So Jason Zweig, what is a tontine?
So a tontine is an informal kind of insurance in which a group of people get together and they pool their money.
And as each member of the tontine dies off, the money is then redistributed among the survivors.
Jason Zweig writes the Intelligent Investor column at The Wall Street Journal.
He spends a lot of time thinking about how people invest and how they used to invest.
You may have heard about tontines from popular culture.
They've been the subject of an episode of The Simpsons.
How many of you are familiar with the concept of a tontine?
Essentially,
we all enter into a contract whereby the last surviving participant becomes the sole possessor of all them pretty bitches.
We're in the animated television show Archer,
and we're also the subject of a 1966 movie called The Wrong Box starring Michael Caine.
Tontines originated in Europe,
but became popular as a financial tool in the early years of American independence.
Alexander Hamilton even proposed using a tontine system as a way to manage and fund national debt.
His plan wasn't approved, and tontines eventually lost popularity due to fraud and corruption.
They also had a bad reputation in popular culture.
Members of some tontines developed an unfortunate habit of murdering some of the other members to get the money early.
But before they fell out of fashion,
tontines were some of the earliest tools that people used for retirement.