Greetings, welcome to Primerica's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Nicole Russell, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin. Thank you, Maria, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Primerica's first quarter earnings call. A copy of our earnings press release, along with materials relevant to today's call, are posted on the investor relations section of our website. Joining our call today are our Chief Executive Officer, Glenn Williams, and our Chief Financial Officer, Alison Rand. Glenn and Alison will deliver prepared remarks, and then we'll open the call up for your questions. During our call, some of our comments may contain forward-looking statements in accordance with the safe harbor provisions of the Securities Litigation Reform Act. The company assumes no obligations to update these statements to reflect new information. We refer you to our most recent Form 10-K filing, as may be modified by subsequent Forms 10-Q, for a list of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to materially differ from those expressed or implied. We will also reference certain non-GAAP measures, which we believe provide additional insight into the company's operations. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the respective GAAP numbers are included at the end of our earnings press release and available on our investor relations website. I would now like to turn the call over to Glenn. Thank you, Nicole. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We're encouraged by our first quarter performance, reflecting positive results from our focus on growing distribution capabilities and improving the attractiveness of our products. Our unique ability to meet the financial needs of middle-income families is attracting more people to our entrepreneurial opportunity. These dynamics have created momentum in recruiting and licensing, resulting in sales force growth. In addition, both our clients and our sales force have reacted positively to our new series of term life products, leading to growth in sales. Although securities market conditions continue to create resistance to growth in our ISP sales, clients' desire for financial guidance remains strong. Starting with a quick recap of our financial results, adjusted operating revenues of $695 million remain largely unchanged year-over-year, while adjusted net operating income of $129 million grew 10%. These results reflect the continued growth in term life premiums, the benefit of higher interest rates on net investment income, and our progress in improving the results of our senior health business. The quarter was also negatively impacted by persistent inflation and continued equity market volatility that pressured ISP and term life sales and led to a modest increase in policy lapses. On the capital deployment front, we repurchased $85 million of our common stock and paid $24 million in regular dividends during the first quarter. Given the strength of our capital and liquidity positions, we believe we will meet our targeted repurchases for the year of $375 million. Recognizing the importance of growing the sales force, both the home office and field leadership teams are focused on its key components, recruiting and licensing. Starting with recruiting, momentum remains solid with approximately 93,500 individuals joining Primerica during the first quarter. This represents a 10% increase over the prior year period. Licensing results were similarly strong with more than 11,000 new life license reps added during the quarter, which represents an 11% increase year-over-year. We ended the quarter with 136,430 life license reps, which was slightly elevated due to delays in processing about 800 terminations by the state of Florida. These terminations should all be processed during the second quarter. We continue to believe that we can grow the sales force around 3% in 2023. Turning next to our production results, the new term life insurance products introduced last fall have given the sales force an increased degree of enthusiasm. By introducing more rate classes, we're able to better match risk and price, which allows our clients to potentially purchase more insurance coverage. During the quarter, we issued 84,500 new life insurance policies, which represents an increase of nearly 2% year-over-year after adjusting the prior year figure to reflect a one life per policy issued equivalent. Productivity at 0.21 policies per life license rep per month remained in our historical range of 0.20-0.24. In addition to issued policies, we believe estimated annualized issued term life premiums and issued term life face amounts provide useful information about our term life business. These figures capture the amount of protection of newly issued policies as well as additions to coverage on in force policies. During the quarter, estimated annualized issued term life premiums were $89 million, up 6%, while newly issued face amount of $28.1 billion grew 14% year-over-year. Looking ahead, we believe the high cost of living will moderate sales growth in the near term, but we believe full-year growth in issued policies will be in the mid-single digit range. Turning to the investment and saving product segment. Sales of $2.3 billion declined 25% compared to the first quarter of 2022, which was