I wasn't just saying life insurance, and I wasn't attempting to be dismissive. I was saying that having a cash stash in some form or fashion of 3 years worth of retirement distributions, regardless of their form, will almost certainly never run you out of money regardless of what happens in the market. Perhaps you missed the 2 forward slashes on the keyboard?
Now, some folks do say those things. Some folks say otherwise. If you have the life insurance, even if you are wealthy enough to "not need it", you can actually up your income in retirement because the end result (which happens to all of us) will be your family being replenished with money in the form of the death benefit in the life insurance policy. So, building up the biggest pile of investment $$ has its merits, and its perils, as does having too much cash, as does having too much life insurance, as does having too much real estate. Having a strategy is better than just saying "I'm gonna build a mountain and then tone down my risk profile when I retire". I'm sure those folks that retired a few years ago and had moved to an 80% bond profile were really happy about taking distributions when the bond market was down 20%.
Like I said, wasn't being dismissive. Was saying that folks can drive themselves crazy with running Monte Carlo sims and maxing this and cutting that. If you stick to a pretty simple strategy of staying invested in the S&P and have 3 years of distributions (at retirement age) of some form of non-market asset, whatever you so choose it to be, you are north of 98% not going to ever run out of money.