Annuities For Dummies
by Kerry Pechter
Annuities For Dummies
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Copyright 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2007941625
ISBN: 978-0-470-17889-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
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About the Author
Kerry Pechter is the senior editor of Annuity Market News. As a reporter who writes about annuities and the annuity industry full-time and as a former marketing writer who specialized in annuities at The Vanguard Group, he brings both an outsiders and an insiders perspective to the writing of this book.
A financial journalist for many years, Kerry has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and many other national and regional publications. His previous books include two career guides, A Big Splash in a Small Pond: How to Get a Job in a Small Company (Fireside) and An Engineers Guide to Lifelong Employability (IEEE). He is a graduate of Kenyon College.
Dedication
To my family my supportive and resourceful wife, Lisa Higgins; my three wonderful daughters, Hannah, Ariel, and Mattea; my brother, David, and his wife, Jean; my sister, Carol, and her husband, Andy; and my parents, Allen and Dorothy.
Authors Acknowledgments
The community of people who think about, write about, create, and sell annuities is a relatively small one. Many of its members patiently guided me through the intricacies of these odd but necessary insurance products when I was figuratively climbing stairs in the dark.
A special thanks goes to Noel Abkemeier, Jeremy Alexander, Lisa Bennett, Garth Bernard, Scott DeMonte, Howard Drescher, Jerry Golden, Pem Guerry, Kelli Hueler, David Macchia, Moshe Milevsky, Lisa Tibbitts, Tamiko Toland, John Ziambras, the folks at NAVA (Mark Mackey, Deborah Tucker, and Kathleen McKee), and to the media relations professionals at dozens of insurance companies who cheerfully responded to my last-minute requests for information.
Im grateful to Adam Reinebach and Lee Barney, the publisher and editor of Annuity Market News, respectively, for supporting this project and for sharing my editorial values. I am also indebted to my former colleagues at The Vanguard Group, who taught me the true fundamentals of investing.
Thanks to my agent, Marilyn Allen, my acquisitions editor, Stacy Kennedy, and my project editor, Natalie Harris, for recognizing the value of publishing this book and welcoming me into the fold. Id also like to thank my friend and fellow Dummies author, Russ Wild, for his indispensable help. Finally, I owe a huge debt to Jesus Salas for his wise counsel.
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