Retirement can be stressful if you don't have a secure pension.

This is because a standard 401(k)/IRA can run out of money if you live 'too long'. Hello

The reality of modern retirement is that:

• none of us know when we will meet our maker, and
• none of us want to spend our whole retirement worrying about spending our savings.

A 'tontine' is a 400 year old pension that ensures an income for life which is expected to rise over time to offset inflation.

Our modern Tontines are designed to be so simple to understand that a regular saver can explain it just as well as their financial advisor.

When you join a Tontine, the income paid by the trustees is recalculated every month based upon interest rates, currently 5.32%, plus a portion of the capital roughly equal to the chance of someone dying at that age.

This combined %, which increases over time as each members risk of dying increases, is known as the safe withdrawal rate.

Every month the trustees recalculate your safe monthly withdrawal rates multiplied by your expected account balance to display the dollar amounts that you can expect to be paid each month for the rest of your life.

With all of the uncertainty around the world right now, we believe that it is best to launch our TontineIRA™ using low risk investments that guarantee the capital and which provide a reasonable rate of return.

For this reason, the only investment option available in the very first version of the TontineIRA™ will be FDIC insured CDs which are currently yielding ~5.32%.

In the not too distant future, a broader range of investment options will be made available for members to choose from.

Inflation destroys the spending power of retirees that are on a fixed income. This ruins their ability to enjoy their retirement because they know that they will have less and less to spend as the years roll by.

This is where the Tontine effect comes in and perhaps explains why Tontines are historically five times more popular with consumers than fixed annuities.

In a Tontine, as the decades pass by, a greater percentage of the members of your assigned Tontine community will start passing away causing you to to inherit larger amounts every year as a kind of tribute from your fellow members for you having outlived them.

And because your payout rate is rising (see above) as well as your balance, you can expect your monthly income to start rising, particularly in later years.

Doesn't that sound like a better retirement to look forward to?

If a parent lives into their 90s then most likely the children will be in their 70s when they receive any inheritance. Worse still is that if the parent runs out of money though then under US filial responsibility laws their children may be liable to pay the parents care bills.

With a regular 401(k) or IRA plan, passing on some of your savings to the kids while they are still young increases the risk of the plan running out of money in old age.

Lifetime incomes though, whether from a TontineIRA or an annuity, reduce these risks by ensuring that there will always be some level of income to support your living costs no matter what age you live to.

As an added bonus, once you secure a suitable level of lifetime income, you may now be able to afford to help the kids buy a house or start a business while they are still young.

Your TontineIRA™ is managed by trustees acting in a fiduciary capacity which means that they are legally and ethically bound to act in your best interest.

This contrasts with other lifetime income solutions such as pure insurance products and securities which are typically sold by commission agents on a buyer-beware basis.

Such practices in respect of retirement savers are rightly coming under increasing scrutiny from the US Department of Labour.

In an era where everyone is increasingly worried about 'elder fraud', online security is becoming increasingly complex even for technically sophisticated users.

This is why we have developed a patented system which replaces hard-to-remember passwords with advanced facial recognition technology.

Now, whenever you need to take a sensitive action on your account such as approving a payout or changing your bank details, you can login to our app using your face so that we can be sure that it is you, and only you, that is controlling your account.