Leave your money to your cryonically perserved self?

The laws are complicated, and not stacked in your favor, but if done carefully it’s possible to leave a huge death benefit payoff from your life insurance policy to your cryonically-preserved self. And since life insurance can also be used to finance your cryopreservation, you need not wait until you are rich to sign up. Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money.

Don’t get me wrong. Leaving money to your future self is complicated. The courts have decided that cryopreserved people are not suspended or preserved. Rather, they are irrevocably dead, and by being dead have no legal right of ownership or inheritance. These laws may change if the first cryopreserved people are resuscitated and sue for some new kind of civil rights, but that could be decades away. In the meantime, those who are not yet being preserved have spent years pondering and discussing possible methods of self-inheritance. They call it Cryonics Estate Planning and there are now at least three ways to achieve the goal.

One method requires individuals to join a foundation based in Europe that has no website and generally avoids publicity (like the piece you are reading now). It was created by wealthy cryonicists for the purpose of wealth preservation, as well as to fund both their cryopreservation and their eventual resuscitation. Meanwhile, Alcor — a more inclusive organization and one of the two main cryopreservation facilities in the United States — is in the process of developing a trust. And finally — for the use of his clients — Rudi Hoffman has created a trust.

Having written cryopreservation insurance policies for nearly a thousand people, Rudi Hoffman is well established as the world’s leading cryonics insurance provider. As a certified financial planner, he also has a longstanding record of helping people leave money to their future selves, and thus avoid the worry of being revived from cryopreservation to discover that they are penniless in wonderland.

A cryonics activist, volunteer, speaker and writer, Rudi teaches cryonic preservation to the uninitiated. “I signed up for cryopreservation back in 1994,” he said, “But being a transhumanist, it’s my hope that medical science will advance fast enough and soon enough that I never need to be cryopreserved. I look at cryonics itself as a form of insurance. If I need it, I’ve got it. It’s always good to have a backup plan.”

via Wake from Cryonics | h+ Magazine.