At one point, investors had two options; these were either traditional or variable annuities. Traditional annuities were met with several complaints. One of them was that the annuity account wasn’t tied to the markets, so investors couldn’t make money when it went up. And while variable annuities allowed for investors to reap the benefits of a rising market, they were also faced with high commission and risk; all because the market could go down. To solve this problem, life insurance companies combined the two into what we know as the fixed indexed annuity. (more…)