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#1. Top Company Overall
Editor Rating: 
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 2%-11%
Year Founded: 2016
Surrender Fees: N/A
Headquarters: Montana
#2.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 3%-5%
Year Founded: 2014
Surrender Fees: N/A
Headquarters: New York, NY
#3.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 3%-5%
Year Founded: 2016
Surrender Fees: N/A
Headquarters: Washington, DC
#4.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 3.25%-7.25%
Year Founded: 1999
Surrender Fees: N/A
Headquarters: Medford, OR
#5.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 1%-11%
Year Founded: 2000
Surrender Fees: Variable
Headquarters: Miami Shores, FL
#6.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 2%-11%
Year Founded: 1986
Surrender Fees: Variable
Headquarters: Englishtown, NJ
#7.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 2%-11%
Year Founded: 1979
Surrender Fees: Variable
Headquarters: Washington, DC
#8.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 2%-11%
Year Founded: 1989
Surrender Fees: Variable
Headquarters: Ponte Vedra Beach, FL
#9.
Editor Rating:
Overall Rating:
- Immediate Annuity Offered
- Longevity Annuity Offered
Rates: 2%-11%
Year Founded: 2001
Surrender Fees: Variable
Headquarters: Washington, DC
Investing in Annuities
If you’re looking to invest in annuities as part of a broader retirement plan, you’ve come to the right place! At Sophisticated Investor, we’ve taken the liberty of reviewing the top nine annuities providers in America. We rated them based on a variety of factors, and because the way one annuities provider promotes themselves can be vastly different from another, we had to cater each of our reviews to account for those differences.
Generally speaking, there are a few factors that we considered with each provider such as:
- The Founders and Management Team.
- Annuities Products Offered.
- Customer Reviews.
- A Final Verdict for Each Provider as to Whether You Should Use Them or Not.
9 Top Annuity Companies Reviewed
After much deliberation, we’ve rated DCF Annuities as the number one choice for your annuity investing needs. There are several reasons for this and we’re about to discuss them in this review.
Why DCF Annuities Ranks #1
No matter which way you slice it, DCF annuities takes the cake when it comes to offering retirement investors the best in annuities. The company features a large network of annuities dealers they can work through, an outstanding reputation among customers and industry related associations and a wide variety of investing options that allow investors to capitalize on and grow their wealth whether they are years away from retirement or they find themselves in the middle of their retirement as seek to earn a little bit of extra income.
The Founder of DCF Annuities
Nathaniel Pulsifer is the founder and president of the company. He actively brands himself as an industry expert on the topic of annuities and is already considered the figurehead of one of the leading annuities organizations in America.
Nathaniel has grown DCF Annuities to become a leader within the market by helping investors in or near retirement understand their safe money options so their clients can implement retirement investment strategies that protect and grow their assets.
Types of Annuities at DCF Annuities
There are only so many ways to rework the types of annuities you can offer. Regardless of the features of the specific annuity, most fall into two categories. They either offer you immediate income or deferred income, and if there were a third category it would be a variable annuity.
DCF Annuities categorizes annuities into three distinct categories: Income Now, Income Later, and Safe Growth Options.
Income Now: The Income Now product category offers retirees a specific payout amount every month for as long as the annuity lasts.
Income Later: Income Later is the deferred version of an annuity. If you’re a few years away from retirement, you can compound interest without benefiting from the income until you’re ready. This makes your income payments higher when you are indeed ready to use them to your advantage.
Safe Growth Options: The Safe Growth Options category is for people who are already retired and looking to secure steady income for the rest of their lives.
Rates and Fees
Believe it or not, annuities don’t work exactly the same way that other types of investing products do. While the annuities provider setting you up with the best possible option for your annuities needs does earn a commission, they don’t take that commission directly from you. They actually get it from the insurer selling the annuity to the annuities dealer, who then sells it to you.
This means that judging rates and fees pretty much comes down to looking at the annualized rate from your perspective. Again, we have to give the win to DCF Annuities in this case because you can get rates as low as 2% annually or as high as 11% annually depending on the annuities product you choose. Obviously if you’re going to look into exposing your annuity to the open market through a fixed indexed annuity, you’re more likely to benefit from a higher rate.
If you’re just looking for more predictability over anything else, then you will likely have to accept a lower rate. Each type of annuity you consider may also come with its own surrender fees or withdrawal fees. Also note that when you withdraw from an annuity, the IRS will tax you on it. Income from an annuity is typically tax-deferred. That means you can benefit from income growth in your annuity and let the magic of compound interest go to work while you’re holding onto your annuity and deferring the income.
That being said, as soon as you make the choice to no longer defer the income and start to use it, you then get taxed.
Stan The Annuity Man
Stan Haithcock is an annuities dealer that markets himself as Stan The Annuity Man. We give’s website honorable mention here for the simple fact that he does a great job branding himself. He appeals to a certain kind of investor that likes privacy and freedom from government. Why does that work well for annuities? Since annuities are sold by insurance companies through annuities dealers, the government actually gets very limited information about your particular annuity, so you get more privacy with this kind of investing than you would using other investment instruments.
