In sponsoring ACTEC meetings, what have you learned about your company and its place within the trust and estates world that you did not know before your partnership with ACTEC began?
We started our partnership with ACTEC seven years ago focusing mainly on life settlements, but soon realized that what ACTEC Fellows needed most from us revolved around life insurance valuation. Ironically, being in the life settlement business enables us to collect valuable data needed to determine the fair market value of life insurance for planning and documentation purposes. The valuation rules for traditional whole life and annual renewable term insurance products have not been updated to provide definitive guidance on how to value universal life and convertible term insurance products. As a result, we’ve developed an alternative valuation, based on the IRS willing buyer/willing seller definition of FMV, by analyzing real-time results in the secondary market. Common uses of our FMV valuation include an alternative to form 712, donations of life insurance to charity, business succession planning, trust to trust transfers, ILIT reviews, and unwinding split dollar/premium finance structures.