Interest Rate Update For Your Retirement

Even if they feel confident that they've saved well for retirement, there is a scarcity factor when they go to retire and they start to show up as a lesser version of themselves. Valuable content are going to be shared and we're literally impacting lives. There's been a lot happening this year with our current administration that is affecting our clients. Hey everyone, I want to welcome you to this video. This is part of our special collaboration series for the finance geek community and my good friend Denzel Rodriguez. I'm Daniel Ronberg and I help specialize in taking people through a process to enter retirement in an abundant mindset. And what that really means to me is being able to show up as your most powerful self, your most abundant self and to be able to enjoy time and the money that you worked hard to save with the people you love doing the things that you love to be able to do. And so one of the things that I'm very passionate about is being proactive and making sure people understand what's happening economically so they can take advantage of it. Right? There's all kinds of things happening in our economy that I can't speak to or solve. So I always look at the micro. How can I help serve people with their individual situations to boost their retirement income so that they can live their best, fullest life in retirement. And one of the things I would highly encourage you to be paying attention to right now if you're a retirement saver, whether you're planning for retirement or in retirement, is the interest rate environment is so, so interesting right now, specifically the interest rates for annuities. Because as the interest rates have risen, what we've observed is that they've grown faster and risen higher in a shorter period of time than ever in US history. Now a lot of people go, well, Daniel, what about the 70s or the 80s when interest rates were double digits? They've been higher in other periods of time, yes, that's true, but they've never risen that this much this fast and now they're starting to come down. And so a lot of people in this community are going to be looking at how that's going to impact debts, right? Home equity, lines of credit, personal lines of credit, business lines of credit, all kinds of tools that you can use for accelerated pay down strategies. But what I want to focus on is what can we use to actually create income? And what's interesting is as rates have come down, annuity rates have held. In fact, in some cases in this year, in 2026, the they've actually gone up. And so why is that important to you? Well, when interest rates are high for annuities, that means that insurance companies can pass benefits forward to you that are far greater than they've been able to. So what this is really crucial for is people. If you own annuities or if you have products that are in that type of realm, like CDs or money markets or any type of bank savings vehicle, these interest rates could be really, really meaningful to you and your retirement. So let me give you three areas where I'd be really paying attention to. If I either own an annuity and haven't had it reviewed in the last couple of years, or if I was looking to create safety in my retirement and I wanted some good rates that I could count on to earn interest to take income from. The three areas are going to be super important to pay attention to are going to be income, the accumulation and the benefits that these annuities provide. So when you look at annuities, they can provide a whole different menu of options of benefits. Traditionally, they're going to provide income. So when people go to use an annuity, they're trying to create a pension like income, a guaranteed income for the rest of their life, or them and their spouse's life to be able to live on in retirement. So the fact that interest rates are essentially 500% higher than they've been in any period in my career that I've been helping people in retirement in is significant. It means they can pass way more income onto you. So if you have an annuity that you haven't reviewed in a while, I would encourage you strongly to do a full independent review and audit of that annuity and see if there's ways that you can boost income. We have helped. I don't know how many, I would say, I venture to say maybe 60 or 70 different people who already had their income turned on from their annuity to increase their income with these higher rates, which is just something that is unheard of, I never would have thought that would have happened in my lifetime. But it's something so cool to be able to go to somebody who's say, getting $2,000 a month from their annuity and saying, hey, if you change your company, you could actually be getting $2,500 a month just for switching companies because the interest rates are so much better. That's something that's really important and really impactful to be able to be aware of. Now, the second area and the other reason why people get annuities is they will Use them for accumulation. Now while I've never been a big proponent of using annuities strictly for accumulation, I think there's far superior accumulation vehicles out there for people that want safety of their principal. They can be competitive in the accumulation space when you compare them to bank products like CDs, money market savings accounts. And so the interest rates being higher means higher rates. So if you go to your bank and you look at what's the highest CD you could go and get, or the highest savings account or money market and you look at that rate and you compare them to the fixed annuity rates, the one year fixed annuity rates are at 5% right now. So if you go look at the one year CD rates at the bank, you can get a good comparison to see if that's really relevant. Now that rate's moving all over the place. So by the time you see this, it could be a little above 5%, it could be a little below 5%, but, but right now they're still meaningfully higher than the current CD rate, which is going to be around 3% for one year. So, so that kind of gives you a guide to see, wow, how much more interest you could make if you compare those products. Now a one year annuity is not liquid like a savings account or money market. So you need to be able to have enough liquidity to handle anything that could come up for 12 months and still be able to keep this annuity with the other portion of your money in something for 12 months at a period of time. So that's how you'd be able to get that interest rate. There's also indexed annuities that are indexed to an underlying indice like the S&P 500. Their caps and the participation rates are substantially higher than they've been over the last decade or even the last 20 years. And so this is a really phenomenal time if you have one of those, to try to get interest from, to be looking at that meaningful higher interest rate potential as well. And the third reason people use annuities in retirement are benefits. And benefits can be things like death benefits, long term care benefits, and they can provide all kinds of other risk mitigation options for you and your retirement. So for somebody who can't get life insurance because you can't qualify medically, or you need some type of long term care solution in your retirement in case, God forbid, you had that type of health care emergency and you need extra money to be able to take care of you, annuities can be phenomenal resources to provide those, they can come with death benefits that can grow on a guaranteed basis every single year with no health underwriting. They can also have tax free long term care benefits attached to them. And because the interest rates are much higher now than they were, those benefits are substantially higher than they've been over any point in my career. So whether you're somebody who wants to drive income, you want to be able to get safe interest, or you want to be able to increase the benefits and protect yourself from certain key risks or your loved ones from certain key risks in your retirement, now would be a really, really great time to take a look at annuities because as these rates fall, I anticipate annuities will follow behind them at some point. But as of right now, they've actually held pretty strong and increased in a couple areas. So if you're looking for any one of those three areas to improve in your retirement, please reach out. We're doing complimentary analysis audits of previous annuities, full reviews for whatever you need to be able to see if you're missing something. Could this be a potential solution that you could add in? And we're doing all of those reviews for the finance geek community. Absolutely complimentary because our company, Nation's First Financial, is the retirement resource for Denzel Rodriguez's company. And we've been having this great partnership and we're proud to be able to continue that into 2026 and forward as we continue this collaboration series. So if you have questions about any of that and you want to do a deep dive for your situation personally, click the link below. Jump on our calendar. I'm actually meeting with everybody from the finance geek community personally and so we can actually spend some time together and figure out how we can be a benefit to you in your retirement. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you soon. Take.