Tontine Trust has launched Tontine Gold, a modern tontine trust designed to make variable lifelong retirement payments backed by physical gold. By combining individually held trust assets with the gains from longevity sharing, it offers retirees a new asset-backed alternative to conventional drawdown and insurance annuities.

DUBLIN, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Tontine Trust today announced the launch of Tontine Gold, a modern tontine designed to make lifelong payments that respond to the value of gold and reward members for living longer.

Tontine Gold addresses the question that Nobel Laureate William Sharpe, famous for the Sharpe Ratio, described as 'the nastiest, hardest problem in finance': How do you turn a lifetime of savings into retirement spending without knowing how long you will live?

Retirees have traditionally faced a difficult choice: keep their savings invested and underspend out of caution, or transfer their capital to an insurer in exchange for fixed payments for life that depend upon the solvency of insurers.

Tontine Gold offers a third approach. Each member establishes an individual trust backed by physical gold. The assets remain segregated under fiduciary oversight, while members share longevity risk with people of similar age and life expectancy.

When a member dies, their remaining assets are redistributed to the trust of surviving members of the same Tontine Class. These Longevity Gains support payments throughout retirement and reward those who live longer.

"People approaching retirement should be free to start enjoying their savings without having to worry if they will run out of money in their later years," said Dean McClelland, founder of Tontine Trust. "Tontine Gold is designed to provide lifelong, asset-backed payments while allowing the gains from longevity sharing to extend your monthly payments for as long as you live."

Tontines have been used for more than three centuries by ordinary people as well as royalty to convert savings into payments for life. By the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately nine million tontine policies were in force in the United States, representing around two-thirds of all US life-insurance policies.

Their decline followed investigations into the conduct of the insurers administering them—not a failure of the underlying tontine longevity-sharing mechanism.

Tontine Trust has sought to preserve what made tontines work while adding modern fiduciary safeguards and setting a new standard of asset transparency.

Savers looking to convert their savings to lifelong payments can apply online, adjust payment settings and inspect records associated with their trust assets through Tontine Trust's patented digital infrastructure.

"Our objective was simple: preserve the proven tontine mechanism, put the trust back into tontines and give members full visibility into the dedicated assets supporting their payments," McClelland said.

Founded upon three established principles, Tontine Gold combines:

• Tontines, which share longevity risk among members, rewarding those that live longer;
• Gold, which has historically preserved long-term purchasing power without depending on the promise of a government or financial institution; and
• Trusts, which segregate assets and maintain them under fiduciary oversight.

The result is:

• A Trust That Pays You for Life
• Rewarding You More for Living Longer
• Backed by Physical Gold

International policymakers are showing increased support for longevity pooling. In August 2025, US Executive Order 14330 directed federal agencies to facilitate access to alternative assets in defined-contribution retirement plans. Its definition expressly includes investments in commodities—such as gold—as well as "lifetime income investment strategies including longevity risk-sharing pools."

In 2020, the OECD expressly identified tontines as collective retirement pay-out arrangements whose payments can adjust according to accumulated assets, investment performance and longevity experience. In 2022, it formally recommended that lifelong retirement payments may be provided through either guaranteed annuities or non-guaranteed arrangements that pool longevity risk among participants.

The UK government has cited research suggesting that CDC collective pension schemes using longevity pooling could provide retirement payments up to 60% higher than annuity purchase.

Recent Pensions Policy Institute and King's College London modelling indicates that a pure tontine could outperform a shared-indexation CDC. Their Collective Drawdown model retained individually attributable assets, pooled longevity risk through a tontine mechanism and produced higher modelled retirement payments overall.

"The emerging policy direction is clear," McClelland said. "Lifelong retirement payments do not always require an insurer to guarantee the outcome. Longevity risk can instead be shared between the members themselves, with payments supported by the redistribution of assets of those that no longer need the money."

Individual Tontine Trust Funds are administered through Tontine Trust Europe KB, a Swedish trust manager, and are available internationally to eligible applicants using personal savings held outside formal pension plans.

Tontine Pensions, including the TontineIRA®, are planned for selected jurisdictions and will accept transfers from domestic pension plans and retirement accounts where permitted.

About Tontine Trust

Tontine Trust is an award-winning financial technology company headquartered in Ireland. Since 2017, it has focused exclusively on developing modern tontine structures designed to help people use accumulated wealth more confidently throughout retirement.

Its patented digital infrastructure supports online applications, trust administration, proof-of-life verification and member verification of the assets held in their trusts.

Note: The payments from a Tontine Trust Fund adjust over time. They will rise or fall according to the value of trust assets and the longevity of the members of the Tontine Class. Payments are not guaranteed by an insurer.

Tontine Trust - Live Long & Prosper® and TontineIRA® are registered trademarks of Tontine Trust.

Media Contact

Dean McClelland, Tontine Trust, 46 850781500, media@tontine.com, https://tontine.com

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SOURCE Tontine Trust