ESTATE PLANNING COUNCIL OF NORTHERN NEVADA

Disruption is the new normal for many planning professionals that work with their clients in a fiduciary capacity. It's difficult for any fiduciary to feel comfortable today working with clients on matters that are outside of their area of expertise. This is especially true with life settlements.

Life settlement providers, who represent the institutional investors, have noticed the lack of life settlement discussions and education coming from planning professionals and are filling this void by increasing their direct-to-consumer marketing. Such direct marketing exploits a crack in the chain of fiduciary oversight and places senior clients in a position where they might enter into a contract to sell their life insurance policy without having any advocate at the table to protect their best interests in the life settlement process. 

We will discuss multiple disruptive factors that have negatively impacted senior clients and show how we arrived at a point where so many seniors are not represented by a fiduciary when they sell their policy on the secondary market. We will review life settlement regulations, laws, and litigation that protect the rights of policy owners to sell their policies. Our main goal is to alleviate the confusion surrounding life settlements that have caused a majority of fiduciary advisors to avoid discussing life settlements with their clients. We will close with a list of Life Settlement Best Practices for Fiduciaries that will help them protect their client's best interest if their client is planning to lapse or surrender an existing life insurance policy.

Jon B. Mendelsohn, CEO of Ashar Group/Ashar SMV, is an accomplished presenter and frequent speaker at the Annual Conference of the National Association of Estate Planners and Councils (NAEPC), American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) annual ENGAGE Conference, the Association for Advanced Life Underwriting (AALU), Advisors in Philanthropy (AIP), and several other conferences and meetings nationally. Ashar Group is an independent resource that supports financial advisors and fiduciaries by providing life insurance appraisals, life settlements, and longevity services.