In 1995, I began to focus on Retirement plans for consumers. At that time, we were in one of the biggest stock market booms. Remember, Bill Clinton was president. And the stock market, all you had to do was show up and you made money in the market. That is, for the first 7 years. In the 8th year of the Clinton Administration, however, the market began a 2 year decline that resulted in a over all market loss exceeding 46%. Five years later, the market would have rebounded earning back all of those losses and just when investors thought they would again start earning positive “net” gains, the collapse of the subprime housing market hit and once again taking investor’s money with it. This time, they would loose more than 49% of their market holding.
I knew this was all coming. Maybe I didn’t know exactly when but knew it would happen. That’s why in 1995 I turned to indexed retirement plans. Then don’t lose money; ever!
Over the coming years, I would market a number of different Indexed plans with a number of different companies. In 2014, I started marketing the Athene BCA Indexed annuity. There were a lot of reasons that I settled on this product as my primary retirement offering. It offered a lot of great investment options (indexes), it had a low annual fee (1.5%), there was no cap like a lot of other indexed products so if the market index went up 20%, the client was credited 20%. Up until finding the “BCA, most indexed products were capped at 4.5%. Having a cap made no sense to me. After all, the real money is made when the market is rebounding as it did in 2002 through 2013. Remember that 45% and 49% market loss I mentioned above. With the BCA, rather than just getting their money back that they lost, most of that was credited as a gain to those with the BCA, “net”. That’s because they didn’t lose money when the market did. It is a contractual guarantee of the BCA. All that changed were the gains in the market when it rebounded.
“When the market goes up, BCA credits you a gain”
“When the market goes down, BCA remains the same”
A quote of mine… it’s original, I think.
Well, it is about time that the industry recognized the BCA for all of it phenomenal work and results.
I’m a believer. You should be too.