I found, a few years ago, a life insurance certificate showing a $1000 policy taken out on my mother by hers in the early 1930s. The practice back then was for an agent to stop weekly and collect 25 cents or so. I guess it was allowed to lapse, because the successor company had no record of it (the result I expected). The certificate was fancy enough to keep, it seems.
We might think of personal security plans such as retirement funds, life insurance and annuities as rather modern, but various forms have been developed over hundreds of years. Benevolent societies have provided security in the form of burial insurance and old-age homes before Social Security, and those of more substantial means have had access to trusts, inheritances and such devices as the Tontine.
What? That word sounds like it refers to a local church officer, like a beadle or sexton. It is, however, a strange stew of lottery, insurance and annuity, and has been around since before Lorenzo Tonti (now we get the name) proposed it to the royal government of France in 1653 as a fund raising idea (Louis XIV spent huge sums on continental wars and was always in search of cash) It was officially offered to the public in the Netherlands in 1670 and in France in 1689, unfortunately for Lorenzo, after he had died.
The idea is that subscribers contribute an amount to build the fund and the government paid out regular interest as with the Treasury bonds we are familiar with. Due to growth of investments, the annuity increases as participants pass away and are paid no more. The macabre end of the scheme is that the last surviving subscriber takes everything remaining. That this process might induce some to bump others off before them was actually the storyline of a 1996 Simpsons episode, in which Mr. Burns attempts to do exactly that to Grandpa Abe.
Tontines were quite popular for a century and a half, but as people learned how to game the system they fell out of favor. The plan is still legal and in use today, and there is talk of broadly reviving it. It was also widely used later on to fund building projects such as hotels and the Tontine Coffee House on New York City's Wall Street (1792) -- the first home of the NYSE, believe it or not.
Original home of the NY Stock Exchange
Some people are grasshoppers, living day to day, and some are ants, always planning ahead. It's generally better for you the more the ant type you are, but as they say, people plan and the gods just laugh.
Waste not, want not
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