I was following this thread to hear both sides of the story on SPIAs, but as soon as you made the above claim (in bold red) you lost all credibility. ALL.
Nice empty post. Because why?????????? Did you even read my entire post??? I actually got suspended for bad mouthing insurance agents. Translation: Bogleheads suppresses speech against annuities and the cons who sell them.
There is a bunch of context to a suspension we're not privy to, including your particular situation, and we wouldn't get anywhere debating it even if we knew what happened. This is also concerning a very large site which, from what I've read, is one of the big three FIRE sites (MMM, Bogleheads, and ERE) that people use as a wealth of resources, information, and inspiration. It's extremely unlikely that Bogleheads is "a sham site," and an anecdotal argument isn't very compelling proof. That's including if you were banned by a single moderator (even if that moderator was an insurance salesman), because Bogleheads is not just someone's blog or a single moderator's forum, it's an entire FIRE community.
Since we still don't have much support for annuities weighing in, I looked at
http://obliviousinvestor.com/single-premium-immediate-annuity/and checked from there via a link from Vanguard at
https://www.incomesolutions.com/LifetimeIncomeEstimate.aspx#results-anchorfor 5k/month (60k annually) for a deposit quote.
The deposit quoted is 629,562.42 if I were 55 and buying for payments to begin at 65. The average stock return over 30yrs doesn't quite fit this 10yr napkin math, but let's say it does for the sake of averages and that we can guess that deposit invested would have grown to 1,259,124.84.
50,364.99 would be the 4% SWR on stocks invested to a long-term average after that window, coming slightly short (4,197/mo vs 5,000/mo) by 19%, but the stocks have significantly more upside if you died early or if you lived longer than 5 years.
If I were going to bet on an annuity, I suppose if the bull market continued two more years and I had just turned 55 and was utterly terrified of starting before a bear market began, and if also I did not expect to live to 75 for some reason (and didn't care about leaving money behind), OR worried about getting cleaned out from a debilitating disease's medical expenses (high rate of heart failure in the first case or perhaps Alzheimer's in the second, where I didn't think I could keep directing my investments?), then perhaps I could imagine a scenario where such a thing might seem appealing.
It still looks like the worst kind of market timing to base retirement planning on a bet on a bad deal pulling through on its rarest opportunity, but, well, I'm trying to bring us something here.