Author: Jay Olshansky

One of the most attractive investment features of life settlements is the regularity and predictability of human survival. In fact, for those of us that study longevity for a living, it is well known that one feature of human longevity that has never changed throughout history is the age trajectory of death. This means the risk of death doubles every seven to eight years after puberty – a feature of human survival that is as constant as the sunrise every day. This constancy has been referred to as a “law of mortality”.  While investors in this asset class should be assured…

In 2009 my colleague and I were contacted by a hedge fund manager in New York City that was interested in investing in life settlements. He is well known, but I’ll protect his identity to save him the embarrassment about to be revealed. We were flown out to NYC and visited his lavish board room where there were a half dozen people in the room accompanying the hedge fund manager. They were considering an investment in a large portfolio of lives offered by a bank and wanted to know if we had insights on how long these people were likely…

Many years ago, my 85-year-old mother and 90-year-old father were at dinner with my wife and I. When the meal was over, the time arrived to decide whether to have dessert. Mom looked down at her pudgy self and declared, as she had every night for the previous seven decades, that she needed to begin watching what she was eating in order to lose weight. As a professor of public health, you might expect my first reaction would have been to agree with her. Decades ago, yes, but at her age my reaction was the exact opposite. I said Mom,…