Annuities are retirement planning products that are meant to be purchased closer to retirement. They guarantee regular annuity, or pension, for meeting your regular, post-retirement expenses for lifetime. You can use your provident fund lump-sum or any other investment corpus earmarked for retirement to purchase (immediate) annuities from life insurance companies. If you have invested through National Pension System (NPS), you have to mandatorily convert at least 40 percent of your corpus at retirement into annuities. You can choose from several annuity payout (individually or with spouse) options including annuity payable for life, lifetime annuity with return of purchase price on death and so on.