23/08/2026
When I am ever asked about my investment philosophy, there is one simple explanation …
I have to assume that you will live forever, so therefore I have to try and make sure that your money will last forever, too.
It’s not a difficult concept if you get the structures, the advice and the ongoing service right.
When a 47-year-old lawyer agreed to pay 90-year-old Jeanne Calment every month until she died in exchange for her apartment, the mathematics must have looked irresistible.
He had made one catastrophic miscalculation.
Jeanne Calment apparently had no intention of dying.
The deal was struck in Arles, France, in 1965. André-François Raffray would pay her 2,500 francs each month. When Jeanne died, the apartment would become his.
She was already 90. What could possibly go wrong?
Thirty years later, Raffray was dead.
Jeanne was still alive.
His widow had to keep paying her.
By the time Jeanne finally died, the family had reportedly paid more than twice the apartment's value.
But that is only one absurd chapter in a life that stretched from 1875 to 1997.
Jeanne was born before the Eiffel Tower existed. As a teenager in Arles, she claimed to have encountered Vincent van Gogh and remembered him rather unromantically as ill-tempered and smelling of alcohol.
She lived through two world wars.
She rode a bicycle until about 100. She lived independently until 110. At 114, she appeared in a film about Van Gogh, becoming the oldest actress on record.
And despite becoming history's greatest symbol of longevity, Jeanne was hardly a model of perfect living.
She loved chocolate. She drank port. She smoked for decades and finally quit at 117, reportedly because deteriorating eyesight made lighting ci******es difficult.
At 120, reporters asked what sort of future she expected.
“A very short one,” she replied.
She was wrong about that too.
Jeanne Louise Calment died on August 4, 1997.
She was 122 years and 164 days old.
No other human lifespan has ever been authenticated beyond hers.
And the lawyer who once bet financially on her dying first had been gone for two years.
