Buy | Sell Insurance

A Buy – Sell Agreement is a succession planning tool. It ensures the business is able to retain the stock of an owner should that owner pass away, become disabled, or leave the business.

A Buy – Sell Agreement requires appropriate levels of life insurance funding so the company can buy back a departing partner’s share of the business. Control of the company continues to reside with the remaining partner(s).

The Buy – Sell Agreement also addresses the individual family dynamics for each partner. A driving force for business owners is providing for their family today, and their children in the future. These familial demands are significant, and the financial rewards that covers family is usually tied up in the equity in the business.

Setting up well thought out Buy – Sell agreements, and funding those agreements with an adequately sized life insurance policy on each partner, provides security for the business and for the partners and their families. Simply put, it takes the uncertainty out of the future.

Per Doug McClure, CEO of Global Investment Strategies, one of the greatest vulnerabilities for a business are the owners themselves. The success of the partnership almost always depends on the relationship between and contributions of each partner. When partners cannot work together any longer, the business becomes very vulnerable. The investment and work up to that point could all be for naught.

As Doug McClure said: “Partners without a life insurance funded Buy – Sell agreement are a dream for lawyers and attorneys. There is nothing but confusion, contention, and lawsuits that result.”

TRUST BUY SELL

This buy-sell agreement uses a trust to hold the life insurance and the stock of the company. The trust is the owner of the stock with the partners as beneficiaries to their pro rata shares. At the death of a partner the trust cashes in the death benefit, retires the stock of the deceased partner, paying off the estate of the deceased partner for the value of the stock. The trust document rather than a separate buy sell agreement governs the transaction. In each type of buy sell agreement the Life insurance is purchased to fund the buy-out of the deceased partner’s shares. Life insurance is purchased with nominal annual or more frequent premiums to provide the continuity of the business (many business’s do not have the liquidity to pay off deceased partners potentially causing problems for the business and the family of the diseased owner).

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