our largest sales quarter ever. Client asset values ended the quarter at $87.6 billion, up around 4% since the beginning of the year, but down 6% versus March 31, 2022. Volatility in the equity market continues to negatively impact large transactions such as rollovers. However, we see very little change in the number of automatic monthly investment transactions or redemption activity. Net inflows during the quarter were $642 million. We believe that our clients continued focus on long-term goals, along with systematic monthly investing, sets Primerica apart from many other distributors. Considering the current market environment, we expect second quarter ISP sales could decline as much as 7%-10% year-over-year, but ongoing uncertainty makes it difficult to project too much further ahead. We turn now to our Senior Health business. Results for the quarter were in line with our expectations and our efforts to maintain controlled growth during the fourth quarter's AEP and this quarter's OEP. Progress has been made on our goal of improving unit economics. First quarter LTV to CAC ratio was 1.1. As we discussed last quarter, we deliberately entered the 2022 enrollment and the 2023 renewal periods with about half the number of agents compared to the previous year, and a focus on agent productivity. The early results of these efforts are encouraging. We are also pleased that leads sourced by Senior Health certified Primerica representatives represented 10% of first quarter sales volume, up from 4% last year. These leads remain attractive in terms of conversion rates and early indications of more favorable persistency. We're encouraged by the progress of the e-TeleQuote team over the last three quarters. It is clear that we need to keep working towards scaling the business, and we will continue to evaluate how best to do so. While it's still early, our efforts to grow judiciously are consistent with our plan to achieve adequate volume, supported by reasonable and growing margins, while controlling the capital required by the business. I'm proud of the Primerica team and the steady progress we are making at executing against our plan to grow the size of the sales force. It's clear that middle-income families need help navigating these uncertain times. The current economic conditions underscore the important role that Primerica representatives play in providing education and guidance to their clients, keeping them focused on the future and working toward financial independence. I'll ask Alison to add her comments. Thank you, Glenn. Good morning, everyone. A quick housekeeping item to mention before I review our first quarter financial results. Last Tuesday, we filed a Form 8-K, which provided financial results for the year ended December 2021 and for each quarter of 2022 under the new accounting standard for long duration targeted improvements, or LDTI. The revised results also recognize all net investment income in the corporate and other segment. An adjusted version of our fourth quarter 2022 financial supplement can be found on the Financial Info tab of our investor relations website. Starting with the Term Life segment, operating revenues of $421 million during the quarter increased 3% year-over-year, and pre-tax operating income of $127 million increased 7% compared to the first quarter of 2022. The pre-tax operating margin during the quarter was 21.4% versus 21.2% in the prior year period. Adjusted direct premiums grew 6% year-over-year in the first quarter in line with expectations. Assuming the mid-single-digit sales growth Glenn discussed earlier, combined with the size and stability of our in-force premium base, we expect ADP growth of around 6% to continue for the remainder of 2023. The DAC amortization ratio for the quarter was 11.8% versus 11.7% in the prior year period. As discussed in the last earnings call, we expect the DAC ratio under LDTI to be very stable from period to period at around 12% each quarter. Moving to the benefit and claims ratio, the first quarter ratio was 58.7% compared to 58.9% in the prior year period, reflecting the stability we expected from LDTI. The benefit and claims ratio came in slightly higher than the preliminary estimate of around 58% we provided during our fourth quarter earnings call. As we finalized all of our processes related to the adoption of LDTI, we found a modification that was needed to properly reflect the disability incident rate under our Waiver of Premium Rider. Since the liability is for future waived policy premium versus a death benefit, it is not subject to YRT reinsurance and therefore led to a disproportionate increase in the benefit and claims ratio. We expect the full year 2023 benefit and claims ratio to generally be in line with first quarter results. With the adoption of LDTI, the benefits and claims ratio now includes the future policy benefit remeasurement gain loss. This line item reflects the cumulative effect of assumption changes and experience variances back to the latter of the 1/1/2021 transition date or the policy issue date on the current period beginning reserve balance. Given our proximity to the transition date, in the near term, assumption changes and experience variances will largely be recognized in future periods by unlocking the rate at which benefit reserves are accrued. Given