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Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I would call the system morbid. This is a way for someone old to get a revenue until he no longer needs it. Often it's used to pay for a retirement home while the people buying the property live in it, thus making it like paying back a mortgage.

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The buyer is essentially making a financial bet that pays out if a stranger will die before a certain date. Even if it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, that aspect feels very morbid to me.

Isn't this the same as most pension plans and annuities?

Yes, but with something like a pension plan you're pretty much always dealing with a pool of people on both sides of the transaction. In the situation in the article you can have a single person on each side so a particular individual is making a financial bet on another specific individual dying sooner rather than later.

I think the key problem is that it creates an incentive for the hopeful buyer to see if they can’t hurry the process up some.

I would imagine that if the death is even remotely suspicious, the beneficiary is going to be murder suspect #1.

It's not murder to bully someone but it can shorten their life.

So then the brokers are the serial killers like with life insurance agents, because the surviving spouse always gets convicted!

actually, because they always get convicted I don't have any proof that the brokers are serial killers

I just dont have any faith in how district attorneys and prosecutors work anymore

There are legal ways to get around it. The viager system is a plot device in this short story by Guy de Maupassant: https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/shor...

which is the plot of this movie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Viager

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