Posted on 10/02/2015 4:31:23 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
Tontines are a bit like the dinosaurs of the retirement world. They perished in a dramatic extinction event, but their DNA lives on in many of the financial products we see today. Tontines were some of the first popular ways to save for retirement, and historians say their demise left the door open for corporate pensions, and Social Security, which continued the tontine promise of a guaranteed retirement.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Social Security will get me through!
You and TWENTY MILLION illegals that never paid in???
I remember the Wild Wild West episode, the Night of the Tottering Tontine. The last person alive gets all the money in a tontine investment.
Social Security is the ultimate Ponzi scheme.
There was a Barney Miller episode involving two brothers. They were both old and one was arrested for a suicide attempt.
They thought it was for only a few hundred bucks but the lawyer/investor managed it very well and they had a 6 figure amount. The two guys and the lawyer left to work something out.
There was an episode of MASH centered on Potter’s tontine with his WW1 comrades.
Even Ponzi himself would blush at SS.
I always thought a tontine was group of friends bought a bottle of fine wine or scotch, with the agreement that the last of the group will drink a toast to the friends of his/her youth.
One of the most memorable episodes of MASH was an episode when Colonel Potter receives and mysterious notice from a lawyer and anxiously awaits the arrival of a package. The group is concerned about him but when the package arrives, he invites the all to share in his toast.
“The Wrong Box”, starring a young Michael Caine in a comedic role was about two old brothers in Victorian London who hated each other, the last survivors of the Tontine, one of whom had a good-hearted son (Michael Caine) the other of which had two no-goodnick sons and a beautiful daughter who become Michael Caine’s love interest, because either or both were adopted.
The no-goodnick sons come to believe that their father was killed in a train crash when he was not, and try to kill the other surviving brother while hiding what they believe to be their father’s body.
There is a hilarious cameo appearance by Peter Sellers, a drug-addicted doctor who the no-goodnick sons ask to produce a death certificate dated ahead and winds up blotting his signature with a cat.
I had never heard the word before and don’t give a rat’s behind.
Obamatines?
I like to crumble up to tontines in soup. No, wait a minute, that’s Saltines.
TAUNTAUN!
Close, but no cigar!
Hey, I like cigars! (...and I had the spelling right fro net search, but wanted to look similar to the theme!)
Can I please have one now?
Far be it from me to be a spelling guy!
A nice cigar needs a nice dinner, perhaps a steak from the grill, potatoes and much more...
I regret to inform you that partaking of such meals has been banned to all citizens! This was part of the great and glorious 0bamacare legislation.
The science has long been settled, that meat and potatoes, cigars too! May be unhealthy! This will free more funds for the ‘End of Aids’ campaign.
Therefore no cigar, never again!
Tauntaun. Tauntauns are a species of snow lizard found roaming the windswept snow plains of Hoth. The Rebel Alliance domesticated the swift creature during their stay on the ice planet, and used the animals for patrol duties outside Echo Base.
Tauntaun | StarWars.com
Thanks for the pic of Jim West in the Night of the Tottering Tontine. Brings back memories.
These arrangements were so widespread in the 18th century that the young United States almost ran a tontine itself: Alexander Hamilton proposed a tontine to pay down national debt after the Revolutionary War.
That links to an article written by my father!
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1922216?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Very nice!
Thank you.
I find this sort of thing an interesting escape from today’s news.
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