Rob Haynie: There Are No More Excuses – What LISA’s 2025 Market Data Means for Every Retirement Conversation
“For more than three decades, our industry has struggled to make enough people aware of a planning tool that routinely allows policyowners to receive a significant multiple of their cash surrender value — if their policy even carries surrender value at all. For years, policyowners and the professionals who advise them have overlooked one of the most valuable assets many seniors own: their life insurance policy. Too often, coverage is surrendered or allowed to lapse without anyone exploring the alternatives. LISA’s 2025 market data makes the cost of that silence impossible to ignore. In 2025, LISA member companies paid consumers $626.6 million for unwanted, unneeded, or unaffordable policies — on average nearly nine times the cash surrender value. The data has, in my view, ended the era of excuses.”
Rob Haynie provides commentary on LISA’s 2025 market data and what it means for advisors, fiduciaries, and retirement professionals as longevity, income uncertainty, and long-term care exposure become unavoidable parts of every serious retirement planning conversation.
Rob, often referred to as Mr. Life Settlements, has been a major influence on the evolution of the life settlement industry during his thirty-two-year career of proactive involvement. Not only has he been directly involved in negotiating and settling several thousand contracts, he is also the Managing Director of Life Insurance Settlements, inc., and presently serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Life Insurance Settlement Association (LISA) and is a charter member of the Association’s PPC committee, which is charged with the regulatory and legislative activities of the industry. On October the 24th, 2024, he recently was the recipient of the prestigious Alan H. Buerger Leadership Award. The AHB Leadership award honors industry leaders who have made significant contributions to support the development and growth of LISA and the life settlement marketplace. On November the 19th, 2024, he was also named one of the Finseca/NAILBA’s ID Twenty Award recipients that honor independent distribution’s most courageous innovators and visionaries, who have made important contributions to the insurance profession. Additionally, he has served on both the Customer Advisory Board (CAB) of ITM/TwentyFirst Services (now Longevity Holdings) and the Advisory Board of the Insurance Studies Institute (ISI). He currently serves on the Forbes Councils as well as the Board of The Retirement Genius and InsMark, LLC’s Advanced Consulting Group (ACG). He was named one of the top 10 most influential people in the life settlement industry worldwide. Mr. Haynie, an Alumnus of Florida State University, currently holds a Life Agent License with Viatical Settlement Broker Appointment for LIS and has spoken at almost every life settlement industry meeting or conference, published articles on the subject on multiple continents and has given many educational webinars as well as been recently featured on multiple podcasts as well as co-hosting his own with Mark Mrky entitled UNLOCKING THE HIDDEN VALUE OF YOUR LIFE INSURANCE, which is the first and only podcast dealing exclusively with the issues surrounding the life settlement marketplace
Here is his commentary:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
For more than three decades, our industry has struggled to make enough people aware of a planning tool that routinely allows policyowners to receive a significant multiple of their cash surrender value — if their policy even carries surrender value at all. For years, policyowners and the professionals who advise them have overlooked one of the most valuable assets many seniors own: their life insurance policy. Too often, coverage is surrendered or allowed to lapse without anyone exploring the alternatives. LISA’s 2025 market data makes the cost of that silence impossible to ignore. In 2025, LISA member companies paid consumers $626.6 million for unwanted, unneeded, or unaffordable policies — on average nearly nine times the cash surrender value. The data has, in my view, ended the era of excuses.
COMMENT:
THE NUMBERS THAT ENDED THE EXCUSES
The latest market data from LISA demonstrates why life settlements deserve a place in every retirement and financial-planning conversation. In 2025 alone, LISA member companies paid consumers $626.6 million for life insurance policies they no longer wanted, needed, or could afford. Had those same policyowners simply surrendered their coverage back to the issuing carrier, they would have received a small fraction of that amount.
A fraction — you’re probably wondering what that means in practice. Here is the most compelling statistic in the entire report. Consumers who sold their policies through a LISA member received, on average, nearly nine times more than their insurance company’s cash surrender offer. Let me repeat that: nine times more. The average surrender value was just $24,360, while the average life settlement payment reached $212,066. For many families, that difference can meaningfully improve retirement security, help cover healthcare costs, reduce debt, fund the modifications a primary residence needs so an owner can age in place, or simply provide breathing room and financial flexibility.
THE VALUE GAP IS WIDENING — NOT NARROWING
What makes the 2025 data even more pointed is the direction of travel. The roughly nine-to-one advantage did not appear because settlement prices spiked; it widened in large part because surrender values are shrinking. According to LISA, the average cash surrender value offered by insurers fell 27% in a single year — from $33,493 in 2024 to $24,360 in 2025. In other words, the carrier’s alternative is getting worse for consumers at the very moment the secondary market is delivering more. In 2025, the life settlement option returned an estimated $554.6 million more to policyowners than surrender would have. When the “safe” default option pays less each year, the duty to mention the alternative only grows heavier.
