MetLife Structured Installment sales are now available!

MetLife structured installment sales are finally available to real estate and small business investors who are selling highly appreciated capital assets and want to have a secured installment sale to defer taxes, secure future income and assist in estate and tax planning.

I’ve pasted below the MetLife Structured installment Sales pdf, which provides a fair amount of information on structured sales, or as I prefer to refer to them now, structured installment sales. Please note that at the time of this article, October 15, 2019, this program is only offered by MetLife in California, Texas, Florida and New Jersey. It is anticipated it will be available in more states in 2020.

The advantages of the Met Life Structured Installment Sale program are fairly obvious.

The first being the security of a major, highly rated life insurance company standing as the guarantor of all of the future payments. The security of MetLife promising to pay exactly as outline in the installment sale agreement can not be over stated. Let’s face it, big is good and MetLife is huge.

The second primary benefit is that MetLife uses a domestic assignment company to hold and guarantee the contractual payments. This is important to many people who are reluctant to use international assignment companies and to utilize the more complex banking arrangements at the time of sale that those deals require. With the MetLife structured installment sale, the funds say in the US and are administered by a fully owned subsidiary of MetLife , further guaranteeing the long term security of the deal.

The final key benefit of the MetLife structured installment sale program is that all payments are fixed and guaranteed, not subject to market fluctuations, reduced value or interest rate swings. The payment stream is guaranteed at onset and is fully dependable as to the nature of the payments, removing market and interest rate risks from any payment schedule you enter into.

In summary, the launch of the MetLife structured installment sale program is a game changer for those who have typically relied upon questionable 1031 Exchange programs or unsecured installment sales. In this situation you have a major company, impeccable credit, commitment to the market and top quality administration all rolled into one simple offering.

Please contact Wahlstrom & Associates, recognized experts in structured installment sales as well as being approved brokers for the Metlife structured installment sale program.

Looking to structure your divorce settlement so as to save taxes and secure income? Allstate has the answer.

Divorce is rarely a happy event but a successful divorce settlement that can bring tax advantages and greater security to both sides of the transaction is going to be great news for many divorce attorney's and their clients across the country.

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Today Allstate Financial has continued it's tradition for innovation and expansion in the structured settlement marketplace by announcing to brokers nationally that Marital Property Transfers, ie Divorce settlements, are now eligible to be structured using their Allstate International Assignments, Ltd, facility and Allstate Life Insurance Company as the funding mechanism. 

This one area of structured settlements has been for the settlement planners who specialize in structured settlements in taxable damage situations, sort of the holy grail, as it is an area of the legal profession where there is a lot of activity and financial planning stress due to the nature of the situation involved. Now with the ability to use a structure to bridge the negotiation gap between parties, the potential exists to provides real value to both sides of the transaction in money saved and security added. 

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Mark Wahlstrom, the host of The Settlement Channel will be doing a commentary on the entire process later this week on Settlement Expert TV, and at that time will provide a more detailed tutorial on how structured divorce settlements work, the tax implications and advantages for both parties if they elect to structure a divorce settlement and who might be most interested in pushing funds into future years and securing cash flows. 

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Obviously the initial benefit of a marital property transfer being funded through a structured divorce settlement is the payer gets a full tax deduction for the amount funded, while the beneficiary of the payments has a secured cash flow from a AA+ rated credit and only pays taxes on the funds in the years in which they receive them. Mark will discuss the creative application of this powerful tool in his commentary later this week. Until then to learn more about the Allstate Financial divorce structured settlement program, keep checking back to our web site and contact Mark Wahlstrom for more details. 

What is the problem with structured settlements? Has the brand been lost?

In this week's edition of Speaking of Settlements, national structured settlement expert, Mark Wahlstrom, looks at some of the empirical data on structured settlement premium written, interest rate trends and the shrinking number of life markets involved in the structured settlement market. 

Mark's conclusion is that there are some fundamental problems in the structured settlement profession as evidenced by shrinking premium, diminished interest from life markets and an aging and static based of structured settlement brokers actively engaged in the profession.

The myth that structured settlement annuity sales have shrunk as a result of lower interest rates is exposed to some degree by the fact that fixed annuity and income annuity sales for the rest of the financial planning industry are up, even at record levels, for certain lines, all with the same interest rate levels the structured settlement profession use as an excuse for poor results. It begs the question as to why structured settlement sales have declined 20% over the last two years, when the rest of the financial service industry is seeing gains of 6% to 15% on similar lines over the same time period. 

If interest rates can not be blamed for this drastic decline, then what is at work in the structured settlement profession to cause such severe drops in premium?

Mark's answer is that the structured settlement brand name has been taken over by the factoring profession and that it is now going to be almost impossible to salvage the integrity of the product in the minds of consumers. The steady drum beat and message that implies that a structured settlement is something to be rid of, ( "It's your money, and you want it NOW!") has polluted the minds of NEW potential clients to a degree that they all wonder why they would ever want to be in a structured settlement when it appears that everyone is trying to get out of one. 

Obviously, those in the structured settlement profession are well versed on the value, importance and integrity of the structured settlement, but as Mark Wahlstrom warned repeatedly over the last five years, the settlement profession's pathetic budget to counter this adverse message from factoring companies has doomed the profession to the loss of it's brand identity with potential newclients.

Listen to this week's edition of Speaking of Settlements and watch for next week's discussion on the implications of the lost battle for the mind's of new customers and what brokers, planners and attorney's can do to manage their professional practice going forward.