Power Select Plus Income (Flex) review

Yes, for the right buyer. This is a good annuity for someone who wants to know today, with reasonable certainty, how much protected lifetime income they can turn on in five to ten years. The guaranteed 8.50% simple roll-up does that job cleanly. It is a poor fit for someone who wants strong accumulation, short-term liquidity, or a simple no-fee contract.

The main reason to buy this is to build a defined, guaranteed pool of future lifetime income. The 8.50% simple roll-up on the benefit base is contractually promised for up to 10 years, so it grows whether the indices go up, down, or nowhere. That certainty is worth something to a planner who wants to circle a future income number now. The secondary reason is flexibility on the growth side: the same contract gives you a broad menu of index strategies and a fixed account, so the account value has room to grow and potentially step the income base up higher through automatic annual step-ups.

I think this is best for someone in the pre-retirement or early-retirement window, roughly age 55 to 70, who is using long-term money they will not need for at least a decade and who wants a guaranteed path to future income rather than a bet on the market. It works in both qualified and non-qualified accounts, though the income guarantees matter most to someone building a personal pension. It is less attractive for a buyer who mainly wants accumulation, expects to need frequent access above the free-withdrawal amount, or would rather not pay an ongoing rider fee.

You are not really buying stock market upside. You are buying a guaranteed lifetime income framework wrapped around a principal-protected annuity. The heart of the contract is the built-in Lifetime Income Plus Flex rider. Your premium establishes a Benefit Base, that Benefit Base grows by a guaranteed 8.50% simple interest each year during the roll-up period, and when you activate income, your age and the benefit base determine the lifetime payment you can take. The indexed crediting on the account value is real but secondary; its main job here is to potentially step the benefit base up even higher, not to make you rich.

The Lifetime Income Plus Flex rider is built in and mandatory. It creates a Benefit Base, which is a bookkeeping value used only to calculate your future income, not a cash value you can withdraw. During the initial 10-year roll-up period, or until you turn income on if that comes sooner, the Benefit Base grows by a guaranteed 8.50% simple interest each year. On top of that, if your actual account value ever exceeds the Benefit Base on a contract anniversary, the rider automatically steps the Benefit Base up to that higher amount and locks it in. When you activate income, you take a Maximum Annual Withdrawal Amount for life, calculated as a percentage of the Benefit Base based on your age at activation.

This is the single most important thing to understand about this product versus its sibling. The Multiplier Flex version of Power Select Plus Income does not use a fixed roll-up at all. Instead, its benefit base grows by a "multiplier," 200% of the actual fixed and indexed interest earned before income begins, or 100% after. That means the Multiplier version can grow the benefit base much faster in strong index years but grows it by nothing in a flat or down year. The Flex version you are reading about here does the opposite: it hands you a guaranteed 8.50% simple credit every year regardless of the market, but without the leveraged upside. Flex is the certainty choice; Multiplier is the market-dependent choice.

The second feature worth knowing is the enhanced care benefit embedded in the rider. If the annuitant is confined to a qualified care facility for 90 or more consecutive days, the rider can pay Enhanced Guaranteed Withdrawal Payments of 200% of the normal amount for a single annuitant, or 150% for joint, for up to five years. There are conditions: at least two years must have passed since you elected the rider, and the annuitant cannot have been confined at issue. It is not a substitute for long-term care insurance, but it is a meaningful cushion that effectively doubles your income for a period when care costs spike. Separately, the base contract waives surrender charges for terminal illness, activities-of-daily-living triggers, and extended-care confinement.

This annuity is built for long-term retirement dollars, not short-term cash. In the first contract year you can take up to 10% of premiums paid without a surrender charge; in later years the free amount is 10% of the previous anniversary's account value. Anything above that during the 10-year schedule is hit with a surrender charge, starting at 9% and grading down to 1%, and a market value adjustment (MVA) may also apply. An MVA means your surrender penalty can move up or down with interest rates, adding uncertainty to the exact amount you would net on a large early withdrawal. Required minimum distributions attributable to the contract are generally not subject to surrender charges or the MVA, which helps qualified-money buyers. Even so, this is not a contract to treat like an emergency fund.

The headline cost is the rider fee: 1.10% currently, with a 2.00% contractual maximum, calculated on the Benefit Base and deducted from the account value each year. Because it is charged on the (usually larger) Benefit Base but pulled from the account value, the drag on your actual cash value is a bit heavier than 1.10% of the account value would suggest. That fee is mandatory here since the rider is built in, so there is no fee-free way to own this contract. The other tradeoff is not an explicit charge but a design choice: the S&P 500 annual point-to-point cap sits in the 3.25% to 4.00% range, which is low for an FIA, because the crediting is engineered to support the income guarantee rather than to accumulate aggressively. Most non-S&P strategies swap the cap for a participation rate or a spread instead. Rates shown are the snapshot effective around the brochure date and will reset on future contract anniversaries.

Legal Entity: American General Life Insurance Company

Parent: Corebridge Financial

A.M. Best Rating: A