Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: Why Annuities Have Higher Yields Than Bonds

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

On today's Talk Your Book, we spoke with David Lau from DPL Financial Partners about annuities and how financial advisors are dealing with low interest rates. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by DPL Financial Partners. Go to DPLFP.com and you can check out their annuity comparison tool to see how much you can make an annuity for your clients as a financial advisor. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritthold's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain

positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Anno Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I think because Squid Game is the most popular Netflix show of all time, spoiler alerts no longer apply. Right? You've had a chance to see it. this point. You haven't seen it as your fault. And so I got to thinking after we talked with David Lowe, who we've had in the show a number of times now from DPL. And you asked him a few times, why is it that annuities can offer such higher rates than bonds? Right? Because it sounds like you can get four or five percent in annuity right now when bonds are more like one to two percent returns in terms of yield. And I think I figured out the in the analogy, Squid Game, Squid Game was an annuity.

How so? Think about it. The reason the annuities are able to offer higher rates is because you pool the money in some of those people die before they get the extended time to earn their money. And the people that survive end up making more money. In Squid Game, as people died off, the big ball in the sky would get more money dropped in. Squid game was an annuity. Kind of a tough mortality kicker, but still. What do you think, okay, I don't know the yuan conversion or whatever, I forget the currency. What do you think interest rates had to do with that? For the payout? That's true. In other words, if rates were 4 to 6% with Squidgin have even happened, I feel like the central bank of wherever that was, it was Korea, was forcing people, it was killing people on the lower end, forcing them to play death games.

This is the other idea. So I got my car fixed recently. I told you, it cost to fix the bumper in the back of my car because it broke so many things and there's all these sensors now. How much was it? I don't think we spoke about that. It was like $12,000 to fix the rear of my car. obviously, did insurance cover all of that? Well, insurance, so they told me how much it cost, and I had to pay my $1,000 deductible. Okay. And I'm thinking back, this is the first time I've probably ever had one of my cars fixed in the, I don't know, 25 years I've been driving.

Not to brag. Well, that is not really a brag. So this is how insurance works, right? You pull it, pull it, and pull it, and finally you get the payout when you actually need it. And that's, I guess, how annuities work. All right. So on this episode with David, we've already spoken about annuities, I think, twice with them twice or three times. I think this was David's fourth time coming back in the show. I don't know,

maybe third. On this show, what we did was we, we used advisor surveys. You know how much we love surveys. We use advisor surveys as a jumping off point to discuss how advisors are handling the current interest rate environment. And Ben, I don't know if you've noticed this, but we've got the Fed on track to taper. And what do you think interest rates are doing? Right. The economy, do you see what interest rates are doing today? Falling off a cliff again. The economy, look, looks like the economy is opening up because pandemic stuff seems to be easing and then interest rates continue to fall. So why are interest rates falling? I don't get this. But the thing that I got away took away from this survey is advisors and clients themselves are going to need more

education on the alternatives to bonds. That was kind of my takeaway. So yeah, so. That's a good takeaway. So, so yeah, we talked with David Lau again going over kind of how advisors are thinking through this and how FPL is helping them think through these decisions. So here's our talk with David Lowe from DPL Financial Partners. We are joined today by David Lowe. David is a returning champion. He is the founder and CEO of DPL Financial Partners. David, thank you for coming back on.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Ben. Good to see you guys. I think a good place to start is an email that came in today from my listener. Good place to tee it up. I am 64, looking at semi-retirement and social security soon. My current portfolio is 80% stocks, 15%. cash, 5% golden crypto. I have no bonds. It seems to me that bonds as an asset class currently

amount to return free risk. If longer term rates rise, say to their average value over the past 20 years, the prices wind up fall into the point that their total return would be significantly negative. Convince me, I should be holding some bonds. So, David, I don't think you're going to necessarily convince this person why they should hold bonds, but maybe this is a good way to start all the conversation about interest rates and income and building portfolios. Clearly, the listener has a high risk tolerance. So between the crypto position and huge equity position, but I don't disagree on bonds. I mean, I don't think there's a lot of value to bonds today.

The way we hear from advisors, now again, we work with thousands of advisors. We do surveys, we get feedback, both anecdotal and through surveys. And advisors, I think it was only 41% said that they still look at bonds as generating income within a portfolio. And really what they're looking at, and you guys, I'm saying they, you guys are advisors too, are looking at bonds and fixed income today as being risk mitigators. And to me, that's really expensive risk mitigation. We do insurance.

