Hazel will have CPP and OAS. Should she also buy an annuity?

Hazel is 62, retired, holds $531,400 across a RRSP, a TFSA and a LIRA, and has no company pension to lean on, so she writes in wondering whether buying an annuity would give her the guaranteed income she is missing. Allan starts with scenario planning rather than a straight yes-or-no, testing a handful of ways her retirement could unfold before settling on an answer. One of his more useful reframes is that delaying CPP and OAS already works like buying an annuity, since each year she waits locks in a larger, inflation-indexed payment for life, without any of the fees or irreversibility that come with a commercial annuity. From there he weighs a purchased annuity against simply drawing down her RRSP, TFSA and LIRA on a schedule she controls, looking at what each path does to her flexibility and to how long the money can be stretched. The piece lands on the real question underneath Hazel's, which is not whether an annuity is good or bad but whether her income, however it's built, will genuinely last as long as she does. It is a useful read for retirees without a pension weighing a guaranteed-income purchase against managing their own withdrawals.