In your original post you stated "zero diversification". I am glad to see that you walked that back. As I already suggested, I doubt many people have all of their money in annuities so they should have some diversification.
There are annuities with survivor benefits so stating that the heirs will receive zero is not necessarily true.
How exactly did you come up with the conclusion that "Probably less then [sic] 1% of the retired population should be in an annuity." ?
I personally neither buy into the concept nor choose to characterize people I don't know as possibly suffering from a gambling issue or possibly being too incompetent to manage their money simply because they have elected to use an annuity. I know several people who don't suffer from either characterization and have an annuity as part of their overall strategy (which also includes mutual funds, ETFs, individual stocks, cash, and bond funds). Again, they don't personally float my boat but I do accept that there is a place for them in a well thought out strategy.
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Originally Posted by l2ridehd
So I divide my funds by 4 and get 4 annuities. That is still VERY limited diversification. Any decent mutual fund will have 30 to 100 stocks and the same number of bonds. Take 100K and one puts the money in an annuity and the other into say Vanguard Wellington fund. Person A has one, maybe two insurance companies. Person B has 50 plus stocks and even more bonds. Look at the rate of return for both products over the past 30 years. Pretty close. And the person in Wellington leave 100K plus to his heirs where the person with annuity has zero. And in my opinion, Wellington by itself is no where near diversified enough.
I personally see almost no situation where an annuity is a good option for anyone except the person selling it. Again, a gambler, someone not capable of managing any money, or someone who has a family history of over 100 year old relatives. There just is no good case to be made for them. Probably less then 1% of the retired population should be in an annuity.
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