The Connie Mack show focused on guaranteed income in retirement this week with a writer from Kiplinger’s, a portfolio manager and an annuity salesman.

Annuities are a touchy subject. I am inclined to agree with any negative sentiment about them you can come up with but I know quite a few people here on the mountain who have them and they all seem to say the same positive things about being able to sleep at night.

The writer (her name was Mary Beth Franklin) talked looking at using guaranteed income for the fixed expenses. She used the example of people needing $6000 per month with $3000 of that being fixed expenses. In her example if social security (which she included as guaranteed income) paid $2000 per month she suggested a suitable annuity to cover the other $1000 of fixed expenses and then the portfolio (assuming there is one) would cover the other $3000 for the month.

If some annuities are as square of a deal as Ben Stein implies then this might be viable.

When the show came around to the annuity salesman I got lost in what he was saying or more correctly I think he was saying things without saying anything and I wondered how the hell the typical person could ever understand all of the nuances of the product. I for one get the feeling that I know what I don’t know as far as annuities are concerned if you follow me. To be clear I am not licensed to sell annuities and it is not long into a conversation before it loses me.

Which circles back to people I know socially who love them; makes me wonder what they do not know.

The portfolio manager (his name was Louis Stanasolovich) seemed to be saying do it yourself. He talked a little bit about building your own (or having him build it for you, but not in an inappropriate salesy way) endowment-like portfolio using the sorts of products I have written about before.

Stanasolovich also made interesting comments about portfolios that “come in” which I took to mean portfolios of people who hire him. He said that these portfolios never are “never managed well.” There is obviously a skew to the portfolios he sees because if the portfolio was doing well by the client’s measure they would not have hired him in the first place.

Still this might be a call to review what you have, look under the hood, maybe shell out a little bit for a website or two that can analyze what you own and make sure your portfolio is “managed well.”

Based on all the interaction I get to have through the blog, theStreet.com, Seeking Alpha, meeting people in the course of running our business and interacting with other investment managers at these conferences I attend I can tell there is a wide range of knowledge and skill level but anyone who seeks out blog content must want to learn more than they currently know so they can be more knowledgeable and have a better chance of having enough money when the need it.

I’ll repeat that all of us are in the same boat; we are trying to learn more than we now know so we have enough when we need it.

Yesterday we had a helicopter land at the fire station for a training exercise. I have been directly involved with one air evacuation of a patient and while nothing went wrong the number of things that can go wrong is astounding and yesterday’s training was a good reminder of that. Can you even see the tail rotor in the picture? If you ever need to be anywhere near a helicopter always, always, always stay to the front.

Last 5 posts by Roger Nusbaum

• The Big Picture for the Week of November 15, 2009 - November 14th, 2009
• Process Drilldown - October 23rd, 2009
• Sunday Morning Coffee 10-18-09 - October 18th, 2009
• A Little Followup From This Morning - October 8th, 2009
• Wednesday Roundup - October 7th, 2009