Pension annuities are financial tools set up by your company, whether that is a government or a private entity. If you have tried searching online for information about your pension annuities you have no doubt come across a lot of really fluffy material. Most of it, I happen to know, is written by Filipinos or Indians. Now bless their souls they are trying their hardest but how many articles can you possibly stomach that say ‘pension annuities are great things. Things that are great like pension annuities are things for financial tools.’ The stuff makes no sense.
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.
