• Also See: Annuities for Retirement — The Best, and the Rest

When Karin Kuder retired in 2007 from her career as an occupational nurse, she hardly imagined she’d wind up writing a six-figure check to an insurance company and signing away control of her nest egg. But after she lost tens of thousands of dollars in one scary swoop in 2008, she found herself enduring sleepless nights. So Kuder, who’s 62, put more than $150,000 in a fixed annuity, where it grows at a steady rate and can’t shrink if the market drops. “I don’t worry about that money,” Kuder says. “It’s safe.”

They can be a nightmare to understand, even harder to shop for. And yet the inscrutable annuity, a product that’s been around for centuries, is fast becoming the country’s most tempting retirement investment, offering the kind of security that financial advisers say aging baby boomers are grasping for. For years, of course, annuities have been picked apart by critics, and even by some advisers who sell them, for their high fees and bewildering rules. (The number of pages in a typical prospectus for one kind of annuity: 700.) But as economic insecurity lingers, some experts are seeing annuities as a product that can deliver the kind of guaranteed monthly paycheck—in good times and bad—that our parents enjoyed in the age of the company pension.

In a twist that fits a cautious era, it’s the least sexy of these investments that have fared the best. In 2009 so-called fixed annuities attracted $108 billion in assets, 48 percent more than they did two years prior, according to Limra, an insurance trade organization. Although sales slacked off somewhat as the stock market recovered, Americans have still sunk their money into these investments at a rate of about $300 million a day, and the insurers that sell them are pouncing. Major annuity sellers have stepped up their efforts to get employers and mutual fund companies to include annuities in workers’ 401(k) plans. And advisers who’ve backed annuities all along are saying they told us so. Jean Fullerton, a planner in Manchester, N.H., says the number of her clients buying annuities has surged in the past year. “Now that we’ve had the market crash,” she says, “they’ve finally caught up to my thinking.”

The industry certainly has momentum on its side. Most investors haven’t recouped the savings they lost in the crash. In a recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, roughly one in four people said they might postpone retirement for financial reasons. Annuity providers say they’re prepared to cover that gap; they often cite a study by Wharton School professor David Babbel, who concluded that a retiree who didn’t annuitize some savings would need a nest egg 25 to 40 percent larger than someone with annuities in his portfolio. That study was financed by the insurance industry, but it has swayed some skeptics—even the Obama administration has since given annuities an implicit endorsement.

Still, annuities haven’t gotten any less complicated, and there’s no easy way to compare investments whose features and costs vary depending on who’s selling them and whose prospectuses can rival War and Peace. With these issues in mind, we put together our first-ever ranking of the top annuities. We combed through more than 100 annuity offerings from two dozen major insurers, ferreting out details about their prices and features; we also turned to researchers at Morningstar and A.M. Best to help us gauge their financial strength and uncover hidden fees.

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