What Ken Fisher Gets Wrong About Annuities (2026)

For more than ten years, Ken Fisher has run one of the most recognizable ad campaigns in personal finance. The tagline is blunt: he hates annuities, and in his telling, you should too. Fisher Investments, the firm he founded and chairs, has reportedly put tens of millions of dollars behind that message since the campaign launched in 2013.

It works. Few slogans in financial marketing are as sticky, and Fisher has reportedly said in interviews that he would rather walk away from the business entirely than sell an annuity. That kind of certainty makes for a great commercial. It also makes it easy to forget that a thirty-second ad cannot capture the difference between a variable annuity, a fixed index annuity, and a plain multi-year guaranteed annuity, three products with almost nothing in common except the word "annuity."

A slogan is not an analysis, and the better question isn't whether Fisher dislikes annuities. It's why, and who benefits when you follow that advice without checking it against your own numbers first.

The three objections Fisher raises

Fisher Investments has published its case against annuities in detail over the years. Strip out the marketing language and the argument comes down to three claims.

Annuities lock up your money

It's true that some contracts restrict access. A ten-year fixed index annuity with a declining surrender schedule is not a product you casually cash out of in year two.

But that description doesn't fit every annuity. A three or five year multi-year guaranteed annuity typically has a surrender period no longer than a bank certificate of deposit, and most MYGA contracts let you withdraw up to 10% of the value each year, penalty-free, starting in the first year. Some carriers add a full return-of-premium option on top of that. Painting every annuity as a decade-long lockup skips over the products built specifically to avoid that problem.

There is a real trade-off buried in here, and it deserves more nuance than an ad campaign usually offers. Locking money up for a fixed term is exactly what lets an insurer guarantee a rate it couldn't otherwise promise, and the surrender period is the mechanism, not an accident. The question isn't whether a term exists. It's whether the term matches how long you can actually go without touching that money, and whether the free withdrawal allowance covers a reasonable emergency along the way.

Annuities carry hidden fees

This complaint has real teeth when it's aimed at variable annuities. A variable annuity can layer mortality and expense charges, subaccount fees, and optional riders into a total cost that runs 3% to 4% a year, and those costs are easy to overlook until you read the fine print.

It doesn't hold up against a fixed annuity. A multi-year guaranteed annuity has no annual management fee, no mortality charge, and no expense ratio baked in. The rate you're quoted is the rate you earn. Treating "annuities have hidden fees" as a universal rule, when it really describes one category of product, blurs a distinction that matters.

The stock market will do better

Fisher Investments manages equity portfolios, and its underlying belief is that stocks beat guaranteed products over long stretches. Looking back 30 years at a time, that has generally been true.

The catch is that most retirees don't have a 30-year runway for the portion of savings they need soon. Picture someone at 63 who puts $200,000 into equities and watches it fall 35% in the first year. She may need that money in five to ten years, and a downturn of that size can take three to five years just to recover from. That timing problem, known as sequence-of-returns risk, is exactly what a fixed annuity is built to remove. Our visual breakdown of sequence-of-returns risk shows why the order of your returns matters as much as the average.

What Fisher doesn't say: how his firm gets paid

Here's the piece that changes the whole conversation. Fisher Investments is an assets-under-management firm, and its fee is reported at roughly 1.25% a year on the money it manages. The more assets it holds, the more it earns, and every dollar that leaves for an annuity is a dollar that no longer generates that fee.

Run a simple, hypothetical comparison. Say someone has $200,000 to place. A five-year MYGA paying a hypothetical 5.50% would owe $0 in annual fees and guarantee its return: at that rate, compounding annually, the account would grow to roughly $261,400 by year five, with no risk of losing the original deposit. An AUM advisory relationship charging 1.25% on the same $200,000 costs around $2,500 in the first year alone, or more than $12,500 across five years, and the ending balance isn't guaranteed since it rises and falls with the market.

None of that proves Fisher is wrong on every point. It does mean that when he says he hates annuities, he's also describing a product that competes directly with how his firm makes money. That's a fact worth knowing before you weigh his opinion.

It also explains why the criticism rarely gets specific about MYGAs by name. A general warning about "annuities" as a category is easy to say in a thirty-second spot. A side-by-side comparison of a guaranteed 5.50% against a fee that reduces returns every single year, win or lose, is a much harder pitch to make on television.

The surrender-charge trade he offers

Fisher Investments has reportedly offered, at times, to cover the surrender charge a client owes to exit an existing annuity and move those assets into its management. On its face, that sounds generous.

