A SUGGESTION FOR ANNUITY PROVIDERS

In my moonlighting career as a business consultant I have developed a service for annuity providers. You know what happens. You are ageing. You hand over lots of cash to one to one of these insurance companies and they pay you a very small sum every month and then you die and they do quite well out of it. The problem is, as one such provider told me, 'The buggers go on living. Our actuaries are actually having to sweat a bit these days. Lifespan is increasing faster than we can do the sums'. My solution is to set up a company called 'Retirement Reward'. When someone takes out an annuity and hands over, say, half a million (for which he might get a mere £20,000 a year which will be taxed ) Retirement Reward will start to send them gifts. The gift parcels might include, say, 200 cigarettes a week or a box of cigars and a booklet called 'Inhale and Live Life to the Full!'. A case of whiskey every fortnight. Tokens to provide free meals at McDonalds. A set of Jeffrey Archer stories. A gross box of Viagra. And so on. My own actuarial calculations tell me that an annuity provider could by spending 2% of the amount received on Retirement Reward parcels knock something like 5 years off the life of a retiree. That's £10,000 spent on our half a million quid annuitant and £100,000 saved on annuity payouts. How clever is that?