Structured Settlements 4Real® Blog: Structured Settlements | Settlement Planning News and John Darer Reviews

NSSTA & SSP Annual Meetings: Pedantic Pat's Droning "Emission" Contains Glaring "Omission"

Like a campy horror show, Pedantic Patrick Hindert posted an unprecedented 9th blog post about the SSP and NSSTA 2010 annual meetings. While Hindert continues to fill his commentary with factual but predictable filler and drivel like "approximately 10 people attended portions of the SSP and NSSTA meetings", HIndert continues to avoid the controversial and big news that the Society of Settlement Planners named a factoring representative to its Board of Directors.

Ironically it was Hindert who expressed (in previous blog postings going back years) that factoring is the key to structured settlement industry growth. Hindert challenged this author to a debate on the topic in May 2008 and then famously chickened out when I accepted. Now that the dog can have his day he is famously avoiding his own scent mark. See Patrick Hindert Called On The Carpet For Specifics

What I really want to know is does Hindert see having representatives of factoring entities (which buy structured settlements from tort victims) on the Board of a trade association (whose members place structured settlements) as a positive thing or negative thing? Why? Moreover, now that the industry's cherry "has been popped" as it were, is it appropriate for the credibility of the group, that the subject member on the Board is apparently the only member (and apparently can be the only member) when there may be other factoring entities who offer alternatives in educating the public.

He does a better job in posing post-conference leadership questions:

• How will SSP's and NSSTA's new leaders respond to industry changes, challenges and opportunities?
• When and how will SSP and NSSTA transition their educational strategies to embrace the Internet?
• What shared interests exist between SSP and NSSTA to improve and grow the structured settlement industry?

Relevance and Social Media Tagging

by John Darer

Could S2KM's Patrick Hindert do any more to ride the creases of a dead man's shroud?

Patrick Hindert posted an online interview with deceased Paralympian Randy Snow in August 2008.  Then when Randy Snow met his untimely demise in November 2009,  Hindert did not make a peep-not a single word to honor this extraordinary individual.

Now in reprint of Evan Krames presentation at the March 2010 ASNP meeting entitled "25 Questions to Evaluate Pooled (Special Needs) Trusts ", he creepily tags Randy Snow among several other social media tags irrelevant to the subject of the post:

• Earl S. Nesbitt, lawyer to the factoring trade association
• Robert W. Wood,  a tax attorney
• NASP, the trade association for cash now pushers and settlement purchasers
• Structured Settlement Surveys
• Structured Settlement Secondary Market 
• Single Claimant 468B
• Structured Settlement Thought Leadership Conference  (run by cash now pusher JG Wentworth)
• structured settlement credo
• NYU Law student Jeremy Babener
• Medicare Secondary Payer Rule (anyone using pooled trusts for MSAs?

I didn't write HIndert's topic sentences, he did

 " Among the strategic consequences of health care reform:

 An estimated 16 million more Medicaid participants - and therefore:

• More special needs trusts;
• More special needs attorneys;
• More structured settlement annuities payable to trustees".

Is making a stink of this "trivial and inconsequential"?  

Consider that inappropriate "kitchen sink" tagging serves to act as a drag on the speed that Internet users can find the information they seek (and it reduces the credibility of your site for search engines). For example If you were looking for something about Randy Snow and ended up with Hindert's latest posting it would be like dressing up in black tie for Phantom of the Opera

and getting a full frontal of Jason Voorhees instead

Paralympian Randy Snow Dies...Patrick Hindert Silent November 26, 2009

 

"Structured Settlement Bankruptcies" or Annuity Servicer Bankruptcies?

by John Darer CLU ChFC MSSC RSP CLTC

Patrick Hindert apparently needs better reading glasses. The Executive Director of The Settlement Services Group inexplicably refers to the potential bankruptcies of annuity service companies as "structured settlement bankruptcies" in a summary of attorney Bruce Akerly's presentation at the National Association of Settlement Purchasers (NASP) about annuity servicer bankruptcies.

What is Structured Settlement Payment Servicing and Why Is it Necessary?

A structured annuity servicer, typically a factoring company only comes into play when an annuitant wishes to sell some, but not all, of their structured settlement payment rights. Because certain life insurance companies allegedly refuse to dice or split payments the entire payment goes to the servicing company which does the "slicing an dicing", takes its cut and pays the annuitant the difference.

 
The co-author of the alleged "seminal text" on structured settlements states:

"Structured Settlement Bankruptcies - Bruce Akerly summarized his recent paper titled "The Impact of an Annuity Servicer's Bankruptcy  on the Annuitant and Structured Settlement Purchaser". Akerly's conclusions:

• "The annuity payments received by a structured settlement servicing company, as well as the servicing agreement itself, become property of the bankrupt estate"; and

• "It may be possible to draft provisions in the servicing agreement to anticipate some of the consequences of the servicing company entering bankruptcy and perhaps lessen the impact on all parties."

As the structured settlement industry has already seen with the Scott Rothstein saga, mislabeling has a potentially deleterious effect on public perception of structured settlements given that the misinformation will be indexed on the Internet for some time to come.

Note: Underline added by this author for emphasis

Watch John Darer's  3 part Legal Broadcast Network video podcast on Structured Settlement Servicing, which includes an interview with Bruce Akerly. Darer's interview with Akerly occurred in October 2009, the month prior to the presentation of the paper that Hindert commented on.