What’s today’s forecast?

There’s always someone out there complaining about the local weatherman getting it wrong again.  “They said it was supposed be clear and now my picnic is ruined with all this rain” or “we’re in for 12 inches of snow today” when it’s 60 degrees outside.  Forecasting the weather is an inexact science, and even with all the progress that has been made in the last few decades, we still get some surprises thrown our way when it comes to whether we see sun, rain, or snow out our windows in the morning.

The same thing holds true when it comes to forecasting the financial markets.  Different from the weather though, markets can only do one of two things: go up, or go down.  There’s no partly cloudy when it comes to investments, it’s one way or the other.  We’ve come a long way with different techniques in forecasting which one of those two directions the markets will move, but it’s still a very inexact science.

One tool that we use here at Secure Retirement Strategies is Fixed Indexed Annuities or FIAs.  What do FIAs have to do with forecasting the markets?  Quite simply, it removes the need to figure out when the market will go down because the best feature of every Indexed Annuity is that your money is guaranteed to NEVER decrease no matter how far down the markets may go.  Not only is your initial premium guaranteed, but any interest credited to your account is also guaranteed to never lose a single penny.  That’s a powerful promise as you plan for retirement knowing that the money you’ve worked hard for throughout your career is now guaranteed to be there when you need it.

There’s more to this story though.  Not only is your money guaranteed to never decrease due to market volatility, but your assets will also grow by a percentage of the growth of a specific index.  You can capture gains in markets like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq without having to worry about any losses those markets experience.  It’s a best of both worlds proposition, which is why we use Fixed Index Annuities as part of retirement planning.

Our goal is in our name.  Securing your retirement is at the core of why we come to work every day.  Utilizing both the guarantee of never losing money and capturing the growth of today’s markets will allow you to focus more on the weather forecasts, and less on the market forecasts.