In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon Stancil and Murs Tariq discuss a major Vanguard announcement that signals a meaningful shift in retirement planning. For years, annuities were often dismissed by large investment firms, yet today we are seeing industry leaders embrace their role in guaranteed income in retirement. Vanguard’s move to introduce a 401k annuity option inside the Vanguard retirement plan validates what many retirees already need—predictability, income, and risk control as they plan for retirement.

Listen in to learn about why annuities in 401k plans are gaining traction, how fixed annuities can serve as a bond alternative, and why firms like Fidelity retirement, BlackRock retirement, and Vanguard are acknowledging the importance of retirement income planning in the face of ongoing market volatility. Radon and Murs explain how this evolution helps investors create your own pension, supports retiring comfortably, and strengthens efforts to secure your retirement.

In this episode, find out:

• Why the Vanguard announcement is a turning point for annuities retirement strategies
• How guaranteed income in retirement helps offset market volatility
• What a 401k annuity option really means for retirement planning
• When IRA rollover options may provide more flexibility than a company 401k
• How the Three Bucket Strategy simplifies planning retirement and managing risk

Tweetable Quotes:

• “As you approach retirement, predictability and reliable income matter just as much as growth.” — Radon Stancil
• “Annuities aren’t about giving up growth; they’re about creating confidence and peace of mind in retirement.” — Murs Tariq

By combining growth assets with income-focused strategies, retirees can follow a clearer retirement checklist, reduce stress during volatile markets, and build a customized retirement planning approach. Whether inside a Vanguard retirement plan or through broader IRA rollover options, the goal remains the same: thoughtful planning, smarter risk management, and a strategy designed to help you plan for retirement with confidence.

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome to Secure Your Retirement Podcast. Today, we are excited to be with you.

And I will say, I think this is some big news really in a way.

So let me give you a little bit of context. For years now, Murs and I have been

working with our clients because most of our clients are in those 55 to 75 years of

age range. So, they’re closer to retirement. They’re in retirement. And a big part of

what you need to think about in retirement is, hey, I need to have income or I

need to have predictability in my portfolio and I need to have risk controls in the

portfolio. And so, we have used over the years annuity.

Many institutions have said, don’t do annuities. Annuities are not good. Annuities are

bad. And really, you kind of had two worlds. You had this world of investments that

we’re saying, let’s invest in the stock market and bonds. And you had this other

world, which was insurance. And both of them talked negatively about the other. You

had the insurance world saying, why would you ever invest in the stock market with

all that risk? You can come with us, and you can have the safety, you can have

predictability, and then you had the other world of the investments that said, why

would you ever go invest in an annuity? It’s conservative. It’s not going to give

you as good a way to return. We can go out and we can, you know, do way better.

It’s back and forth, back and forth all the time. One saying bad things about the

other. What we have seen occur, and particularly, I will say over the last decade,

but really in the last three to five years. In the last three to five years, we’ve

seen those worlds come together. And so, what we’ve seen now is that folks that were

just being insurance only said, you know what, that’s not the right way to be. We

need to get over into the world of helping people with investments. We’ve seen the

world of investments basically says, hey, you know what? There is volatility in the

market. And we do have a big part of our population that needs to have some safety

and predictability. So, we need to understand the insurance world. And so those two

things

a big announcement. So, Murs, you kind of want to jump in. This is an article, by

the way, that we’ve read and just thought, let’s just talk about it. Right. Yeah.

So, Vanguard, earlier here in December, came out with an article with a big

announcement that they are going to start introducing within the 401K plans the

ability to create income streams, guaranteed income streams. What that really is the ability to purchase an annuity within the 401 plans. This is really big because

what Radon was just saying earlier, Vanguard, Fidelity, all these institutional money

managers that really own the 401k in the retirement planning space, I mean, if you

think about the trillions of dollars that are under these types of plans, these guys

are coming out and saying that, hey, there actually is some validity here in

providing a portion or having an ability to put a portion of the assets towards

insurance -based products that are going to provide some element of guarantees that

really the stock market cannot provide. So, like Radon said, we’ve been saying this

for decades, and now you’ve got some of the largest companies, the largest custodians

and asset managers coming around and saying, hey, this might be a good idea to

consider in your retirement planning process. So, the article was really, it was

really nice to see, I mean, they laid out some good reasons, which we believe are

true reasons as to why.

back, but pretty much anyone that is not retired yet doesn’t have access to a

pension. Very few percentages of the people are going to get those. So, the ability

to recreate or create your own pension to add on to Social Security could be

something very attractive to someone. And another big one, I mean, just think about

the year here in 2025, market volatility. And if all of your money is in one type

of strategy, which is the stock market, and we’ve got a volatile year, it makes

withdrawal planning very stressful. It makes managing your retirement income very

stressful because one month you could be up, one month you could be down. And on

that month that you’re down, are you going to withdraw the same amount of money

that she did in the previous month, right? Those are stressful decisions. We want

retirement planning to be very simple and easy and predictable, not having to play

the market for our withdrawals. And that’s really the key is what Vanguard and a

bunch of others have started to realize is that what matters more as your approach

retirement is not growth or not just growth. Let me say it that way. What matters

equally as much as growth is also the ability for predictability and reliability in

your income plan. So, the focus is being shift to income planning rather than just

growth strategies because that’s what the retiree wants and they need and they need

avenues to be able to get that. So, it’s not just Vanguard. Vanguard just announced

it, but some other large, large asset managers, large custodians like BlackRock and

