„Bezahlt wird einer dafür, … dass er endlich verschwindet“, stand bei Magnus Enzensberger im gestrigen Adventstürchen. In den meisten Fällen ist Bezahlung fürs Verschwinden gleichbedeutend mit einer lebenslangen Rente (auf englisch annuity). Doch lebenslange Renten haben mindestens für die Finanzierer ihre Tücken. So meinte Fanny Dashwood in Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) Sense & Sensibility (Kapitel 2):

„Certainly not; but if you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it. You are not aware of what you are doing. I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it. Twice every year these annuities were to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father, because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my mother’s disposal, without any restriction whatever. It has given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am sure I would not pin myself down to the payment of one for all the world.“