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Both are fixed-income tools built for the same conservative job — but they carry the risk differently. A bond ladder gives you flexible, self-owned rungs of principal that mature on a schedule you control, with no protection against outliving the ladder itself. An annuity trades some of that flexibility for a guarantee that income keeps arriving for as long as you live, no matter how long that turns out to be.
A fixed indexed annuity is a fixed-income contract from an insurance company. Your principal is protected from market-index declines by contract guarantee, and interest is credited using a formula tied to an outside index — but your money is never actually invested in that index. Think of it as a bond alternative, not a stock-market product.