They I start looking at the numbers on a spreadsheet and what inflation does to it 10 and 20 years down the road. Not so good.

Inflation is certainly an issue with annuities.

Every time I've looked at the numbers, for any sane time horizon it's better to get a non-inflation-protected annuity than a partially-inflation-protected one. You're better off for a *lot* of years. The inflation protection is really expensive, and almost always only partial, since there is no obvious big player in the market taking the other side of inflation bets that the insurance firm needs to offload.

Better than either would be a two-fer.
Buy an immediate non-inflation-protected annuity with a bunch of money, and put the rest in medium-to-long dated TIPS. When the TIPS expire (protecting you completely from inflation at no cost), put that money into another non-inflation-protected immediate annuity. It leaves something for your "to do" list later on when the TIPS mature, but no actual investment decision to make and get right. It would be easy to break this into a few chunks to get pretty flat real spending power with a negative inflation protection cost.

Jim