The Tontine Coffee-House (2018)

With regular life insurance, you bet you'll die.

With a tontine, you bet you'll live.

The latter seems much more sensible to me.

As the founder of the first Tontine company in over 100 years, I cannot agree more.

Surely you mean the first tontine out of Africa ?...

Good point. I mean retirement tontines and tontine trust funds that pay members an income for life secured against hard assets rather than ROSCA tontines which are community savings vehicles designed for short term borrowing between members.

>With a tontine, you bet you'll live.

One problem is that everyone else in the tontine is betting you don't and sometimes are willing to act on that.

Life insurance isn't for you.

Life insurance is for the Husband/Wife, Daughter, and Son you left behind to replace the income you used to support them with and pay for the (abhorrently and unethically expensive) process of putting you in the ground in most places.

It's the lottery you don't ever want to win.

Most people do lots of things that don't benefit themselves to the exclusion of all others.

In theory yes, but in practice, no such cases ever existed.

A good example is that the collapse of Swiss Air created am accidental Tontine among its pension beneficiaries. Rather than trying to bump each other off, they meet up every year to hear to jointly toast the good news about their rising income: https://tontine.com/news/swissair-the-accidental-tontine/

A better way of phrasing this would be with life insurance, everybody else bets you’ll live.

With a tontine, everybody else bets you’ll die.

Well we will all die eventually.

Perhaps it's better to say that:

"With a tontine, others of the same age and sex bet that you’ll die before them".