Aspirations Variable Annuity (NY) review

It depends. This is a good annuity for a New York resident who wants tax-deferred market growth across a deep fund menu and wants the option to add guaranteed lifetime income or an enhanced death benefit. It is a poor fit for someone who wants principal protection, can't tolerate the subaccounts losing value, or is shopping purely on cost — a plain brokerage account avoids the 1.20% insurance charge, and a fixed indexed annuity protects principal that this product does not.

The main reason to buy Aspirations NY is tax-deferred growth with real market upside and a very wide menu of professionally managed funds in one contract. The secondary reason is optionality: you can add the SecurePay income rider for a guaranteed lifetime withdrawal floor, or layer on an enhanced death benefit so heirs receive at least your contributions or a locked-in high-water mark. For a New York buyer who has already maxed out other tax-advantaged accounts and wants market exposure with a guaranteed-income safety valve available, that combination has a logic to it.

I think this annuity is best for a New York resident in their 50s or 60s, comfortable with market risk, who has already filled up their 401(k) and IRA space and wants additional tax-deferred growth — ideally someone who anticipates wanting guaranteed income later and values being able to add it through the RightTime feature rather than committing now. It works best with non-qualified money, where the tax deferral is an actual benefit; inside an IRA the wrapper is already tax-deferred, so you'd be paying insurance charges for guarantees, not deferral. It is not for conservative savers, anyone who needs principal protection, or anyone who would be unsettled watching the contract value fall in a down market.

Strip away the brochure language and this is a brokerage account wrapped in an insurance contract, with optional guarantees you can pay extra for. Your premium goes into your choice of 127 variable subaccounts — mutual-fund-style portfolios from managers like BlackRock, PIMCO, American Funds, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price — or a fixed account paying 2.65% as of the materials. The "variable" in variable annuity means exactly what it says: the subaccounts rise and fall with their underlying investments, and there is no floor unless you add a rider. What you're paying the insurance company for is the wrapper — tax deferral, the standard death benefit, and access to optional guarantees — not investment management, which the fund managers handle and charge for separately.

The core of the contract is the subaccount lineup and how you allocate across it. You spread premium among the 127 subaccounts based on your risk tolerance, and you get 12 free transfers per year to rebalance. Net subaccount expenses run from 0.34% to 2.58% depending on the fund — that's the fund manager's charge, layered on top of Protective's 1.20% base contract charge. For people who want to ease in rather than invest a lump sum at once, the contract offers dollar-cost-averaging accounts that pay enhanced interest while the money waits to be deployed — 8.00% on a six-month annualized basis and 4.00% on a twelve-month basis as of the materials. Those DCA rates apply only to the money parked in the DCA account during the averaging window, not the whole contract, so treat them as a sweetener for staging deposits rather than a headline yield.

The most meaningful secondary feature is the optional SecurePay income-rider suite, because it's what separates this from a plain investment account. SecurePay Protector costs 1.5% annually (1.6% with RightTime) and includes a 7% compounding annual rollup of the benefit base for up to 10 years or until you turn income on — meaning the figure used to calculate your guaranteed lifetime withdrawal grows even if the market doesn't. SecurePay Investor is the cheaper option at 0.5% (0.6% with RightTime) but has no rollup; it offers step-up only, locking in market gains rather than crediting a guaranteed growth rate. The RightTime feature lets you add the rider after issue rather than committing at purchase, which is genuinely useful — you can buy the contract for accumulation now and elect income protection later if your plans firm up. The tradeoff is plain: the rider fee is charged on the benefit base and deducted from contract value every year whether or not the market cooperates, so it only pays off if you actually activate income and live long enough to draw it down.

This is built for long-term money, not short-term cash. The surrender schedule runs seven years — 7%, 6%, 6%, 5%, 4%, 3%, 2%, then 0% — and there is no market value adjustment, which is one less moving part to worry about. Free-withdrawal access is more generous than many annuities: in year one you can take 10% of your initial purchase payment, and from year two on you can take the greatest of contract earnings, 10% of cumulative purchase payments, or 10% of contract value as of the prior anniversary, as long as $5,000 stays in the account. The contract includes nursing-home and terminal-illness waivers at no extra cost, which drop surrender charges after the first year if you're confined to a nursing home for 90 days or diagnosed with a terminal illness. RMDs are accommodated. Even with the flexible free-withdrawal terms, anything above the free amount during the first seven years gets hit with the surrender charge, so this isn't emergency cash.

The fees here stack in layers, and it's worth being clear-eyed about them. The base contract charges 1.20% annually — a 1.10% mortality-and-expense (M&E) risk charge plus a 0.10% administration charge — and that's before anything else. On top of that sit the subaccount fund expenses, ranging from 0.34% to 2.58% depending on what you pick. Add the SecurePay income rider (0.5% to 1.6%) and an optional enhanced death benefit (0.2% for Return of Purchase Payments, 0.35% for Maximum Anniversary Value) and a fully loaded contract can carry well over 3% in annual costs. There's also a $30 annual contract maintenance fee, waived once contract value or net purchase payments reach $100,000 (Wink shows this as $35 — a minor discrepancy in the source materials). The honest framing: every layer buys something specific — the M&E charge buys the death-benefit guarantee, the rider buys income protection — but the more you add, the higher the bar the underlying funds have to clear just to break even.

Legal Entity: Protective Life and Annuity Insurance Company

Parent: Protective Life Insurance Corporation

A.M. Best Rating: A+