PPLI Keeps You Dry
Part 2
Our next series of articles will comprise an in-depth look at the five main components of our PPLI Concept Map: Professor PPLI to the Rescue.
“I understand it is raining on my assets.”
This Private Placement Life Insurance (PPLI) client is frustrated and resorts to a seemingly obtuse statement to his advisor. Let us examine his statement more closely. If something valuable would be left out in the rain, it might be spoiled. Indeed, even a PPLI asset can take a turn for the worse.
Perhaps he intended to use the colloquial phrase it is “raining on my parade.” Perhaps English is not this client’s first language, and he is using an idiom of his first language, and translating it literally into English. But whatever is occurring with the rain and his assets, IT IS NOT GOOD. At this point, it is doubtful whether PPLI is of any use to this dissatisfied client.
In the Introduction to her book on idioms, As Right As Rain, Caroline Taggart tells us:
“The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as ‘a group of words established by usage having a meaning not deductible by the meanings of the individual words’ (my italics); other dictionaries emphasize the same point. An idiom, by definition, doesn’t make sense.
Isn’t that fun? Or is it just baffling?
Take the book title, for instance. Why do we say ‘as right as rain’ rather than ‘as right as snow’ or ‘as right as wind’? Or why should rain, or any other climatic feature, be more right than anything else?
Why, to take another example, why do we cry over spilled milk rather than spilled wine or spilled tea? Why is a wild idea pie in the sky or a piece of surprising news a turn up for the books?
A foreigner learning English might well ask these questions and be told, ‘Because it just is, OK?’ That’s because a newcomer to the language has to learn the exact form of the idiom–nine times out of ten, if you translate it from one language to another, it means nothing, and if you alter a single word, it means even less. (To give someone the cold elbow? To bring home the pork? I don’t think so.) But if you want to delve deeper, to find out where these apparently absurd expressions come from in the first place, you might choose to pick up this book. It’s an attempt to reduce the bafflement, and increase the fun.”
The expression “as right as rain” offers a positive response to this phrase, but the client’s continence suggests this client is not happy. Enough of our conjectures. Let us give this client a persona.
We take the liberty of making him Gary Barnett, who “remade Manhattan’s skyline and spurred a supertall-tower boom with One57. In a faltering real estate market, he’s hoping to sell the ultra-rich on Central Park Tower,” according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Man behind Billionaires’ Row Battles to Sell the World’s Tallest Condo,” by Katherine Clarke and Candace Taylor.
Mr. Barnett could use our services, as PPLI can provide excellent structures for real estate. As we have now made him our client, let us learn something about him from the Wall Street Journal article we mentioned previously.
“A self-described “poor boy from the Lower East Side,” Mr. Barnett grew up as Gershon Swiatycki, the son of a Talmudic scholar. His entry into the world of luxury goods came in 1980s, when he met his late wife Evelyn Muller, whose father owned a diamond business. Mr. Barnett traded precious stones in Belgium for over a decade before starting to invest in U.S. real estate.
Arriving at the sales office in a dark suit with black sneakers and a bold, flowered tie that he said is “probably 20 years old,” the 63-year-old developer is an unlikely purveyor of luxury homes. An observant Jew who largely eschews the flashy trappings of the industry, Mr. Barnett lived in Queens until moving recently with his wife and children to the heavily Orthodox suburb of Monsey, N.Y., about an hour’s drive north of the city. (He keeps a one-bedroom unit at One57 to make more time for work.)
Mr. Barnett’s refusal to give up the antiquated flip phone is a source of indulgent eye-rolling from colleagues. He often avoids computers, said a person who has worked with him; instead, his assistant prints out his emails and leaves them on his desk, where he annotates them in what one employee describes as “serial-killer scrawl” for staff to decipher.
He’s “a total nerd,” real-estate agent Nikki Field said affectionately. “He’s not a New York developer personality in any way.”
Other Manhattan developers thought Mr. Barnett was crazy when he started building One57 in 2010, the depths of the real-estate downturn. And after no major U.S. lenders would back him, he turned to the Middle East to obtain financing from two of Abu Dhabi’s wealthiest investment funds.
His gamble paid off handsomely. As One57 started sales, U.S. economic growth snapped back. As one of the few new luxury condo buildings on the market, One57 attracted billionaires from Russia, China and the Middle East. The condominium is the first ever New York City building to break the $100 million threshold for a single condo.”
Frequently, at the beginning of a discussion on a topic new to them, clients have an incomplete or erroneous understanding of the topic. An advisor does well not to trample on the client’s understanding. The process of understanding frequently needs to occur in an atmosphere where there is a respectful give and take.
In the end, unless a true mutual understanding is reached no meaningful understanding has been achieved at all between the client and the advisor, and the client usually does not become a client of the advisor. In the end, what is left is a topic or concept with two different understandings, and both understandings think that they are correct.
What if one of these understandings is actually false?
There have been many discussions of late on “fake news,” what constitutes it, and how it is created, and how it affects our lives. Let us examine the strange case of Claas Relotius.
With PPLI our company is careful to discern at the beginning of a discussion whether PPLI is in fact the right planning choice for the client. By analyzing the structure thoroughly, we insure a more successful PPLI outcome at the end of the process.
Here we have an award winning journalists, who evidently was the perpetrator of “fake news” for many years. We are grateful to another Wall Street Journal article, “Germany’s Der Spiegel Says Reporter Made Up Facts,” by Bojan Pancevski and Sara Germano.
“BERLIN—Europe faces its largest journalistic scandal in years after Der Spiegel, the continent’s biggest-selling news magazine, said one of its star reporters fabricated facts in his articles for years.
The magazine’s disclosure, which came after a colleague raised concerns about a recent piece on supporters of President Trump in rural America, was made as Europe’s established media faces attacks by populist forces at home and abroad.
Claas Relotius, an award-winning journalist, resigned from the magazine last week after admitting to making up parts of his reporting in the past decade, Der Spiegel said late Wednesday.
Mr. Relotius couldn’t be reached for comment.
According to the magazine, Mr. Relotius, 33, invented characters, dialogue and events in his coverage of subjects ranging from a Guantanamo inmate who no longer wanted to leave the prison to civil war orphans in Syria.
“We must see what control mechanisms failed, whether they did or whether we were negligent,” Steffen Klusmann, who will become the magazine’s editor in chief next year, said in a video interview posted on the magazine’s website.
Major news organizations have faced a number of crises in recent decades over reporting that was later determined to contain fabricated material.
In seven years writing for Der Spiegel, Mr. Relotius became one of Germany’s most highly regarded journalists, accumulating 10 coveted awards.”
How does one protect oneself from the rain? Usually by providing some cover, like a waterproof outer garment. Let us cast life insurance into the role of this protective outer garment. In our next article, we will divulge how PPLI provides this protection. Please let us know how we can keep your assets ‘as right as rain.’ PPLI can solve a myriad of asset structuring needs. Your suggestions and comments are very welcome. Please write them at the bottom of this article or Contact Us directly.
~ by Michael Malloy, CLU TEP RFC
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