Member-only story
I Built My Own Annuity and Retired On It
No commissions. No surrender fees. No fine print. Just a paycheck that shows up.
Written with help from an AI writing tool for research and editing. Every position, number, and opinion is mine.
A few years back, an annuity salesman took a friend of mine to a very nice lunch. My friend told me he had glossy brochures, a laminated chart showing “guaranteed lifetime income,” and an answer for everything except one question. My friend asked him how much he would get paid if he signed. The salesman smiled and changed the subject.
That lunch cost the salesman maybe fifty dollars. The deferred annuity he was selling would have cost my friend a 6–8% commission up front, surrender penalties for the better part of a decade, and a stack of riders written by lawyers who were not looking out for him.
He passed. After he told me the story, I went home and started looking at whether I could build the same thing myself: a monthly paycheck that didn’t care what the market did that week. Turns out, I could. I built it with income funds I own outright. That’s really the whole point: you can create your own annuity, keep the paycheck, and skip the middleman.