Annuity Customer Reviews
DCF Annuities again takes the cake when it comes to customer reviews. The unfortunate part about that is that some of the reviews are split between two different company names, DCF Annuities and DCF Exchange. Still, we had no choice but to rate them first simply because most of those reviews are positive.
Investors have left many comments saying how well the company does at providing advice and guidance to those who don’t know what they’re doing or want to include annuities as part of their retirement portfolio but aren’t sure which products are best for them.
To be fair other annuities providers also ranked well in this department. Namely Annuity Gator and Blueprint Income. Both get extra credit from us for developing educational content that really keeps investors informed, and also being upfront about the rates that and investor can earn with different types of annuities products and different insurers backing those products.
Annuity Alliance Offers Great Content
Annuity Alliance features one thing that other annuities providers really don’t, a robust list of frequently asked questions with coupled detailed answers. Sure, other websites we reviewed do have frequently asked question sections and we make it a point to include frequently asked questions and every review that we do, but Annuity Alliance actually has separate answers for beginners, intermediate and advanced annuities investors.
It’s ironic that most of the blog posts and web pages on the company’s website at then because this FAQ way of organizing content actually works really well. Still, we couldn’t rate the company among the top annuity providers simply because it doesn’t have as much of a reputation when it comes to reviews or a proper management team listed on any public websites.
(FAQ) Frequently Asked Questions about Annuities
How is an Annuity Structured?
There are four different constituents involved in an annuity: the owner, the annuitant, the annuity beneficiary and the insurance company. The beneficiary is obviously put in place for when the annuitant passes away and wants to leave behind their estate. The owners the provider of the annuity and the insurance company is the one backing it.
How is an Annuity Structured?
There are four different constituents involved in an annuity: the owner, the annuitant, the annuity beneficiary and the insurance company. The beneficiary is obviously put in place for when the annuitant passes away and wants to leave behind their estate. The owners the provider of the annuity and the insurance company is the one backing it.
What Types of Annuities Are Available?
There are two main types of annuities: immediate and deferred. Immediate annuities start paying out income in the first month that you start paying a premium. A deferred annuity allows your interest to compound before giving you income, which means you earn more if you’re willing to wait for the interest to accrue rather than cashing out as soon as possible
Should I Invest in Annuities?
Answering this question really requires some soul-searching on your part. You need to decide when you want to retire and what kinds of things you hope to accomplish and experience while you are retired. Most people don’t have a specific bucket list for every day, every month or every year of their retirement lives, but at the same time, we all know that whatever we do during retirement, it’s going to cost us money.
Beyond thinking about what you hope to do when you retire, you should also think about what you’d like to leave behind, how much you contributed to IRAs and other types of investments, and the tax consequences associated with those decisions and how an annuities investment potentially fits into all of that.
If you still don’t know what to do, it might be best to ask somebody you trust for their advice on your personal financial situation.
Do I Have To Pay Commission Fees on an Annuity?
Annuities providers typically don’t take commission directly from customers. The way it works is that you do business with the annuities provider and the annuities provider does business with insurance companies that facilitate the administration of the annuities product. This means that when you look at rates offered by annuities companies, you’re looking at the actual rate you’re getting and any fees that are incurred by the annuities provider are already built-in.
This works to your advantage because you can compare different annuities companies based on the rates and terms they offer in full transparency and you don’t have to wonder if you’re getting a good deal. You just look at the rates and consider the terms and conditions and do what’s best for you.
Do I Have to Pay Withdrawal Fees on Annuities?
In the world of annuities, withdrawal fees are called surrender fees. By withdrawing, you are surrendering the rights to the income paid out by your annuity early and you do have to pay a penalty for that most of the time. There are some annuities that won’t charge you a withdrawal fee, but most of them will. You also need to consider that while annuities are tax-deferred investing tools, they are not totally tax-free.
This means that you will be docked income tax when you withdraw and sometimes the IRS can even levy you with the 10% withdrawal fee. On top of that, the annuities company usually charges withdrawal fees based on a sliding scale.
Let’s say for instance that you invest in an annuity that pays 7% annually on average. If you withdraw in the first year, you pay a 7% fee. In the second year you pay 6% and so on and so forth. This means the longer that you stay in the annuity, the lower your fees get over time. But if you leave in the first year, you’re really hampering any gains you’ve made. That’s what typically happens most of the time.
How to Choose the Right Annuities Provider for You
Choosing the right annuity provider for you really comes down to your specific retirement goals, where you’re currently at in your life and how much time you have to realize your goals or reach retirement.
Every company is different in the way they present educational material and the rates and fees that they offer, and not every company has reviews on the same customer review websites. Some brand individual people as authority figures and others use more generic brand names to try to market themselves. Most companies work with similar insurance providers and offer similar rates, but at the end of the day the subtle differences in the offerings might have the biggest impact on the overall performance of your retirement portfolio.
After conducting the in-depth research that we have, it’s obvious that DCF Annuities is far and away the number one annuity provider in America. Rave reviews from dedicated investors, a sound marketing strategy and some of the best rates in the industry are the reasons we believe that.
So as you continue along your journey towards investing in annuities, keep the name DCF Annuities in mind and feel free to pursue the other reviews we’ve put together in taking the time to make the best decision for yourself.
Top Annuity Companies Summary
