many.

So you are exchanging the equity in your home for $1,000 per month. The only way to determine for sure whether the reverse annuity mortgage benefited you for sure would be to ask your self how valuable the additional $1,000 per month was to your monthly income. If it makes the difference between having the necessary medications and money to live on then it will be a good thing to do. However, if all you are doing with it is spending it on your grandkids then you may be in trouble at the end of the annuity.

Axa annuity rates are going to fall into the same range as other annuity rates from similar large firms. Typically these rates are between 2% – 4% depending on the type of annuity you choose.  Variable annuities and fixed annuities will have different interest rates over the course of the annuities life.

Why the different annuity rates? Well a bank or more accurately the insurance companies, can’t guarantee a specific rate for much longer than 3 years. Typically even fixed annuity rates will have room to adjust every so often depending on the company. It is important that you know beforehand that your Axa annuity rates can change over time because this directly affects the amount of money you will have coming to you in annuity payments.

Each annuity is structured at its best to accommodate your retirement needs, which can make it difficult to compare annuity rates. There are a number of sites out there that will guarantee quotes for you, but they are really just lead generation tools for larger banks. You won’t get a quote that is very accurate until you sit down with the financial institution you plan to buy the annuity from.

Annuity interest rates won’t vary much from company to company because they all have to play by similar rules. What you really are comparing with Axa annuities are the fees associated with setting up your annuity. The worst case scenario when it comes to Axa annuity rates is 2 fold, 1) your rate varies so much over 5 or 10 years that planning your financial needs is difficult. 2) That Axa Annuity goes out of business because they lose financial viability in the market and have their credit scores reduced.

Its important to evaluate 3 or 4 companies you feel are reputable or that you have a personal relationship with before making a final decision. Large financial decisions tend to lend themselves towards relationships, and sincerity is easy to fake for an insurance salesmen who wants a commission.

Every company that deals in financial contracts is going to add on a ‘fee’ in order to nickel and dime the consumer and this is true for JG Wentworth fees as much as it is for a payday loan. The difference of course, is that a deal with JG Wentworth and Co is going to have substantially higher fees and longer term affects than a simple pay day loan.

When you sell a structured settlement you are selling future payments in exchange for a lump sum payment today. But rather than thinking in terms of payments and lump sums, just consider the settlement as a whole. Lets say the settlement is worth $3 million dollars. If you sell your structured settlement to JG Wentworth fees and charges will take somewhere between 9 and 30 percent. Meaning of the 3 million you were going to get, you will now only be getting (assuming 10%) $2.7 million.

There are only a few circumstances when selling the settlement is a more viable option than keeping it. This would be when the loss of money from the sale is less than the money you are losing in interest payments to a credit card company for example or money you may owe for medical expenses. The more rare case is that you have an investment opportunity that has a higher yielding interest rate than the one your structured settlement is getting while in the bank.

Say your annuity interest rate is 5%. If there is a home for sale that you feel is a good investment and home prices are rising at 8% per year than your money is better off in the real estate market. These cases are rare and you better really know what you’re doing before you take your settlement payments as a lump sum.

There are sites that suggest that JG Wentworth fees along with their cut of your settlement just sit in the bank and they collect your money over time. This is not actually the case. In reality your annuity is packaged into an investment portfolio and sold on the market as a bond of some kind. This way JG Wentworth doesn’t have to deal with as much of the debt. Their problem arises when no one wants to buy the bonds and they have to reorganize like they did in 2008.

Why as an insurance provider? Because insurance policies are what fund annuity payments. So if a company has a poor credit history when it comes to funding insurance policies it means they are not well structured enough to ensure you get paid your regular monthly payments via your annuity. In fact I would say that your annuities company financial records are even more important than your annuity rates. Who cares how much you are ‘going‘ to get paid if you never actually get paid.

The North American Insurance Annuity has an A credit rating. That may sounds all amazing at first but there are a few other things you need to know in order to get the proper context. What are common credit ratings? What is the highest possible rating? What is the lowest possible annuity company rating?

The credit ratings can be deceiving and whats worse, manipulative. The highest possible rating you can get for a financial institution or annuity company, is an A++. Wow, right? Amazing. Not quite. The lowest rated among the annuity companys is a B-. Meaning the gap between an A++ and the North American Insurance Annuity rating of A is actually quite large. On top of that the A is an average rating with some creditors or markets giving them AA-’s.

Now I’m not at all saying that North American is a bad company or that they have a weak financial structure. I’m just giving you some context on the ratings so that when the insurance agent talks to you about their credit rating you have the ability to understand what that really means. North American has been around for a number of years and for the most part has good to great reviews on dealings with consumers.

Just make sure you understand how your annuity is going to be structured so that is is designed to meet your financial needs with limited risk for collapse.

