Noah purchased the first flood insurance policy. Unfortunately, he was unable to collect because the insurance company went under.
The first insurer to issue life income annuities, Mesopotamia Life & Accident Company, was forced into bankruptcy when it wrote a life annuity on Methuselah.
In Roman times the dead were typically buried in low lying areas. However, an enterprising citizen of Herculaneum, who owned a hilltop, started charging people in advance for a higher burial plot that would provide a better view in the afterlife. This advance payment to ensure a premium gravesite at death came to be known as “paying the premium”.
Since parchment was very expensive in the Middle Ages, insurance policies were hand printed on used parchment that had been washed, but this often left faded lines of the original sentences. Since the new insurance contract words could be seen along with the original text, the page was said to have been “under-written” and this created the process of underwriting a policy.
The origins of the word actuary are based on renaissance insurance carriers hiring soothsayers that acted out the way the proposed insured would die. If the death scene featured an old person the policy was issued.
“Compliance” comes from the latin word comperiolimus which means “to discover mud.”
A millennium ago the Catholic Church offered a type of variable annuity based on societas sacri officii. These were church offices sold by the Pope that had the authority to do business on behalf of the church. These offices could be very profitable and thus very expensive to purchase, so office seekers would form syndicates and offer people life annuities for their contribution. Many of these paid out a portion of the income received by the church office, so that the income stream was variable.
In the 1690s England authorized the issuance of a million pounds (roughly equal to $500 million today) of life annuities at a payout rate of 14 percent. France and Holland were also big issuers of annuities to fund government expenses.
In 1852 Massachusetts created the first insurance department.
If you take the first letter of the name of every insurance carrier you can create anagrams of every word in the English language.
The idea for a double indemnity life insurance benefit came from the 1944 film Double Indemnity.
The additional forms required by compliance departments for each annuity sale since 2012 has caused so much demand for paper that 2.3 million birds are now homeless because their nesting trees were cut down for pulp.
Ironically, of the forty two insurance companies that have the same company name as a former president, none has ever issued an insurance policy on a former president.
“FIA” is not an acronym for fixed index annuity, but is derived from the Latin word fiadelisnuntionus which means “believe what the agent tells you.”
If you created a tower containing all of the crediting methods and indices used with fixed index annuities over the last 20 years it would be taller than Mount Everest.
The purchase of a life insurance policy has been clinically proven to protect the owner against cooties, zombies and sorrow.
The average premium for a life insurance policy that pays a $100 million death benefit if Earth is destroyed by a comet is $52.64.
Annuity is the only word ending in “nnuity.”
