FIA Plus 10 Year review

It depends on how the floor is set. If a buyer, ideally with an advisor's help, selects the 0% floor, this behaves like a conventional 10-year FIA — indexed upside, no downside from the crediting strategies, and an above-average death benefit. If a lower floor is chosen to chase a bigger cap or participation rate, the product takes on real principal risk that a typical annuity buyer isn't expecting to have signed up for. I think that flexibility is a double-edged feature: it can be used well by a sophisticated buyer, but it also creates room for a mismatch between what someone thinks they bought and what they actually own.

Someone shops this because they want tax-deferred, index-linked growth without a rider fee eating into performance every year. The three-index menu — S&P 500, BofA U.S. Strength Fast Convergence Index, and HSBC AI Global Tactical Index — plus a traditional fixed account and an annual declared rate option gives an advisor room to diversify crediting strategies inside a single contract rather than buying several annuities. The death benefit is also a real draw: heirs receive the full Tracking Value and Fixed Interest Strategy Value with no surrender charges or market value adjustment taken out, which isn't universal among contracts this age.

This fits a buyer in their 50s to 70s with money they won't need for a full decade, using qualified or non-qualified retirement dollars, who wants indexed growth potential without an income rider attached. It's a better fit for someone working with an advisor who will actually walk through the floor selection and cap tradeoffs rather than someone shopping off a bare rate sheet. It's a poor fit for anyone who wants guaranteed lifetime income built into the contract, anyone in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, or Wisconsin, or anyone who might need more than 10% of the account value in a single year.

You're buying a tax-deferred contract that credits interest based on the performance of one or more indices, with a menu that also includes a plain fixed-interest account and an annual declared rate option. What separates this from a standard FIA is the "Modified Annual Point-to-Point" feature added in mid-2025: instead of a flat 0% floor — the usual FIA promise that you can't lose value to index performance — Ibexis lets a buyer choose a floor as low as -15%. Choosing a lower floor is a trade; brochure materials suggest it can unlock a higher cap or participation rate, but it also means the tracking value tied to that strategy can decline in a bad index year. Whatever floor is chosen, money placed in the Fixed Interest Strategy at issue stays there — it cannot be moved into the Index-Linked Strategy on future anniversaries, only the reverse.

The core mechanic is indexed crediting across three benchmarks using an annual point-to-point design. Caps reportedly run from roughly 8.50% to 20.25% and participation rates from roughly 99% to 196% depending on index and strategy, though the available brochure materials didn't give a clean rate-by-rate breakdown, so those figures should be confirmed on a current rate sheet before assuming they apply to a specific allocation. The key structural piece is the floor selector: a buyer picks 0%, -2.5%, -5%, -10%, or -15% for how much index decline the tracking value can absorb in a given period. A 0% floor keeps this behaving like a conventional FIA. Anything lower is a bet that a larger cap is worth accepting some real downside.

The death benefit is the second reason to notice this contract. At death, the beneficiary receives the greater of the Tracking Value plus Fixed Interest Strategy Value or the Minimum Guaranteed Surrender Value, with no surrender charges or market value adjustment taken out — a cleaner outcome than contracts that still apply an MVA at death. A surviving spouse who is the sole beneficiary can also continue the policy in their own name instead of being forced to cash out or annuitize. For a 10-year contract, that legacy flexibility is a meaningful offset to the length of the surrender commitment.

Free withdrawals are capped at 10% of account value per year after the first contract year, and Ibexis requires at least $5,000 to remain in the account, so this isn't a product designed to be drawn all the way down. The 10-year surrender schedule starts at 9% and steps down to 1% by year 10, and a market value adjustment applies on top of that schedule — meaning withdrawals beyond the free amount can be affected by interest-rate movement, not just the stated surrender percentage.

There's no separate income rider fee here because there's no income rider — this version is accumulation-only, which keeps the fee load simpler than a hybrid income product. The real cost shows up in the crediting mechanics instead: caps and participation rates aren't fixed guarantees, they reset periodically and weren't fully itemized in the available brochure materials, and a 0.25% annual spread applies to the S&P 500 strategy (no stated spread on the other two indices), quietly reducing credited interest before a return ever reaches the account. The bigger tradeoff is the floor selection itself — choosing anything below 0% is effectively trading downside protection for a shot at a higher cap, and that's a cost that only shows up if the index actually falls in a given period.

Legal Entity: Ibexis Life & Annuity Insurance Company

A.M. Best Rating: A-