But as retirement approaches, one question begins to overshadow all the others:
How long does my money need to last?
In the U.S., the largest retirement market by assets in the world, a common rule of thumb is for 65-year-olds to plan around ‘average life expectancy’ but life expectancy models show a very different picture:
- ~1 in 4 won't get to enjoy more than 12 years of retirement.
- ~1 in 4 will live into their 90s.
- 150,000+ Americans turning 65 this year will need to budget to live to 100 or more.
It's no wonder that, for many people, retirement feels like a high-stakes guessing game when it should feel like arriving at an all-inclusive resort, knowing that the bills have already been paid.
Solving the seemingly impossible
Traditionally, retirees have faced a difficult choice: keep their savings invested and underspend out of caution, or hand them to an insurer in exchange for a fixed income for life.
In 2017, one of the world’s leading actuarial consulting firms surveyed more than 100 insurers and financial institutions about what consumers wanted from the ‘perfect’ retirement product.
The three leading priorities were protection from:
- outliving their savings;
- loss of purchasing power due to inflation; and
- loss of capital if the provider failed.
The report concluded that combining these protections in one affordable product was effectively impossible…especially at a low cost.
Yet the report’s own analysis identified, but did not explore, a historically successful mechanism capable of resolving much of that conflict: the ‘tontine’.
A decade earlier, Ralph Goldsticker, CFA, had already shown that a tontine-style mutual fund could lower costs, deliver significantly higher payments than purchased annuities and reduce reliance on an insurer’s solvency.
The solution was not impossible at all. It just required a different type of provider.
In the years since, academics and policymakers around the world have increasingly adopted the principles identified by Goldsticker.
In 2022, the OECD recommended that, in addition to annuities, tontine-style asset-backed longevity pools could be made mandatory for at least part of savers’ retirement balances.
In 2025, the UK government cited research suggesting that CDC pensions using longevity pooling could provide retirement incomes up to 60% higher than an annuity purchase. The Pensions Policy Institute and King’s College London modelling indicates that a pure tontine could outperform a CDC.
In the United States, Executive Order 14330 subsequently directed federal agencies to expand access to alternative assets in defined-contribution plans, expressly including both commodities—such as gold— and longevity risk-sharing pools.
What is a Tontine?
For more than three centuries, people ranging from ordinary workers to European royalty joined tontines to convert savings into payments for life. As with an annuity, members paid a sum of money upfront.
But tontines had one crucial difference: whenever a member died, payments to survivors increased rather than benefiting the annuity provider.
While annuitants generally received fixed payments, tontine members could expect theirs to rise as the number of surviving members declined. Not surprisingly, tontines became widely preferred to annuities.
By the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of American households owned a tontine policy. By 1905, nine million such policies were in force, representing two-thirds of all U.S. life-insurance policies.
So why did they disappear?
Not because tontines stopped working, but because the institutions offering them lacked the fiduciary safeguards to put members’ interests first.
As policy sales surged, so did insurers’ general funds. Subsequent investigations showed that policyholders’ funds were directed into affiliated businesses, speculative ventures and other opaque investments that neither savers nor their advisers could see or independently verify.
In 1906, the authorities intervened, revealing failures by providers rather than the tontine mechanism itself. Reforms were imposed to make the policies safer for members, but restricted many of the practices that had made them commercially attractive to insurers.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
When we set out to modernise the tontine, our objective was simple: to preserve what made tontines work, add modern fiduciary safeguards and set a new standard for asset transparency.
In other words, to put the trust back into tontines.
Introducing Tontine Gold:
Individual Trusts Designed for Lifelong Payments that Respond to Gold and Reward Longevity
Our first modern tontines bring together three principles proven over centuries:
- Tontines share longevity risk and reward those that live longer.
- Gold has historically preserved long-term purchasing power without depending on the promise of a government or financial institution.
- Trusts segregate assets and safeguard them under fiduciary oversight.
The Confidence to Begin a New Golden Age
For years, society has criticised apparently wealthy retirees for being too frugal. But what if they were simply afraid of running out of money?
Tontine Gold is designed to replace that uncertainty with the confidence to spend more on the people, places and experiences that make life worth living.
And its defining advantage is simple: the longer you live, the more prosperous you can become.
About Tontine Trust
Tontine Trust is an award-winning fintech headquartered in Ireland. Individual Tontine Trust Funds administered through Tontine Trust Europe KB, a Swedish trust manager, are now available to eligible applicants using their personal savings held outside formal pension plans.
Tontine Pensions, including the TontineIRA®, are planned for selected countries that support the OECD’s recommendation for asset-backed longevity-risk-sharing pensions and will accept transfers from formal pension plans and retirement accounts.
