CL Life Annuities

CL Life only sells two types of fixed annuities. The first is the CL Tarrant Trail Annuity, a simple fixed annuity.

The product offers a first-year bonus rate of 7% and has a five-year surrender schedule that starts at 9% and decreases thereafter. The minimum premium for purchase is $20,000, and penalty-free withdrawals of up to 10% are available starting in the second year of the contract.

The company also offers a renewal rate bailout feature. This allows customers to make a full or partial withdrawal without facing surrender charges if the renewal rate of the annuity is lower than the bailout rate of 5.5%.

The other annuity is the CL Sundance Annuity, a single premium deferred annuity that CL Life offers in terms of two or three years.

A 6% rate is available on the three-year version of the product, and 5.25% is available for two years. The annuity is straightforward, offering a death benefit equal to the full accumulation value of the contract and a 30-day free look period.

With just over $200 million in annual premiums on annuities in 2023, CL Life is a small carrier without the financial backing or deep history of the better-known companies in this space.

CL Life is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, and was initially founded in 1978. It served as a life insurance company before Crestline Investors acquired it in 2022 and rebranded it to its current identity.

Crestline itself was only founded in 1997 and manages around $17 billion in total assets.

Given CL Life’s small size and limited reach, there is little publicly available info about its customer satisfaction.

The company is unsurprisingly absent from the J.D. Power Overall Customer Satisfaction Index, which measures customer satisfaction for the larger and more established carriers in the industry.

CL Life does hold a perfect NAIC Complaint Index Score of 0, meaning there are no records of customer complaints against the company.

However, given the size of the company and its relatively small total annuity premiums, a low NAIC score may not carry as much weight as it would with a major provider.

Simply put, the company is too small to accurately measure its customer satisfaction.

As with any provider, there are both pros and cons to working with CL Life.

An advantage of CL Life is its transparency in regard to its offerings. All annuity carriers operate differently, and some can be obscure about exactly how their products work.

CL Life openly lists virtually all the features of its two products, trusting the consumer to compare the components of its annuities on their own without keeping details hidden or only accessible to finance professionals.

However, there are key potential drawbacks to CL Life. The company’s B++ financial strength rating could be a concern for some customers. One agent told RetireGuide.com that they will not even work with a company that isn’t A-rated.

Furthermore, CL Life isn’t available to a lot of people, with its products sold in only 10 states. Depending on where you live, you may not have access to any CL Life annuity.

The company’s annuity offerings themselves also are not particularly robust. The company only sells two products, which are both fairly simple fixed annuities.