Reminds me of a work colleague of mine, the admin assistant, who used to work for AT&T. When she got laid off there, she got a pretax payout of lump sum pension or something like that (similar to an IRA or 401k, I believe, in that it had to be rolled into something else) and her advisor convinced her to put it all in annuities. More recently, he has been bugging her to take her existing 401k and give it to him to put it in MORE annuities. Of course he makes money on that, not on her keeping a 401k with our company.
She showed me her existing annuities, and since they are from 15+ years ago before interest rates went so low, they have a guaranteed minimum payout of 5%. I told her that's not bad for these days, but if her advisor bugged her again, tell him she would only consider it if he can get annuities identical to those. :) He won't be able to, of course, annuities today tends to be "floating", where you lose less than the market but upwards returns are capped, as far as I know there are none that have 5% minimum payouts.