Closing the gap between retirement outcomes and retirement planning

New York Life | June 17, 2026

Data shows how financial professionals, personalized planning and annuities work together to improve retirement confidence.

The retirement planning conversation in America has long centered on a single question: are you saving enough? For most of the past four decades, it was the right question to lead with. Defined contribution plans replaced pensions. The responsibility for building retirement assets shifted from employers to individuals. Helping people save more became a central mission of financial services.

But saving enough and planning well are not necessarily the same thing. Turning accumulated assets into reliable retirement income requires a different kind of plan, a different set of tools, and a different way of thinking about financial security. Many Americans approaching retirement have not yet had that conversation. New York Life research and industry data show what’s possible when they do, what barriers are standing in the way, and what we can do about it as an industry.

What a complete retirement plan produces

New York Life's Wealth Watch research in 2025 identified three behaviors that make a material difference in Americans’ retirement preparedness: owning protection products like annuities, working with a financial professional, and maintaining a tailored financial strategy.  

The findings are striking. Adults who own annuities specifically are more than twice as likely to feel prepared for retirement as those who do not (47% versus 20%). They save more, are more likely to have a strategy in place, and report higher confidence in their financial futures. A 2024 study¹ by Blanchett and Finke through the Retirement Income Institute adds an important dimension: retirees with annuitized income streams spend more confidently and at higher rates than those relying solely on investment portfolios. The income floor does not just protect against running out of money. It changes how people experience retirement itself.

Working with a financial professional and maintaining a solid strategy produces comparable consumer results on their own. IRI research² finds that nine in ten retirees agree they were better prepared for retirement because of their relationship with a financial professional. Wealth Watch data shows that adults who work with a financial professional and maintain a financial strategy report 89% confidence in their ability to meet financial goals, compared to 41% for those who do neither. Adults with a holistic strategy are twice as confident in their ability to meet their financial goals.

Each behavior independently improves consumer outcomes. When the three behaviors are combined, their effects compound. A professional helps build a strategy. A strategy creates a framework for which products belong in their plans. And a guaranteed income floor provided by fixed annuities opens up new possibilities for how everything else is managed.  The whole is measurably greater than the sum of its parts.

Why the gap persists

The consumer outcomes data makes a clear case. Yet even among retirees who have taken the step of working with a financial professional, IRI research finds that only 9% have used any of their savings to purchase an income annuity for guaranteed lifetime income. The professional guidance is there. A strategy is more likely to be in place. However, the income floor, which is the behavior most directly tied to income security and spending confidence in retirement, is still missing.

Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) research on operational and philosophical barriers to annuity production points to something fundamental. Philosophical objections rank among the most significant barriers to financial professional adoption³, including beliefs that other strategies are better for providing income, that clients don't want annuities, or that annuities are unnecessary. These are not objections that better product design alone can address. They reflect how guaranteed income has often been positioned: as a product to be sold rather than a key component of an overall strategy.

Structural barriers compound this. When annuities are absent from the tools advisors use to build and model retirement plans, they are absent from the plans themselves. IRI's Digital First initiative has made meaningful progress: 66% of top financial planning tools now model annuity products⁴. But a third of the tools that advisors use every day still do not. The different kind of plan that retirement income requires is not yet the default.

What the industry can do

The distance between the outcomes the consumer data shows are possible and the outcomes so many Americans experience is not a mystery. Carriers, distributors, and the organizations working to modernize the annuity experience are the ones best positioned to close that distance. Not by selling harder, but by finishing the work of integrating guaranteed income into the planning workflow, into the tools, the training, and the professional culture that shape how financial professionals think about what a complete retirement plan means. The philosophical barriers IRI has identified will yield to evidence and familiarity with sustained education and effort. The structural ones will require deliberate investment. New York Life has been an active leader in IRI's Digital First initiative since its inception, including being among the first carriers to adopt Paperless Replacements and piloting real-time application status transparency, reflect what that investment looks like in practice.

The three behaviors that predict retirement security are known. The compounding effect of combining them is clear. The solutions exist. What is required of us as an industry is the commitment to make a different kind of planning not only possible, but the standard for American consumers.

1 Blanchett and Finke, Retirement Income Institute, June 2024: RP-28_BlanchettFinke_v2.pdf

2 IRI Retirement Fact Book 2025, Chapter 11 (citing IRI Research Brief: The Impact of Financial Guidance on Retirement Readiness, January 2024): https://www.irionline.org

3 IRI, Operational and Philosophical Barriers to Annuity Production, 2024: https://www.irionline.org

4 IRI, Digital First for Annuities Successes Executive Summary, 2025: https://www.irionline.org