Insurance is risk mitigation. It's another way of mitigating risk. To basically say, I'm allocating 40% of account. client portfolio just for risk mitigation, seems like really expensive risk mitigation to me. We can do that for a few basis points. Why allocate 40% of a portfolio to it? When you say you could do that for a few basis points, what do you mean exactly? We can bring risk mitigation.

So if you want to look at a product like a buffered annuity, maybe we talked about it before, you get some downside protection on index investing. So maybe you get a 10% downside buffer floor. We're bringing in some risk mitigation into your portfolio, and that doesn't cost anything in terms of true basis points. Obviously, there's a spread in the product. So, I mean, there's cost to it. There are no specific fees, is probably more accurately said.

So you can get in, for example, we've got a buffered annuity product right now. You invest in the S&P one-year tranche. I think it's a 17.75% upside on the S&P with a 10% downside protection. that's risk mitigation. That doesn't involve allocating 40% of your portfolio to non-producing, frankly, even maybe loss locking assets. Let me push back on this a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Push back. I'm not anti-annuity, by the way. So this is just for the purposes of having it back and forth. It doesn't have to be black or white. So you can do bonds. You could build a portfolio that includes annuities. But I think that the numbers are where they

are. And it would be really difficult to argue in favor, in a vacuum, in favor for bonds over annuities. However, you and I both know that clients don't look at that portfolio as a whole. They don't look at the sum of the parts. They look at the parts. And so you can give them an equity portfolio and take that 40% or whatever it is and put it into an annuity. But in the meantime, if a bare market hits, they're not looking at the pie. They're looking at their equity portfolio and they're going, holy shit, not all. You know what I mean. But it's nerve-wracking. And so one of the things that bonds offer are liquidity, dry powder three balance, You're right. It's hard to argue with the returns about bonds. But to me, that's where bonds come into play.

But then again, you've got that quote-unquote dry powder. One, I mean, you're using an annuity. You're not necessarily eliminating your liquidity. Number one. I mean, there's plenty of products that provide liquidity in the same fashion that bonds do. They have market value adjustments. There's not surrender periods. With your bond liquidation, that could be a positive or negative event, depending on the mark on the bond. Sorry, this is big news to me. Annuities have liquidity. now? I know the market has moved a lot since. So I started at Mass Mutual in 2010, not that I'm an annuity expert, but I know that the market has changed so much over the years. So this is very new to me. So could you please explain? So if you want to think about like a variable

annuity, on a commission-free basis, there isn't a single variable annuity product that has any liquidity, no surrender charges at all. I mean, you're going to have, because it's a retirement product, you've got IRS limitations, the 59.5, if you're going to withdraw pre-50, nine and a half, you're going to have that IRS penalty because it's a tax deferred account. But there's no penalty within the product. Similarly, on fixed products where you're getting fixed interest rates, you might have some kind of longevity mechanism to the product, some duration mechanism, whether it's a surrender or a market value adjustment.

Some products have one or the other, but you can liquidate the product. With a surrender penalty, clearly, you're paying a price. penalty. It's called a penalty. But with a market value adjustment, the product works like a bond. So rates go up. Since you've bought it and you're going to liquidate it, you're going to have one result. Rates go down. You're going to have another, depending on the way the market has moved, just like your ownership of the bond. So you have this survey where you've done over 200 financial advisor, and I guess that's probably the financial advisor's in your platform. They're looking at? No, it's broad base. It's not just within our membership. So the question asks,

So like relative to historical returns, how satisfied are you with current fixed income market in your returns and almost 60% say not satisfied? I have to assume, though, that some of your clients are using bonds and annuities together. Because to Michael's point, that question from the listener that we had, that Social Security is probably one of the best annuities there is. So some people already have some annuity exposure. So I have to imagine that some of your advisors are using bonds for a portion of their portfolio and then a portion of that bond exposure to annuities. Correct. There's some of both. And I think the question is maybe not the best worded question. How satisfied are you? Well, relative to what's out there,