Look at what it actually swaps. The client signs an advisory agreement, and the assets are now subject to that same roughly 1.25% annual fee for as long as they remain under management. There's no more surrender period, but there is now a cost that never fully disappears.

Compare the two structures directly:

• A MYGA's surrender charge might start around 7% to 10% and steps down to 0% by the end of the term. Once that period ends, the money is fully liquid and carries no further cost.
• An AUM fee of roughly 1.25% doesn't step down. It applies every year, indefinitely, to every dollar under management.

On $300,000, a 1.25% fee runs about $3,750 a year. Over ten years, that's roughly $37,500. Over twenty years, it's about $75,000, likely more than the surrender charge would have ever cost on the original contract. The annuity's cost eventually hits zero. The advisory fee generally doesn't.

None of this means paying an advisory fee is automatically a bad deal. Active management, planning, and ongoing advice have value, and plenty of people are well served by paying for it. The point is narrower: covering someone's exit cost from one product isn't the same as making that person better off once you account for what replaces it. Read the new agreement in full before you sign anything, and ask directly how the fee is calculated and how often it's deducted.

Where Fisher has a point

He isn't wrong across the board. A few of his criticisms are worth taking seriously.

• Variable annuities can be expensive for the average buyer. The layered fee structures on many of these contracts are genuinely hard to justify next to a comparable standalone mutual fund.
• High-pressure sales tactics exist in this industry. Dinner seminars and scare-based pitches on complex products are a real problem, and they deserve the scrutiny they get.
• Stocks have historically outpaced guaranteed rates over very long periods. Someone in their mid-40s with a 25-year horizon and genuine tolerance for volatility will likely come out ahead in a diversified equity portfolio compared with a MYGA over that stretch.

The issue isn't that these points are baseless. It's that folding them into a blanket "avoid every annuity" message ignores how different one annuity type is from another.

Who shouldn't follow his advice as written

His recommendation doesn't fit everyone equally. It probably doesn't apply to you if:

• You're 55 or older and want to shield part of your savings from a market downturn.
• You have somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000 that you won't need for three to seven years and you want a return that beats a CD, with a guarantee behind it.
• You'd rather not pay an ongoing advisory fee on money that's already meant to sit safely.
• You value a known outcome. "This contract will be worth roughly $261,400 in five years" is a fundamentally different statement than "stocks have historically averaged around 10%, so you might end up with more, or you might not."

Fisher's advice makes more sense for someone who wants full equity exposure, has decades before they need the money, and is comfortable riding out volatility. A large and growing share of retirees, including the wave of Americans reaching 65 every year, simply aren't in that position. For them, the goal isn't the highest possible average return. It's making sure a specific dollar amount is there on a specific date, regardless of what the market happens to be doing that month.

That's a different job than the one Fisher Investments is built to do, and it's worth being honest about which job you're actually trying to accomplish before you rule out an entire category of product.

What the sales numbers actually show

While the ad campaign keeps running, Americans keep buying annuities in record numbers. According to LIMRA, total U.S. annuity sales reached $464.1 billion in 2025, the fourth straight year of record sales. Fixed-rate deferred annuities, the MYGA category specifically, accounted for $165.3 billion of that total.

That is not a market full of people being talked into a bad decision. It's a lot of retirees, in an environment of attractive interest rates, choosing a guaranteed outcome over market uncertainty with their own money, at the same time a decade-long ad campaign has been telling them not to.

It's worth sitting with that contrast for a moment. If the campaign were persuading its target audience, annuity sales would be shrinking, not setting records four years running. What seems to be happening instead is that people nearing or in retirement are doing their own math on the specific dollars they can't afford to lose, and reaching a different conclusion than a general-audience commercial.

The bottom line

Ken Fisher built a genuinely successful investment firm and one of the most effective marketing campaigns in the industry. But a marketing campaign is a client acquisition tool first, not a neutral financial analysis, and it's fair to treat it that way.

Before you take his advice at face value, ask one question: does the person telling you to avoid annuities make more money when you don't buy one? If the answer is yes, it's worth getting a second opinion, ideally one that looks at your specific age, timeline and goals rather than a slogan.

That doesn't mean an annuity is automatically right for you either. It means the decision deserves the same scrutiny you'd give any product with a well-funded marketing budget behind it, whether the message is "buy this" or "avoid this." We can compare a fixed annuity or MYGA against other top-rated options and walk through the real numbers for your situation, with a free, no-obligation quote.