FIA Plus with Premium Bonus 7 Year review

Yes, for the specific buyer it's designed for. It's a reasonable choice for someone who wants a bonus-boosted, principal-protected accumulation vehicle and is comfortable with a 7-year commitment. It's a weaker fit for anyone who wants guaranteed lifetime income built into the contract, needs more than modest liquidity in the first few years, or lives in a state where the product (or its bonus feature) isn't approved.

The most obvious reason is the 12.50% premium bonus, which puts more principal to work from day one than a comparable no-bonus FIA would. The second reason is the crediting menu — three underlying indices plus a fixed strategy and an Annual Declared Rate option, with buffer-floor choices that let a buyer dial risk tolerance up or down within the contract. Someone rolling over an IRA or reinvesting a maturing annuity who wants a bigger starting number and flexibility in how that money is credited going forward is the natural audience here.

I think this fits a buyer in their late 50s through mid-70s, with money in a qualified or non-qualified account they genuinely don't need for seven years, who values the psychological and mathematical head start a premium bonus provides more than they value an income rider. It's a weaker fit for someone who wants to start guaranteed lifetime withdrawals soon, who needs liquidity beyond the 10% free-withdrawal amount, or who lives in Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, or Wisconsin, where the contract isn't currently approved.

You're not buying market exposure. FIA Plus is an insurance contract that credits interest based on formulas tied to index performance, never a direct investment in the indices themselves. The 12.50% bonus is added to your account value at issue — it's real money working for you from day one, but it's also the carrier's way of making the contract look more competitive on a headline basis, and bonus products of this kind typically fund that bonus through the crediting terms elsewhere in the contract (caps, participation rates, or the buffer structure) rather than giving it away for free. The brochure materials available here don't spell out a vesting schedule or bonus recapture provision, so it's worth asking your agent directly whether the full 12.50% is yours immediately or accrues over the surrender period.

Money can be allocated across a Fixed Interest Strategy and an Index-Linked Strategy tied to the S&P 500, the BofA U.S. Strength Fast Convergence Index, or the HSBC AI Global Tactical Index, plus an Annual Declared Rate option. Indexed strategies use Modified Annual Point-to-Point crediting with annual resets, and each strategy comes with a choice of buffer floors — 2.5%, 5%, 10%, or 15% — that pair with different participation rates (56% to over 160%) and caps (6.00% to 13.25%) depending on which index and floor you select. In practice, a lower floor selection generally buys you a lower cap or participation rate in exchange for more downside protection built into that strategy, while a higher floor selection opens up more upside room. An Annual Lock feature can convert specified gains into locked-in Strategy Value along the way. All of this sits inside a fixed indexed annuity chassis, so the worst-case outcome for any indexed allocation in a given year is a 0% credit — the buffer-floor selection shapes the crediting formula, not whether the insurer can pass a raw market loss through to your account value.

The 12.50% premium bonus is the product's real headline. On a $100,000 premium, that's $12,500 of extra account value credited immediately, which is a meaningfully larger starting cushion than most FIAs in this surrender band offer. The catch is that bonus-heavy contracts are rarely free lunches — carriers typically recoup the cost through less generous crediting terms than a non-bonus sibling product would carry, and some bonus products reduce or recapture the bonus if the contract is surrendered early. The available materials confirm the bonus applies to account value (not just a benefit base used for income calculations, which would be a different and less valuable kind of bonus), but they don't fully resolve the vesting question, so I'd treat the bonus as a real asset only once you've confirmed the surrender-year mechanics directly with the carrier or your agent.

You can withdraw up to 10% of account value penalty-free starting in year two (not year one), as long as at least $5,000 remains in the contract. Anything beyond that free amount during the 7-year surrender period triggers both a withdrawal charge on the schedule below and a market value adjustment (MVA), which can move the penalty up or down depending on where interest rates have moved since issue. RMDs are treated as penalty-free withdrawals regardless of size, which matters if this money ends up in a qualified account. Surrender charges are also waived for extended nursing home confinement of 90-plus days or a terminal illness diagnosis after year one, though those waivers aren't available in every state. None of that changes the basic math: this is a 7-year commitment, and money you might need access to sooner shouldn't go into this contract.

There's no income rider here, so there's no rider fee to weigh. The available materials don't clearly disclose a base contract fee, which is typical for FIAs of this type (most carry no explicit annual charge and instead build their margin into caps, participation rates, and spreads), but it's a gap worth confirming rather than assuming. Structured strategies with buffers reference a 0.25% annual spread, which is deducted from index-linked credits on those particular strategies. The bigger tradeoff is opportunity cost: the buffer-floor system caps upside in exchange for downside protection tiers, the 7-year MVA-backed surrender schedule limits flexibility, and the lack of any income rider option — optional or built-in — means this product simply isn't built for someone who might want to convert savings into a guaranteed income stream down the road.

Legal Entity: Ibexis Life & Annuity Insurance Company

A.M. Best Rating: A-