I think I'm doing okay, or relative to history, I think the yields are really bad. And if you're answering the question relative to historical returns, you have to answer, I'm really dissatisfied. I don't know the history of annuities very much or how long they've really been around, but I mean, were people locking in 15% annuity returns back in the 80s as well with 15% bond returns? Yes. So there are two components. You're going to talk about what's the accumulation mechanism, which is built off of basically the annuity company's corporate bond ladder, effectively off their balance sheet, which is just a giant bond ladder effectively. So you're going to get the benefit of that large, diversified bond ladder in the yield that's

paid. Then when you look at the payout rates, the payout rate is going to be built with the mortality credits on top of the interest rate. So in really high interest rate environments, actually annuities aren't as valuable. as they are in low interest rate environments because those mortality credits are stagnant. They're worth the same in a high interest rate environment or a low interest rate environment. And if you've got 15% interest rates and mortality credit's worth 2%, it's now a little bit better. In a 1% interest rate environment, the mortality credits are still worth 2%.

It's much more valuable in a low interest rate environment. Hey, let me ask you about, I know you don't look into these people, but 28% of advisors are satisfied relative to historical returns? What were they just sleeping? We're sort of anti-survey. Actually, we're very anti-survey. How is this possible? It's a great question. And the thing is, I think so many people come out at saying, basically, I'm good at what I do. I'm satisfied with what I'm doing and don't want to really be questioned. So, I mean, that's the point. If you're answering that question, honestly, relative to historic returns, either you aren't aware of what historic returns are on bonds, or you're not answering the question, honestly. I mean,

if historic returns are 5.5% and you're saying I'm satisfied at 1.5, I'm not sure where the disconnect is. One of the questions in here is talking about with some market volatility, like, what are people thinking about allocating to? And the highest one here is dividend paying stocks, which is interesting because Michael and I have kicked the tires on for the last 24 months, probably on every single alternative to bonds that there is. We've looked at it all, I think. I think the easiest one to wrap your head around is bond. So you talk about the buffering strategies, and we've looked into those as well. And I think those structured products make a lot of sense.

Sometimes I think they're harder for people to wrap their heads around how they work, even though they have this defined outcome in them. Do you think it's going to take some time in education for people to become more comfortable with these types of strategies just because they simply haven't been used as much before? Absolutely. I mean, getting people to change. And there are so many things in that survey that you look at. And you're like, people are just doing what they've always done and not really adapted strategies.

So, I mean, like you said, you're looking at all kinds of alternative to bonds. What can you do? Because you have to. The bonds, as we talked about, aren't doing their full job within a portfolio that they used to. So what can replace that? And so that's where you actually do see a little bit of movement, people looking to alternatives to bonds. And then even when they're seeing them, boy, it's hard to take that first step. It's been so comfortable. We've done it this way for so long. And it's serious business. You're

investing people's money. You're trying to deliver a retirement. So sometimes our consultants get frustrated. We present an advisor this great solution and they're not doing it. And it's like cut them a little slack. This is hard. This is their client's assets. This is something new. We need to work with them a little more. What other education can we provide them? What else can we show them? How else can we make them comfortable because changing strategy relative to something so important is a difficult thing to do. So let's talk about some of the things that advisors are doing. BlackRock analyzed more than 20,000 advisor portfolio models and found there's a 25% increase

in risk over the last two years in the average moderate advisor model. That makes sense to me. 7030 is probably the new 6040. Some of the other things that advisors are doing, they're selling positions to generate cash. okay. They're allocating more heavily to dividend paying stocks. In fact, that was the biggest check. They're allocated to lower rated bonds with higher yields, but even junk bonds. What are you getting 4%? I mean, it's crazy. And of course, there's the annuity. And then the other, I don't know what that could be. But the thing that we found, and that's obvious, is that you can't

manufacture risk-free return in a world where the tenure is at 1-4, whatever it is. So whatever you're doing, you're going to be trading one risk for a different risk. And it's the advisor's job to work with a client, to educate them, and to say, okay, here's what we have to do. These are the risks that we're taking. And let's proceed. It's really interesting. So a couple of those options are basically the same thing.

