What percent would you say or what does the research say that you can take out with still very high likelihood of you having some money when you die?

Well, let's talk about Dave Ramsey first because it's so much fun to make fun of Dave Ramsey.

Let's talk about the way he's thinking through this.

So he's thinking, all right, if you just invest 100% of your portfolio in stocks, and historically, stocks in the United States have maybe had a 12% average rate of return.

By the way, that's what's known as arithmetic returns.

It's not geometric returns, which are the actual returns that you get, the actual amount of money that you're But I think those kind of details don't really matter to people like Dave Ramsey.

But let's say that inflation is 4%.

And then obviously annuities, for some reason, there's a certain group of people that a lot of them call themselves fiduciaries, ironically, that are like so against certain products that they, it's almost ironic that you can call yourself a fiduciary, but then speak in such an absolute way.

What is an annuity? What is protected income? How do they fit together?

I'm, I'm gonna start by talking about what an economist thinks an annuity is, because that's not necessarily the products that exist on the marketplace.

An annuity is an umbrella.

And the best way to think of an annuity is a set of laws and a tax structure that defines a certain class of investment-like products.

So let's focus on how an economist thinks about an annuity, and that's an income annuity.

So the purpose of an income annuity is to generate a stream of income as long as you're alive.

It's very similar to when we think of a pension or Social Security.

[laughs]