A MATURING MARKET WITH A FIVE-YEAR TRACK RECORD
This is not a niche or experimental corner of finance. The market continues to grow. In 2025, LISA members completed 2,955 life settlement transactions, an increase of nearly 10% over the prior year. That growth reflects rising awareness among both consumers and financial professionals that life insurance is an asset with value well beyond its death benefit.
The longer view is just as persuasive. Between 2021 and 2025, LISA members paid consumers approximately $3.6 billion for unwanted life insurance — roughly $3 billion more than those same policyowners would have received through surrender. Nearly 15,000 policies were purchased over that period representing more than $20 billion in face value. Across those five years, the multiple consumers received over surrender has ranged from roughly five times to nearly nine times, and the trend line has bent steadily upward. This is a mature, regulated marketplace with a consistent, documented record of delivering value.
THE SCALE OF WHAT IS BEING LEFT ON THE TABLE
Now set that record against the size of the problem it could be solving. The life settlement marketplace has lately been purchasing somewhere in the range of $3 to $4 billion of face value a year. Contrast that with the roughly $112 billion in life insurance face value that is lapsed or surrendered every year by Americans age 65 and older. I am not suggesting that all $112 billion would have qualified as a life settlement candidate — it would not. But I promise you that $20 to $25 billion of it would have qualified, if not this year then somewhere down the road, had those policyowners simply been properly informed of their options. Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars in real value evaporate when policies are surrendered or lapsed without anyone first checking the secondary market.
Life insurance is often one of the largest assets a senior owns, yet it is treated as the one asset that may only ever be handed back to the company that issued it, at whatever price that company cares to offer. We would never accept that logic for a home, a brokerage account, or a business interest. The 2025 data is the strongest evidence yet that we should stop accepting it for life insurance. For years I have publicly taken my share of the blame for how slowly our industry has moved on this. Our industry is established and here to stay; it is time we started talking from a position of strength. With that in mind, here are my takeaways.
- Sell-it-later belongs in the sales conversation, not just the exit conversation. Carriers and the agents who represent them should tell prospective clients, at the point of sale, that a policy can be sold later if it is no longer wanted, needed, or affordable. Far from discouraging the purchase, that knowledge may be the very reason a client signs on the spot. Think about how we treat every other major asset. No one buys a home believing they are locked in forever; they buy knowing that if circumstances change, the property can be sold, downsized, or borrowed against — and that built-in exit is part of what makes the purchase rational. Life insurance has too often been sold as the opposite: an all-or-nothing proposition in which you either pay premiums indefinitely or walk away for pennies at surrender. The secondary market changes that arithmetic. It turns a policy from a potential sunk cost into an asset with genuine liquidity. An agent who explains that optionality up front is not undermining the sale — he is strengthening it, and very likely improving the odds the policy stays on the books. It works in real estate; there is no good reason it should not work in life insurance.
- The era of pretending is over — and the fiduciary risk of pretending is rising. For too long, some carriers, broker-dealers, and others in positions of influence have acted as though they had never heard of life settlements — or worse, have warned or threatened to terminate agents who so much as utter the words. That practice harms consumers directly, and in a roundabout way it harms the very institutions that engage in it. As my good friend Brian Casey has observed, many advisors do not realize this is even an option, and failing to present it could raise questions about their fiduciary responsibility; the industry has not yet seen widespread litigation on that point, but the winds are shifting, especially toward stronger consumer protections for senior populations. A growing number of states now require carriers to notify policyowners of alternatives to lapse and surrender, the secondary market among them, and best-interest standards continue to expand the advisor’s affirmative duty to disclose material options. Suppressing the conversation is no longer merely poor ethics; it is becoming poor risk management. Before a policy is surrendered or allowed to lapse, the policyowner deserves to know its true market value.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The message is clear. Whether you are a consumer weighing your options or a professional serving clients, life settlements can no longer be ignored. The data speaks for itself: nearly nine times the surrender value, $626.6 million returned to consumers in a single year, $3.6 billion over five, and a carrier alternative that is paying less with each passing year. It bears repeating — there are no more excuses.
HOPE THIS HELPS YOU HELP OTHERS MAKE A POSITIVE DIFFERENCE
~ Rob Haynie
CITE:
LISI Estate Planning Newsletter #3305 (June 15, 2026) at http://www.
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