Halbert Hargrove built one client's income plan on four unbilled annuities

The income plan took more than a year to assemble and rests on four separate annuity contracts, none of which carried an advisory fee at Halbert Hargrove, a firm that reports $4.2 billion in regulatory assets under management and 20 investment adviser representatives per RCD's records. Nick Strain, a senior wealth advisor and chair of the firm's wealth advisory committee, described that arrangement in an interview with InvestmentNews as where annuities sit for many fee-only registered investment advisors: the products solve problems a stock-and-bond portfolio cannot, while the work of using them fits awkwardly inside an RIA practice. His case for the products runs on safety, since guaranteed income, he said, provides more certainty than a diversified mutual fund or ETF portfolio, where there are no guarantees, and the guarantee puts clients at ease.

Two situations drive the conversations. The first arrives with the client: a new household holding an old annuity contract and no memory of why it was bought, where surrendering it can trigger a large tax bill. That is why Strain often reaches for a 1035 exchange, the tax-free transfer from one annuity contract into another, which can capture a higher payout rate or move a client out of a variable contract and into an indexed product with a floor, making a legacy contract behave like something the client wants to keep. The second case is a conservative client nearing retirement with a large position in cash, CDs or Treasuries and little appetite for more stock market risk; Strain's point is that a long stretch in Treasuries or high-yield cash may not be the best long-term solution even for a household that has decided it does not want to take equity risk.

Both scenarios are planning work rather than product sales, and the volume appears to be climbing: Strain said an increasing number of clients have joined the firm with existing annuities over the past five years, and he described a growing onus on the firm's advisors to fold the products into clients' financial plans rather than let recommendations get made somewhere else. His reason is as much defensive as strategic, since he would rather be part of the conversation, he said, than learn six months later that he was unhappy with whatever had been recommended.

The numbers behind that impulse are lopsided: citing a 2025 LIMRA study, Strain said only about 1% of total annuity premiums come from fee-based products, a share he described as an obstacle to adoption at firms that operate on a fee basis, while the wider industry hit a record $464.1 billion in sales last year. Set alongside that record, the channel that holds the planning relationships carries, by the study's measure, a sliver of the flow.

Insurers expect that to change: in Goldman Sachs Asset Management's 2025 Annuity Industry Survey, 45% of respondents named the RIA channel as the one likely to see the most growth over the next three years, a forecast worth reading as a supply-side view because the respondents are industry participants rather than the advisors themselves. The article names the first obstacle plainly: for a fee-only fiduciary that takes no commissions, the difficulties start with knowledge, since expertise and experience with contracts a client already owns is not a given on a stock-and-bond desk, and a firm without both is poorly placed to judge whether an old variable annuity should be exchanged, repositioned, or left alone.

The demand-side case keeps building on its own. TIAA's KRC Research survey of 1,000 adults found 53% fear outliving their savings, while Guardian's 2026 Mind, Body, and Wallet report recorded its lowest well-being and financial health readings in 15 years, with 41% of respondents doubting their savings will last. The contracts already sitting in client accounts are another sign of that anxiety, and the first scenario Strain describes, a client who has forgotten why the contract exists, implies an in-force book sold years ago and rarely revisited.

We have argued in this publication that the industry has built the lifetime-income products but not the permission structure around them, and that the winner in decumulation will be whoever makes the first default spending plan rather than the first annuity. The fee-only channel points to a second gap, one that sits closer to the invoice: a client who arrives holding four contracts does not need persuading that annuities belong in a plan, but the advisor needs a way to work with what is already there. On the evidence of Halbert Hargrove's plan, the work happens, spanning the exchange analysis, the placement inside a retirement income plan and the monitoring afterward, without a billing line attached. That makes the fee-based share a compensation statistic as much as a demand one, and it is the number the carriers' growth forecast has to clear.

Our September reading of LIMRA's final second-quarter tally complicates the sales picture further: fixed-rate deferred annuities, the product that carried the boom, are the ones contracting, and the money replacing them behaves differently. Record annual volume has been arriving with a changing mix underneath it.

Where that leaves a fiduciary is a judgment about labor. Halbert Hargrove's answer, to build the expertise, keep the annuity conversation in-house and absorb the work without a fee, is easy to defend to a client; whether it survives the arithmetic of a firm that has to staff it is the part the carriers' optimism has not addressed. The fee-based share is the number to watch.