What is a Contingent Deferred Annuity (CDA)?

A contingent deferred annuity (CDA) is a powerful tool for individual investors that allows them to create a structure that acts like a “personal pension1” by covering retail ETF and mutual fund investments with insurance protections in IRAs, Roth IRAs or brokerage accounts. These protections allow individual investors to insure their retirement savings against sequence of returns risk, market risk, and longevity risk.

Portfolio Retirement Income Guarantee for Clients of RIAs

Our proprietary technology unbundles annuity insurance protections from underlying investments. This allows you to transfer risk to an insurance company without moving assets. The resulting solution, a Contingent Deferred Annuity (CDA), allows retail mutual funds and ETFs to be wrapped in brokerage accounts, IRAs or Roth IRAs to generate lifetime income for your clients even if the covered assets are depleted (subject to the claims paying ability of the insurance company). And since you may choose qualified or non-qualified assets to cover, the insurance coverage does not change the tax status of the covered assets.

Unbundled

Unbundling simplifies advisor and client experiences. It removes the traditional technological hurdles advisors face when working with traditional annuities. Asset allocation, rebalancing, reporting and management all remain at the custodian, so you don’t have to implement and manage off platform.

Portable

The income guarantee and underlying investments are not tied together in an annuity chassis, so the coverage can move from custodian to custodian. A taxable event isn’t necessary to fund it. Covered assets may remain where they are custodied; there’s no need to sell out of and buy into positions.

Transparent

Because this isn’t annuitization, your client’s retirement savings don’t disappear into a black box. The covered assets retain a value you and your clients can see so they can be managed, tracked, and billed on. Advisors keep control and their value as asset allocator is preserved.

The Portfolio Retirement Income Guarantee (or CDA) is liquid and flexible. Cancel any time. Use it to insure clients against sequence of returns risk during the fragile decade. Use it to provide a bridge between retirement and the age at which they intend to take social security, or simply use it to manage longevity risk.

The Portfolio Retirement Income Guarantee was designed by and for fiduciaries with zero commissions. RIAs may bill directly from the covered assets without impacting coverage or creating a taxable event.

1 A CDA is not a pension, nor does it contain all of the same features or benefits of a pension; it is a type of insurance. Guarantees are backed by the claims-paying ability of insurance company and do not apply to the investment performance of the covered ETFs and/or mutual funds, which fluctuate with market conditions.