Select Choice Plus 5-Year review

It depends on whether you are comfortable with the liquidity structure. For someone who genuinely intends to leave the money untouched for five years, this is a reasonable MYGA — clean rate guarantee, no MVA, decent minimum, solid waivers. For someone who wants the standard 10% annual free withdrawal built in without a separate rider cost, there are competing MYGAs that include it at no incremental rate reduction. Neither position is wrong; it is a question of what you are optimizing for.

The primary reason is rate certainty. Select Choice Plus 5-Year locks a declared rate for the entire five-year surrender period — no annual reset risk, no index dependency, no cap or participation rate to negotiate. For a buyer moving money out of a CD, savings account, or maturing short-term bond, the structure is familiar. The secondary reason is the no-MVA design, which removes the interest-rate risk that makes early surrender unpredictable on many competing products. If rates rise after purchase, you only pay the stated surrender charge — nothing more.

I think Select Choice Plus 5-Year fits best for a conservative buyer in their late 50s through early 70s who wants a guaranteed rate on a defined timeline and has no expectation of needing access to principal during the surrender period. The wide non-qualified issue age range (starting at age 0) also makes it usable for trust and legacy contexts. It is less appealing for buyers who want standard free-withdrawal access without paying extra, who are shopping for the absolute highest rate available at the 5-year MYGA maturity band, or who have any meaningful chance of needing the funds early.

You are buying a fixed-term insurance contract that credits a declared interest rate to your account value every year for five years, then returns the accumulated balance at maturity — less whatever surrender charges apply if you exit early. There is no index, no market participation, no rider complexity. The insurance company takes your premium, invests it in its general account (primarily bonds), and agrees to pay you a stated rate regardless of what happens to interest rates in the meantime. The declared rate at issue is the rate you earn for all five years. What you are giving up is liquidity during that window, and on this product, that cost is more concrete than on most competitors because the base contract has no free-withdrawal provision built in.

Select Choice Plus 5-Year credits a single declared fixed rate to your accumulation value at the end of each contract year. The rate is set at issue and guaranteed for the full five-year initial rate guarantee period — it does not reset annually the way a fixed account inside an FIA might. Rate banding applies: as of September 2025, the rate was 4.50% for contracts below $50,000 (Low Band), 4.50% for contracts of $50,000 to $99,999, and 4.70% for contracts of $100,000 or more. The guaranteed minimum renewal rate at the end of the initial period is 1%, which is a contractual floor but not a meaningful planning target.

At the end of the five-year initial guarantee period, you enter a 30-day window. During that window, you can surrender the contract without charges, take the accumulated value, or renew into another guarantee period at the then-current declared rate. If you do nothing, S.USA Life will notify you and roll the contract forward, but you should treat that window as a hard decision point — it is your most efficient exit opportunity.

The no-MVA design is worth understanding clearly. Many competing MYGAs and fixed annuities include a market value adjustment, which means that if you surrender before maturity, the insurance company can increase or decrease your payout based on how current interest rates compare to rates at issue. In a rising-rate environment — the environment that followed 2022 — this can make the actual cost of early surrender substantially higher than the stated charge. Select Choice Plus 5-Year has no MVA on this contract form. If you need to exit early, the surrender charge schedule is the complete cost of doing so above the free-withdrawal amount (or RMD amount on qualified contracts). That predictability has real value for buyers who want certainty about their worst-case exit cost.

This is the most important structural feature to understand before purchasing. The base contract provides no penalty-free withdrawals during the five-year surrender period — the only exceptions are RMD amounts on qualified contracts and the emergency waivers (confinement and terminal illness). If you want annual access to 10% of your accumulation value, you add the optional Penalty-Free Withdrawal Rider, which reduces your declared rate by 0.10 percentage points. Unused rider withdrawals in a given year do not carry forward.

The surrender charges are steeper in the early years than many competing 5-year MYGAs — a 9% first-year charge is toward the high end of the peer range. Because there is no MVA, however, the stated charge is the complete cost of early exit on amounts above the free-withdrawal allowance. The confinement waiver — which applies if you are confined to a skilled nursing facility, intermediate nursing care facility, or hospital for 90 or more consecutive days — and the terminal illness waiver provide meaningful safety valves for genuine health emergencies.

There are no base contract fees. The declared rate is the rate you earn — no spread deducted on top of it, no administrative charge reducing your accumulation value annually. The only fee events are the optional riders:

The Penalty-Free Withdrawal Rider reduces the declared rate by 0.10%. At the current top-band rate of 4.70%, adding this rider gives you 4.60% with standard 10% annual access. The Return of Premium Rider guarantees your principal even if surrender charges would otherwise reduce the payout below your original deposit — it reduces the declared rate by 0.15%. Adding both riders together costs 0.25% off the declared rate. Whether that tradeoff is worthwhile depends on your specific concern: the FW rider makes sense if you expect to use it; the ROP rider makes sense mainly for buyers in the early contract years who are worried about a forced early exit.

The broader structural tradeoff is rate versus flexibility. Other 5-year MYGAs in the peer group typically include 10% free withdrawal at no incremental cost. S.USA Life unbundles that feature and charges for it separately, which may allow them to offer a marginally higher headline rate to buyers who genuinely do not need the liquidity — but it requires buyers to think carefully about what they actually need before they lock in.

Legal Entity: S.USA Life Insurance Company, Inc.

Parent: Prosperity Life Group

AM Best Rating: A-

S.USA Life is a subsidiary of Prosperity Life Group, a mid-sized insurance holding company. The A- AM Best rating is within the acceptable range for annuity buyers focused on short-to-medium-term commitments, though it sits one notch below the A and above it by a meaningful gap from the A+ or A++ ratings that larger carriers carry. For a 5-year commitment at the minimum premium levels this product allows, the carrier profile is reasonable. Buyers placing larger amounts — particularly at the $100,000 or more tier where the rate improves — should verify current ratings directly with AM Best and compare against peer carrier profiles before committing.