A Short History of Tontines
by Kent McKeever - Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law
Extract:
A tontine is an investment scheme through which shareholders derive some form of profit or benefit while they are living, but the value of each share devolves to the other participants and not the shareholder's heirs on the death of each shareholder.
The tontine is usually brought to an end through a dissolution and distribution of assets to the living shareholders when the number of shareholders reaches an agreed small number.
If people know about tontines at all, they tend to visualize the most extreme form - a joint investment whose heritable ownership ends up with the last living shareholder. The all or nothing nature of that form is memorable.
The last survivor principle has been the basis for a number of dramatic works whose plots hang on the machinations of a tontine participant to murder his co-investors to insure the core property reverts to him.
In fact, tontines are far more innocuous and served as an important step both in developing modem insurance plans and providing some of the earliest reliable actuarial data on which the later insurance plans could be developed.
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Tontine Trust is a consumer-oriented fintech that provides software and marketing solutions to banks, chartered trust companies and credit unions (each a ‘Bank’) which enables the Banks to offer state of the art retirement income solutions such as the Tontine IRA™.
Banking, trustee and fiduciary services in the US are provided by Bank partner(s) which are regulated in the US to act as fiduciaries on behalf of US Tontine IRA™ accountholders (‘members’).
Tontine Trust provides and operates the TontineIRA™ administration and record-keeping platform on behalf of, and under the supervision of, the Banks.
Tontine Trust is not a Bank or a trust company and does not provide banking & fiduciary services other than certain administrative services in a ministerial capacity as the Trust Advisors to the Tontine IRA™s.
No information on this website or the platforms provided by Tontine Trust should be taken as constituting individual advice to you. The information is informational and of general guidance only. Tontine Trust does not provide investment management services, financial advice, banking or fiduciary services.
The choices you make or do not make around the investment of your retirement account are your own responsibility. Neither Tontine Trust nor the Banks can be held responsible for any financial loss arising from your retirement choices or lack of them.
The amounts and duration of the lifetime income from the Tontine IRA™ are indicative only. By design, neither the amounts nor the duration of retirement income payments from a tontine plan are fixed or guaranteed.
Based upon many years of research and development, the TontineIRA™ platform displays reasonable best estimates of what level of income you can expect to receive over the course of your lifetime. These estimates are constantly reviewed (sometimes nightly) to incorporate any effects on expected incomes caused by changes in interest rates, investment returns, life expectancy and/or the actual mortality experience of members sharing the same tontine.
The Banks we work with are required to manage US trust assets in accordance with the Uniform Prudent Investor Act.
To ensure maximum security of capital and income for members, the Tontine IRA™ assets will be invested by the Banks in a basket of FDIC insured deposits such that each up Tontine IRA™ account can obtain FDIC coverage up to approximately $10m of assets per member.
Note that while the deposits made on behalf of the Tontine IRA™s are FDIC insured, the IRA accounts themselves are not directly insured by the FDIC because they are not a deposit or other obligation of, or guaranteed by a Bank or state chartered trust company and and as such are subject to investment risks, including possible loss of the principal amount invested, particularly if the member passes away before they have receive total income in excess of their original contribution to the TontineIRA™.