Fidelity and a handful of others, they’ve been rolling these out all year to give

people access to this type of retirement planning investment strategy that we’ve been

believing in for decades now. So, I think it was just cool. I came across this

article and I was like, man, you know, you got some of the biggest guys out there

that are saying this makes sense. So, I’m glad we’ve been doing it for a long time

now. And, you know, when you hear the feedback from our clients as we get together

in meetings and at client events and stuff, we’ve got some pretty happy people just

because they’re not worried when the market goes down as much. Yeah, are their

investments going to lose some money? Absolutely. But are they worried about their

cash flow and where their retirement income is coming from, they are not. So, what

else do we have? Why does this matter so much, Radin? Yeah, I was just going to

say, you know, we’re not coming on this podcast today and saying, hey, my goodness,

this is great. Go go go go. Go get a Vanguard 401K. We just think it’s kind of

interesting that this industry that both sides have come together, it does add some

validity, I think, to the strategies that Murs and I have been laying out now for

a long time. But I think the things that you want to take away from this is, hey,

this is something that if I’ve not considered it in the past, I might want to

consider it. That’s one aspect. I think the other one is, is let’s talk a little

bit about the structure of everything as compared to what you would have in a 401K.

So, while kudos out to Vanguard for going and doing this, you know,

most of our clients have the ability to move their money out of a 401K. And one

of the things that we tell them is by moving the money out of the 401K, it opens

up your options. You’re not just restricted with the limited options that you’re

going to get in a 401K. So, a 401K, a lot of times, is going to give you a

limited number of mutual funds that you can go pick. You do not have the world of

investments. and the same is going to be the case with these ideas of putting

annuities over in a 401k. So, you might have an option or two within the 401k,

but you’re not going to have the world of the annuity options. So, I want to kind

of come back and tell you a little bit about how we do this and how our process

works is that we’re going to look at the entire world of annuities.

So, if we get a client come to us, we’re first of all going to say, what’s the

objective? Is my objective to just say I would like to have some safety, a bond

alternative within the portfolio? Okay, great. Now let’s go find the best producing

interest -bearing annuity that we can get. And we go shopping. And it literally comes

down to what’s the top three to five annuities out there? Let’s say the person

comes in and they said, I want the highest guaranteed income. Well, that’s a whole

different search of what we’re going to do. Now, depending upon how much money we’re

putting over into this allocation, we’re going to split this usually between two to

four annuities. Why do we do that? Well, we want diversification. They’re all very

similar, but it allows us to get that diversification. And I think that’s extremely

important. So, If I am younger and I still believe I want an annuity or I don’t

have an option but to be in my 401K, okay, so be it. But if I am at least in a

position that maybe I’ve got an old 401k or I’m 59 and a half or older,

getting out of the 401K environment, which is a company environment, moving over into

the IRA, which is an individual arrangement, now all of a sudden, I’ve got a lot

more options. But I think, Murs, if we could just hit briefly before we close

this episode out of the idea of how we do this with the three buckets, I think

that’s just how we tie this together. Yeah. So, if you’ve been listening to us for

a while, you know that we like buckets and we like simplicity as well. So, we, the

three buckets that we talk about very often are the cash bucket, the income and

safety bucket, and then the growth bucket. The cash bucket is really your, someone

would call it your emergency fund, some would call it your operational cash.

investing in the stock market and riding the volatility of the stock market. But

over time, we know if we give it time and we give it the ability to grow

unhindered, it does pretty well. That’s the stock market, but carries a good amount

of risk. In between, we introduce what’s called the income and safety bucket. So as

we approach retirement, as we approach this idea of needing to start creating our

own paychecks, we want to have a place that is not subject to volatility that can

still make a decent rate of return. What we would say is a bond or better return.

So somewhere in that, you know, four to eight percent average rate of return and

provide us the ability to now withdraw the cash flow needs that we need without

ever worrying about this bucket being down because the market is down that month or

that year. So, when you combine these three buckets together, now we’ve got

simplicity. it’s a strategy that you can talk about with your friends and everyone

really kind of understands it very quickly. And it buys us the ability to really

just have peace of mind because we’re not stressed out when we have issues like

we’ve had here in 2025 with tariffs and inflation and the Fed. And then, you know,

next year, whatever headlines the volatility brings, yeah, we want some money at

risk. The question is, is how much do we want at risk? And the dollars that we

are not going to put at risk, do we have it in an effective place that it can

drive income? It can also

of your investment strategy becomes very, very doable. We can customize it to what

you want on the growth side and also the income and safety side. Some may require

a rider that’s going to bring in guaranteed income. Others may not need that rider

and that fee that comes with it because we can effectively just have a safe bond

alternative that’s going to create the ability for a predictable withdrawal strategy.

So, customization is the key, especially as we start to cater more and more to the

person who wants more from their advisors. We’ve been doing it for a long time, and we know it works very well. All right. We hope this has been helpful.