Categorized | Corporate Law

About the Author

Ryan Roberts is a corporate lawyer and advises clients in a wide variety of transactional matters, with an emphasis on startup companies, mergers and acquisitions, and securities. Visit his law firm's website.

Funding Your Buy-Sell Agreement For All Scenarios

Before you execute a buy-sell agreement, make sure that you have adequately funded it.

To adequately fund your buy-sell agreement, take each event that would trigger your buy-sell agreement (death, disability, retirement, etc.) and ask yourself “If this event happened tomorrow, would there be enough available funds to purchase the shares?”

The most common mistake I find is a buy-sell agreement that can be triggered upon disability, but the company or shareholder (depending on whether the buy-sell agreement is a stock redemption or cross-purchase plan) relies solely on life insurance to fund the agreement.

A permanent life insurance policy’s cash value takes time to build. And if a shareholder becomes disabled before the cash value builds up, such a company may be forced to fund the buy-sell agreement in non-optimal ways.

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