What's on our desk

Shorter term annuities

We wanted to share what's actually on our desk, not the polished version, but the real mechanics of what goes into building a 1-year guaranteed rate worth choosing.

When you deposit into a fixed annuity, we invest your money in bonds to fund your guaranteed rate. The term of the product and the duration of the investments match: 1-year term, 1-year bonds; 3-year term, 3-year bonds. This is called asset-liability matching. It's the structural reason your rate is guaranteed for the full term and doesn't move on you.

At shorter durations, the bond universe changes.

In most rate environments, shorter-duration bonds yield less. The spread between what we offer and the bond yields has to cover our costs and fund a rate that's actually worth your while. If it doesn't, we're not launching the product, so we're pricing carefully, not quickly.

Short terms also attract a different kind of saver. People who want a 1 or 2-year term usually have a specific plan. They're waiting to see where rates go. They're parking money from a CD that just matured. They're building a ladder so different accounts come due at different times. Almost all of them will hold to the end of their term, which is exactly what the product is designed for. Pricing for that certainty, rather than having to estimate how many people leave early, requiring a different set of assumptions and precision in the math.

Then there's the regulatory side.

Every product we sell is regulated state by state. Each state's Department of Insurance has its own filing requirements, its own review timeline, and sometimes its own disclosure standards that require form revisions before approval moves forward. A straightforward new term can sit in the pipeline for months, not because something's wrong, but because that's what thorough oversight looks like.

We're glad it works that way. State approval means examiners have checked that the product does what we say it does. The friction is the point.

The last piece is simpler but still real.

Running a 1-year account costs roughly the same as running a 3-year one. Identity verification, customer service, account infrastructure, maturity notifications. Those costs get recovered across the life of the investment. At 3 years you have 36 months. At 1 year you have 12. So the experience has to be built efficiently, not just correctly.

We're building it both ways.

You joined this waitlist knowing what you wanted. We're working through the math, the filings, and the infrastructure to make sure what we give you is actually worth the wait. We'll be in touch when we're close.