More dividend yielding stocks. Okay, you're selling stocks. That's basically what you're doing in the dividend yielding stock. But the interesting thing to me is, and this is the evolution of advisor thinking, if you think about, let's dial the clock back a few decades. advisors were stock pickers. They created portfolios of individual stocks and individual bonds. It's a very rare bird who still does that. Why? Because mutual funds are so much more efficient to getting you diverse exposure to different asset classes, where ETFs or pick your weapon of

choice. But the same thing hasn't happened yet for the fee-based advisor relative to income. So we're still trying to individually manufacture income within a portfolio for clients, rather than buying a package product that is specifically designed to very efficiently deliver income and has some very strong structural advantages to doing it. So we're still looking for, okay, how do I get income? Well, I'm get a little bit here from this dividend yielding stock. I'm going to sell some equities. I'm going to do this and that.

One, it's tremendously inefficient. It's highly complicated. And you're using things that aren't designed for income in order to try to replicate an income stream. What about like in terms of, so advisors do things to start in the way, they like their model portfolios, they like being able to rebalance and do the performance reporting all in one. Where do annuities sit in terms of custody and things like, and reporting and all that sort of stuff? That's where I think there's been a lot of progress made.

So let's just start with the easy one, custody. Custody, the assets are custodied at the insurance carrier. So think of it, you've got another custodian. you're adding alliance to Schwab and Fidelity. So minor, but definitely a pain in the butt because you've got different paperwork. You've got a different account. Correct. So you've got to set up and it's distressing the number of advisors for whom the paperwork

becomes the barrier. But you want to make life as easy as possible, but you think I'm a fiduciary and now we're showing you something materially better for your client. You can get over 10 minutes of paperwork. So, yeah, you've got to set up the account. But then you can get the account balances in it. integrated into your portfolio management system. And here's where I think we're seeing progress is in functionality within the portfolio

management system. So just a few years ago, it's a win to get the values put into the portfolio management system, just creating the data feed. At least I can see it now. I can bill on it. I know what positions I'm holding, et cetera. Now we're starting to get functionality. So InvestNet's done a lot of work on this with their fiduciary exchange.

We're doing a lot of work with Black Diamond, hopefully. a couple others, we're getting ready to implement with, where you're getting real functionality across that portfolio with your portfolio management system. And there's always going to be limitations because they are tax-deferred products within annuities, what you can do. But getting that functionality makes it start to look more and more like just another asset. That billing is an interesting one because the client doesn't care if that's a problem for the advisor now. So you have this thing in here about do advisors currently bill on fixed income? And some of them, I'm sure to Michael's point about taking more volatility, I remember there was a Peter Bernstein study a number of

years ago. And he said, well, a 75-25 portfolio of stocks and cash is kind of similar to a 60, 40 of stocks and bonds. And I think that's probably what a lot of advisors are doing these days, too, is saying, hey, we're taking no risk over here and more risk here. But you're saying that there's some advisors who are saying that they're either offering a discounted rate if they're holding some cash or short-term bonds, or they're not charging on it. And I think obviously that's probably been a problem with some people in the past with these annuities. So how are you helping advisors see through that part of the business side? I think, which again, the clients don't care about, but the advisors certainly do. If you think about, okay, what are all the problems being

caused today by the low interest rates in a fee-based practice? It's not only just the portfolio challenges, as we've been talking about, the financial plan challenges that it creates, but it's the practice management challenge. Okay, now interest rates are so low. So basically, my read of that in the survey was 40% of advisors are either not billing on fixed income or billing at a discounted rate. They're trying to do the right thing by their client. They're saying interest rates are so low. If I tack my fee onto these assets, it's really bad for the client. The fact of the matter is you've created a conflict of interest. So now, if I look at that, Michael, like you said, the default has become whatever the 70, 30 portfolio, if I'm a client and something bad happens,

Am I not in a position for a lawsuit? Say, hey, you had a conflict of interest. You're getting paid more on equities, and now you've had me over-allocated to equities for so long. Now the market crashed. Can I go after you over that? It's a conflict of interest. So what annuities basically can help with,

and I mean, this is that the interest rates are better. You're getting better returns. It can help out in that regard. But all the same, to me, if you're concerned about the amount that you're charging, putting a 1% on a 10-year that's yielding 1.4, maybe you should just lower the rate overall. I don't think you should create different fees for different asset classes or investment types. That's just asking for trouble and it creates conflict of interest, I think, period, end of story.

