JP Morgan Multi-Asset Choice review

It depends on what you want it to do. As a low-cost, tax-deferred investment account inside a fee-based advisory relationship, it is a reasonable tool — the 0.35% base charge is genuinely low for a variable annuity, and the absence of a surrender period removes one of the biggest complaints people have about VAs. It is not a good annuity for anyone shopping for guaranteed income or principal protection, because it offers neither. The subaccounts carry full market risk.

The rational reason to own Multi-Asset Choice is tax deferral on money that would otherwise sit in a taxable brokerage account generating yearly tax drag. Someone who has already filled their 401(k), IRA, and other tax-advantaged buckets, and who wants to keep investing in market-based subaccounts without paying tax on annual gains and rebalancing, is the natural buyer. Because it is an I-share with no embedded commission and no surrender penalty, the cost of that tax deferral is about as low as variable annuities get. The buyer is paying for the wrapper, not for a guarantee.

I think this is best for an affluent, fee-based advisory client — someone working with a JP Morgan advisor, in the accumulation phase, with at least $50,000 to commit and meaningful taxable assets already invested. It suits a non-qualified (taxable-money) buyer specifically, since putting an already-tax-deferred IRA into a tax-deferred annuity adds cost without adding a tax benefit. It is a poor fit for anyone who wants lifetime income guarantees, a beefed-up death benefit for legacy planning, or principal protection — none of which this contract provides.

Strip away the annuity label and this is essentially a tax-deferred investment account with a thin insurance shell on top. You put money in, allocate it across up to 115 subaccounts (which behave like mutual funds), and your account value rises and falls with those investments. The "annuity" part is that gains grow tax-deferred until you withdraw, and there is a death benefit equal to whatever the account is worth. There is no smoothing, no floor, no cap, no guaranteed crediting — the subaccounts are real market exposure. What you are buying is the tax treatment and the fund menu, wrapped in a contract with a low explicit insurance charge.

The core of the contract is the subaccount menu. You allocate your premium across 115 variable investment options spanning a range of asset classes, and you can move among them with up to 40 free transfers per year at no transfer fee. The underlying funds carry their own net fees, which the materials list as ranging from 0.03% to 2.13% depending on the fund — so a low-cost index subaccount and an actively managed specialty fund are very different cost stories, and your real all-in cost depends heavily on which subaccounts you choose. There is also a dollar-cost-averaging fixed account: a 6.00% rate on a six-month DCA program and 3.00% on a 12-month DCA program, used to phase money into the subaccounts over time rather than as a long-term parking spot. There are no indexed or structured (buffer/floor) options here — this is a pure variable contract.

The most meaningful secondary feature is the cost structure itself. The base contract charge is 0.35% — a 0.30% mortality and expense charge plus a 0.05% administration charge — which is low for a variable annuity and reflects the fee-based, no-commission I-share design. On top of that, the administration charge is waived once the account value reaches $1,000,000 on a quarterly anniversary, which modestly rewards larger balances. That low base cost is the main thing separating this from older, commission-loaded variable annuities, and it is the reason the tax-deferral math can actually work for the right buyer rather than being eaten by fees.

There is no surrender charge period, which is the headline liquidity feature. You are not locked in by a back-end penalty schedule the way you are with most fixed and indexed annuities, so you can move money out of the contract without an insurance-company surrender charge. The materials do not specify a separate penalty-free withdrawal provision because none is needed — there is no surrender charge to be free of. The normal caveats still apply, though: withdrawing gains before age 59½ generally triggers a 10% IRS penalty on top of ordinary income tax, because this is still tax-deferred annuity money. RMD-friendliness is not addressed in the available materials, so if required minimum distributions matter to your situation, confirm the contract's treatment directly. Treat this as a long-term tax-deferral vehicle, not a checking account.

The named trade is straightforward: a 0.35% base contract charge buys you the annuity tax wrapper and access to the subaccount menu. The bigger cost variable is the underlying funds themselves, which run anywhere from 0.03% to 2.13% — so your true all-in expense is whatever the base charge plus your chosen subaccounts add up to, and a poorly chosen lineup can quietly cost far more than the contract charge. There is no rider fee because there is no rider. The real tradeoff is conceptual rather than line-item: you are paying an insurance layer on top of investment costs, and in exchange you get tax deferral and a return-of-account-value death benefit — and nothing else. If you do not value the tax deferral enough to cover that extra layer, a plain taxable brokerage account does the same investing for less. One structural gate worth noting: an advisor must be contracted through JP Morgan to sell this product, so it is not generally available on the open market.

Legal Entity: Nationwide Life Insurance Company

Parent: Nationwide Financial

AM Best Rating: A+