Now they say the devil is in the details and when it comes to explaining what is an annuity that couldn’t be more relevant. What is annuity? Well annuity is defined as “A fixed sum of money paid to someone each year, typically for the rest of their life.” by Dictionary.com. But when they say fixed sum of money and ‘rest of their life.’  There is definitely room for interpretation.

Back to the original question for a moment, how much does an annuity cost? The easiest answer there is that the annuity will cost whatever amount of money you want to put into it. Meaning however much you want to invest, assuming is is large enough or has enough time to gain interest that is is worth the effort of placing into an annuity. I received an annuity once per year, for 5 years, in sum payments of $7,000. Annuities can serve so many purposes its impossible to put a minimum price on what you need to get started. Although my best guess is somewhere around $10,000 but much more than that if you plan on using the income to retire.

So the next most applicable interpretation of the question of how much does an annuity cost is as it relates to fees and the actual cost to the investor for setting it up. Lets remove the tax costs as something that everyone has to pay and focus on the fees. The fee to set up an annuity is going to be a fixed cost to cover the commission for the sales person as well as the costs to process the paperwork. I’m all for people getting paid for what they do, but you shouldn’t be paying more than $1,000 to set up an annuity.

The reason there is a T 3 settlement example is because when securities go undelivered the market as a whole is at great risk. If there is a high trading volume, but market prices fall there is a greater risk that firms purchasing the securities will not be able to fund them. An abnormal amount of unfunded securities puts the market as a whole at risk.  Think of perishable goods at your grocer, if there are tons of people ordering them but when it comes time to pay they have no money there is spoilage. On top of that those goods could have been sold at perhaps a lower rate to someone else during the 3 day waiting period. So the losses really can be substantial to the market place.

Our trading system, the FTC, used to impose a 5 day settlement period as recent as 10 years ago. This was reduced down to the current T 3 settlement example because the FTC wanted to further mitigate risk to the market.

Trades that are covered under the T 3 Settlement Example:

Most security transactions, including stocks, bonds, municipal securities, mutual funds traded through a broker, and limited partnerships that trade on an exchange, must settle in three days. Government securities and stock options settle on the next business day following the trade. Reference SEC.gov.

So the 3 day count will start on the business day after you purchased or sold the security, so if you purchase Friday, your 1st of the 3 days begins the following Monday.  You have until the end of business on the 3rd day to deliver your certificates, in this example that means you’d have until close of business that Wednesday.

There are penalties for delivering the certificate later than the 3rd day. This can result in the firm holding the security selling it and then charging you a fee to recover their losses. There are other penalties and charges the buying firm can execute at its own discretion as well.

Why do people use a Family Settlement Agreement? While there are different types of settlement agreements from a divorce settlement agreement sample to a death benefits settlement agreement. The main function of these remain the same – to make sure the wishes of the person holding the money are carried out the way the wish. Sometimes the person holding the money is a judge, like in a divorce settlement agreement, other times it is a family member who is dividing up assets.

The family settlement agreement sample is used most often in moments of retirement allocation and inheritance divisions. It provides the legal language to make sure each member of the family is given what was intended from the deceased or nearly deceased.  What is most important to know about the family settlement agreement is that it is MORE binding in most states than what is itemized in the will.

So the most frequent uses of the family settlement agreement sample are when the will states one thing, but the siblings and remaining spouse want something different. So the settlement supersedes the will in these cases to sort of adjust it and allocate resources based on how the living agree they should be. This is common where family disputes have alienated a child from a parent to the discontent of the other parent and remaining siblings.

A father may have left that son out of the will for spite but the remaining family members want him to be included in the inheritance. The structured settlement can only be used if all parties agree to its terms and there is a clear plan to distribute all the resources mentioned in the will.

A link to an example of a family settlement agreement can be found here, http://goo.gl/MmUM6.

Now I can understand if you are in an accident that causes damage to your body, your vehicle and perhaps your livelihood.  You should be fairly compensated for your losses. What makes the situation even more aggravating is if the person who has committed the crime is uninsured. What do you do then? You are more or less screwed right?

Well lets now reverse the table here and say the person at fault is insured, and the person who was injured is not because they are here illegally. Are the then entitled to less friendly accident injury compensation? In California it is headed that way. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to make a political statement. What I am saying is that everyone is entitled to compensation based on the injury hey suffered at the hand of another.

The reason I tell my client accident injury victims California is not their friend is because of the precedent set by all the thousands of cases that California can no longer afford to deal with economically. So if you have been injured in an accident in California you need to get in touch with an accident claim lawyer immediately.  Don’t be turned off by the so called ambulance chasers. Think about it…this is what they do all day every day. Don’t you think they would be the most qualified to address your concerns and get you the compensation you need?