Lower your overall charge to 70 basis points or something, but don't create a conflict of interest. There was another survey, and I think this is from BlackRock. This is from the BlackRock survey. This is your survey. So, for example, when choose it between two options below, which would you rather choose a bond portfolio yielded in 1.5% or an annuity that pays 6% guaranteed income for life net of fees. Is that a U survey? That's us. Yep. Okay. So, 84% of people said

the annuity. Again, I'm confused on the 16% that said the bond. But I guess I would just ask you this 6% number, who can get a 6% annuity? Is that a 63 year old? Because obviously, this is based on life expectancy. So, well, if we're using 6%, let's be specific, I know health comes into play, but roughly where in life does this fit? Not far from 65, and at 65, if you use a product properly. So I think maybe last time we talked a little bit about one of my favorite annuity features of deferral credit, just like Social Security. Once you own the product, if you defer taking the income, you're going to get an increased payout each year. So there are products that do that and a fair number of them. So if you are using a fixed index annuity, which is one of our more popular

strategies, open it up for a 60-year-old client. You're going to get a nice accumulation for five years. Let's say they're retiring right at 65. Your payout in that is probably 6.5% for life on that product. If you had opened it at 55, you're probably at like 7.25, something in that neighborhood. So that's the disturbing thing about that question is that's real. That's not a fictional, unattainable annuity. That's a real, real life product example. You can get a guaranteed 6% for life in a very reasonable fashion. It's not like for an 85 year old or something like that. It's a real product against a real interest rate relative to the bonds. And you still, it's actually that last year's number is an improvement. It used to be more like a third of the people still

said, I'll choose the bond portfolio over the annuity, which shows progress. What about people? that are never going to need income? What about somebody that has $9 million and they will never spend all their money? Does an annuity have a place in that person's portfolio as well? Yeah, in a couple of different ways. To me, I always say if you're going to take income from the portfolio, because the income generated is so much more efficient from the annuity, you should be looking at an annuity. Also, if you're just looking for, again, risk mitigation within the portfolio. And now your risk mitigation tools, your bonds that you used to be using are not yielding enough. Why not look to an annuity, a fixed index annuity, a fixed annuity, something that's

just an accumulation product, not necessarily looking for income again, but just using it for that risk mitigation within the portfolio, but at a better interest rate. And tax deferred, by the way, on a tax inefficient income. You're getting taxed on ordinary income rates, tax deferring ordinary income makes a great deal of sense. Looking at fixed index annuities or fixed annuities within a portfolio for risk mitigation makes sense. I guess one of the other pros for just investing in bonds is the fact that it's so simple. You can use the same bond fund across all client accounts. How much operational lifting is there for doing, let's say you have, you're a bigger firmity of hundreds or maybe even thousands of client accounts. How much specific information is

needed per client to have an annuity if you're going to have all of your clients have 10 or 15 of their portfolio in an annuity? Like, how unique do those have to be? They don't have to be that unique. I mean, I think you'd probably ban the clients by age range, create maybe three bans or something like that, maybe two, and apply it across client portfolios. And that's only really applicable if you're looking to use it for income.

If you're just using an annuity for accumulation, you'd probably do it in the same way you'd do a bond fund. You'd look at the annuities that are available, and you'd select a couple that are good accumulation vehicles. David, can you explain to us where the yield comes from? I guess maybe the answers, it depends, but I'd be curious because obviously some of the premium is the pooling of mortality risk. But when the funds come into the product, there is like a sub-account where the money is invested. Let's break out. So the mortality credits, number one, they're not going to affect your accumulation.

That's only going to be on the income feature. So then if you're looking at accumulation, you've got basically two flavors of options. You've got a variable annuity. that's going to have sub accounts with funds that you can invest in. And those make a lot of sense for high income earners. Again, old variable annuities, commissioned variable annuities didn't make any sense. Still don't make any sense for tax deferred accumulation. They cost too much. You don't get the advantage of tax deferral. But if you can get basically a tax deferred wrapper for 20 basis points, that's valuable. And then as long as you've got institutionally share class funds in there and you can invest in the kinds of things you'd normally invest in. That's one thing. Then when you're looking at

