Annuity Shopping Sites Spare You the Sleep-Inducing Sales Pitch

If you wanted to buy a variable annuity a few years ago, it often meant spending the evening with a monotone insurance agent who rattled on about fixed-amount payout options, death benefits and asset-based distribution expenses. After a couple of hours of talk like that, you can understand why few people had the stamina to comparison shop.

But that was before the Internet made comparison shopping a cinch -- even for complicated, pain-in-the-derriere products such as variable annuities. Four sites -- insure.com, AnnuityNet.com, AnnuityScout.com and Variable Annuities Online -- let you sift through hundreds of different VA brands and the baffling array of options that come with each one.

At the same time, there's a move on by 20 industry heavyweights, including Fidelity Investments, Metropolitan Life and Franklin Templeton, to make annuities more comprehensible to the general public. For starters, the group wants VAs to be called "personal retirement accounts." The hope, of course, is to demonstrate that VAs are suddenly relevant to the millions of Baby Boomers who now must get serious about retirement. ...