The world's oldest woman had a lifetime annuity

Jane-Ling Wang is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis. One of her areas of focus is aging research.

In a recent article, she describes an annuity contract paid out to a person who turned out to be the world's oldest woman:

Jeanne Louise Calment, the world's longest living person (who died at the age of 122) was born in Arles, France on February 21, 1875 and died on August 4, 1997 in a nursing home in Arles. She was born in the year Bizet’s “Carmen” was first staged and Tolstoy published Anna Karennina, and a year before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. She also witnessed the aeroplane and the cinema. At the age of 13, she met Vincent Van Gogh in Arles and wasn’t impressed by him.

...Jean Calment came from a bourgeois family and never has to work. Her husband, a cousin, was a prosperous storeowner who offered her a life of ease revolving around tennis, bicycling, swimming, roller skating, piano and opera. In later years, Calment lived mostly off the income from her apartment, which she sold cheaply to a lawyer when she was 90.

Andre-Francois Raffray, who apparently relied on the actuarial table, signed a contingency contract with Calment and agreed to pay a life annuity of 2,500 francs ($500) a month under a deal to make him the owner of Calment's flat when she dies. Yet, he died at 77 and his family was still paying for more than a year unitl she died. Altogether, they paid more than 900,000 francs ($180,000), three times the value of the house.

In today's financial world, an annuity can be used to provide a steady income stream for life.

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