Americans are living longer, but their retirement funds are not. With greater financial instability comes a need for quick income, and many seniors are taking advantage of life settlements—the sale of a life insurance policy to a third party in exchange for a lump sum greater than the value of the surrender value but less than its death benefit. It’s a helpful solution for seniors, but also a profitable asset for investors. Investing in life settlements provides investors greater diversification with low risk.
The legality of investing in life settlements traces back to a 1911 Supreme Court decision, Grigsby vs Russell, 222 U.S. 149. To pay for an operation, a patient sold his life insurance policy, plus payment for remaining premiums, to A.H. Grigsby, the doctor. The patient died a year later.
Grigsby tried to collect the benefits, but an executor of the patient’s estate challenged this. The grounds were that the policy had previously been sold to a third party (Grigsby) who had no insurable interest in the insured.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Grigsby and held that anyone who owns a life insurance policy has a right to:
Grigsby created an alternative asset class, though one that remained very quiet and largely unknown outside of discrete, private transactions for the better part of a century.
Fast forward to the 1980s to the start of the AIDS epidemic. Shorter lifespans and expensive treatments created a secondary market for life insurance policies being sold to brokers for a lump sum. In turn, these brokers resold the policies to investors.
At this time, there was little governmental regulation overseeing these transactions, known as “viatical settlements.” Furthermore, because new treatments were being developed to combat the AIDS virus, assumptions about estimated life expectancies of the insured were often incorrect. Investment returns suffered and litigation ensued.
The dust started to settle in the 1990s and new legislation was enacted to help create tighter regulatory oversight. Policy portfolios were bundled together and sold in a process called “securitization.” These developments led to a renewed interest in this asset class, now commonly referred to as “senior life settlements” or the “longevity-linked asset class”.
Asset management firm Conning reported in 2018 that $200 billion in life insurance will be lapsed or surrendered annually through 2027–showing the potential growth for life settlements. And in 2019, Conning predicted continued growth in the market. Steve Weberson, Head of Insurance Research at Conning, stated, “The increased supply of investors will have a larger number of policies to select from because of the increasing number of retiring baby boomers. Additionally, the broad regulatory environment surrounding life settlements has stabilized and an increasing supply of settled policies supports the continued development of the tertiary market.”
This asset class has been the subject of many studies by research firms and business schools. The London Business School found that investing in life settlements can provide a return of more than four times the policy’s cash surrender value.
Here are some reasons investors may look toward investing in life settlements.
But investing in life settlements can also come with risks, especially if one invests in an individual life settlement rather than a life settlement investment fund. Funds provide investors with access to more diversified policies. Additionally, investing in a life settlement requires the investor to pay the policy’s premium over the course of the senior’s life. So, the investment may be less profitable if the person lives longer than expected.
Life settlements have not always been the best investment, but they’ve evolved over time. Throughout the last few decades, investing in life settlements has proven to be reliable and lucrative.
©All Rights Reserved. August, 2020. DailyDAC™, LLC d/b/a/ Financial Poise™
Gary Opp is the owner of Redwood Alternative Investments and is a well-respected estate planning specialist/investment advisor with 18 years of experience. Share this article:
Session expired
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.
Want to know about investing in life Settlements
Gary, Would love to hear more about how you see the Life Settlement space growing in the coming years and the measures you see the industry needing to take for large scale adoption on both a retail investor and institutional side.