rates paid within fixed accounts, you're leveraging the carriers for fixed rates period on interest rates. You're leveraging the carrier's bond balance sheet, their bond ladder. And so you're getting the scale and you're getting the benefit of investments that generally can be held to maturity. So they can often provide rates that look attractive, as opposed to a mutual fund where there might be turnover in the fund. You've got issues on return relative to the turnover. Then the other way you get increased yield is like in a fixed index annuity by using the index. So the index, over time, Roger Ibbotson did a great study on it a few years ago looking at the historical performance. He said using an index within an FIA will generally give you about a 10% better

yield than bonds, long-term government bonds, meaning 10 years. When you say index, what index are we talking about. Just a general S&P 500 index. So use the index. And so you can get a little extra return. And then you have non-correlation on the downside. You've got a zero floor. You're not taking risk relative to the downside. You're putting some risk mitigation investments into the portfolio. You're going to get a little better than bond returns within it. And that can be a useful and valuable product. We see advisors using either fixed annuities or fixed index annuities for accumulation. But where annuities will really shine as an income, but they're also good alternatives just for accumulation. How much should advisors and clients care about who the actual

carrier is or the one who's actually underwriting the annuity, the company they're working with? Because the one thing people would say, well, if your insurance company goes out of business, you're out of luck or something, how does that fit into it? If you're looking at life insurance, if you're looking at a lifetime income product, even, you should be more concerned about the carriers' ratings. If you're looking strictly at accumulation, then you're looking at it on a credit risk spectrum, just like you would have bond. I might be willing to take a product from an A-minus carrier for an accumulation product, but not for an income product. So you want to think about it in those ways. And sometimes you see that lower-rated carriers will have better rates, and you're

taking that rate. But if you're taking basically a three-year product, you're not at much risk. And mostly it's theoretical risk. I mean, insurance carriers are highly regulated. Their balance sheets are reviewed quarterly, both by regulators and ratings agencies. They're required to hold most carriers are holding in excess of their obligations in reserves. So, I mean, they're extremely safe investments. David, so maybe a good way to bring this home is to talk about how DPL has been so successful, working with advisors, streamlining the process. What does that? that look like in terms of how you work with advisors? I know we went over that previously, but maybe just to rehash that. Just a few things. One, it starts with the education like we were

talking about. This isn't light decisions. I mean, you're making big decisions. In your case, you've got thousands of clients and you want to do things that can benefit all of them. These aren't small steps for advisors to take. So we provide education in all sorts of ways. We do it ourselves. We bring on third parties from investments experts to insurance experts to planning experts. We make all kinds of resource available. We even today launched DPL University and online resource for CE credits. And you can self-study there. Then we provide consultants who are DPL employees, licensed insurance consultants who can help find best products for your clients or groups of clients. And we bring technology to product selection, which I think is a really

unique and different thing. So insurance, how do you compare one product to another, one rider to another, one income benefit to another? We basically take all of the product knowledge out of that, even for our own consultants, and we say, we modeled it all in software. We've got every annuity in the market and every annuity that was ever sold, modeled in our software. Don't ask about the crazy guys who programmed all that stuff. But you can compare any annuity. Tell us what you're looking to do. what is the benefit you're looking to provide for your client will tell you the best product to do it. So you don't need to know which type of income rider is best or which rate is it. We're going to normalize all that through technology.

And then we help operationally to some of your operational questions. We're going to make sure that you've got data integrations. We're going to make sure you're going to be able to pull your fees that operationally you can handle everything and we're going to support that. Do you have any data in terms of the number or volume of annuities? sales that you've done on the platform? For context, we launched officially in the beginning of 18. We really got to market kind of mid-year 18. So we've been in market a little over three years in total a billion two-ish in annuities. Well, yeah, all through RAs. And frankly, we're just getting started. We started from nothing. And they're just getting going.

So it's definitely a process and progress. And we continue to try to make things better for We're advisors like yourselves with more products, more features, simplification, integrations, technology, education, all of that, to just provide you with more tools within your practice to serve your clients. Well, clearly the proof is in the pudding. $1.2 billion. That's impressive. So, congrats on your success.

And thank you for coming on today. Thanks, guys. Always fun. Always enjoy the questions and the dialogue. Take care and look forward to doing another time. All right. Thank you, David. Thank you, DPL.

email us at Animal SpiritsPod.gmail.com, and we will shoot you to DPL's way when we can't answer the question. Have a good one. Thanks again to David. Thanks to DPL financial partners. Remember, go to DPLfp.com to learn more and send us an email Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. Thank you.