The fundamental promise of guaranteed living benefit riders on annuities is the potential to invest more aggressively for growth, while maintaining an income guarantee no matter what, in case things don't work out as expected. In other words, at the most basic level, using income guarantees is a "floor with upside" approach to investing for retirement income. The floor may not be the most appealing income level, but it's tolerable on the downside when there's a hope and real chance that things could turn out much better.
Yet in today's environment, the combination of lower prospective returns and higher annuity costs is presenting a troubling new alternative: that guaranteed income riders no longer representative a "floor with upside" but instead are a floor that will be almost impossible not to fall down to and hit. In other words, what was supposed to be a floor that would only be relied upon in a worst case scenario may instead turn out to be the best case scenario and an unavoidable outcome instead!
Unfortunately, though, if the reality is that the income guarantee of the annuity is no longer a worst case scenario but actually a best case one, then it no longer represents the fundamental trade-off that made it so attractive in the first place. Instead, if there really is little upside to the income guarantee, then it may be more appealing to skip the guaranteed living benefit rider altogether and instead just buy a single premium immediate annuity for a comparable guarantee and invest the rest, or just invest and spend conservatively using a safe withdrawal rate approach and simply ride out any intervening market volatility!