“Because it’s not working for you, and it drives me crazy.”

“I prefer to work for it.” That was an equation I could understand: Work. Pay. Deposit. Easy math. “Let it go, Luce. How short-term are we talking?”

“You do know you’re literally leaving money on the table.”

I eyed the half-gone muffin and considered another. “Well, now you’re just making me feel stupid.”

She was quiet on her end.

“Viatical settlements,” I prodded gently. “Short-term?”

I took the long sigh on her end as her letting my money buffoonery go. “Short-term. Up to a year, no more than three, I guess, in order to see some kind of return.”

“How lucrative is something like this for the investor?”

“It’s decent. They’re paying the premiums on the policy, of course, as the new holders, but there’s no real risk, the person’s gonna die. It’s only a question of when. The market should be such a sure thing.”

“I read up on this a little,” I said. “A deal like this gets split a lot of different ways, a lot of things could go wrong, but run it down for me. Give me an example.”

She hummed for a couple seconds. “Okay, let’s say you have a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Then you find out you’re dying of something and have to finance your care, or you want to live it up while you can. You’ve got no other assets, so you sell the only thing you have that’s worth anything.”

“My insurance policy,” I said.

“Right. You’re probably looking to get about eighty thousand of that to do whatever with. An investor would probably pay a little more than you’re getting, eighty-eight thousand maybe, for a guaranteed return of the full death benefit when you go.”

I pulled a face. Lucy’s explanation smelled an awful lot like death speculating. “Where does the rest of the money go?”

“I was getting to that. The rest goes to a broker who sets up the whole thing. I guess you could look at it like a commission. There’s paperwork to file, legal and other expenses to cover. On this hundred-thousand-dollar policy, the broker might pull in seven or eight thousand, easy. Not bad for shuffling paper around. In a year’s time, a smart investor could see a return of about thirteen or fourteen percent on his eighty-eight-thousand-dollar pay down. Though, of course, that return percentage decreases the longer they hold the policy.”

“You mean the longer the person doesn’t die,” I said.

“Basically, but like I said, these settlements are meant to be short-term. Your investment returns decrease over time. Your second year in, you might only see a return of six percent. The third year—if things drag on that long—less than that, since you’re maintaining the policy the whole time.”