the weighted average duration of our future policy benefit liability, we should reach a steady state of about 50% of assumption changes and experience variances being reflected in the period of occurrence in 2028 or 2029. The remeasurement gain loss was de minimis in the first quarter as claims experience for the period was largely in line with LDTI assumptions. While persistency deteriorated slightly versus pre-pandemic levels, it does not have a significant impact on the net liability for future policy benefits, nor as we discussed last quarter, does it have a significant impact on DAC under LDTI. If current trends continue, we do not anticipate any meaningful revisions when we perform our annual unlocking of reserve assumptions in the third quarter. The insurance expense ratio was slightly higher in Q1 than we expect it to be for the remainder of the year. Given this and the consistency in the DAC and benefits and claims ratios from period to period, we expect the full year life margin to be near 22%. Turning next to the investment and savings product segment. First quarter operating revenues of $210 million declined 13% compared to the same period last year, while pre-tax operating income of $56 million declined 16%. Market volatility continues to put downward pressure on both sales and client asset values. Year-over-year revenue generating sales declined 29%, which led to a 30% decline in sales-based revenues and commission expenses. Asset-based revenues, which benefited from a mix shift towards products on which we earn higher asset-based fees, such as managed accounts and mutual fund sales under the PD model in Canada, declined 1% year-over-year, while average client asset values declined 8%. Asset-based commission expenses were generally aligned with asset-based revenues after excluding revenues from segregated funds for which asset-based expenses are recognized as insurance commissions and DAC amortization. Continuing with results in our senior health segment. As Glenn mentioned earlier, we continue to make progress building a sound senior health business and our profitability metrics are improving. LTVs for approved policies for the quarter were $856, generally in line with expectations. Both the chargeback rate on business sold during the fourth quarter AEP and the renewal rate for the January 1st annual renewal cycle were in line with our revenue assumptions, and therefore we did not need to recognize a negative revenue tail adjustment this quarter. We believe this is indicative of both our significant progress in refining our revenue recognition model as well as a stabilization of churn trends in the marketplace. CAC per approved policy improved to $814 during the quarter, reflecting our progress in managing leads selectively and efficiently. Looking ahead, we expect normal seasonality to pressure CAC as there is a limited number of seniors who can enroll in Medicare during the second and third quarters. We expect to incur modest losses in the second and third quarters and a profit in fourth quarter during AEP. On a full year basis, we expect segment losses to be around in the $5 million range. Currently, we do not expect that the senior health business will require capital from the holding company to fund operations in 2023. The corporate and other distributed product segment adjusted loss of $11 million decreased three and a half million dollars year-over-year. The improvement was driven by significantly higher net investment income, partly offset by its lower mortgage loan sales and volatility in a small block of discontinued business in our New York subsidiary. Adjusted net investment income increased $10 million compared to the prior year period. Growth in the portfolio contributed to the increase in NII, but the rise in interest rates over the last year have been the primary driver. We've seen both steadily rising average book yields in our fixed maturity portfolio, as well as rising yields for our cash and money market balances, which alone added $5 million to NII in the quarter year-over-year. If the rate environment stays consistent, we expect NII to be around $32 million per quarter for the remainder of 2023. On a year-over-year basis, we expect NII to be favorable by about $9 million in 2Q and continue to be favorable for the remainder of the year, but to a lessened extent given the rise in rates began last year. As we've noted in the past, given the nature of our business, we are not constrained by our liability duration in choosing how best to invest our portfolio. We are focused on optimizing our income while also maintaining a conservative portfolio that does not subject us to undue risk. On a regular basis, we review the relative value of purchase opportunities in various asset classes and durations, looking for those that we feel pay us for the risk. The inversion of the yield curve has allowed us to invest at attractive levels without extending duration. Our new money rate of almost 5.6% is up more than 200 basis points compared to the first quarter of 2022, while the average duration of purchases remains relatively short at four point three years. Commercial real estate has received a lot of attention recently, particularly office space. We do not write any direct mortgages and most of our exposure is in syndicated CMBS and publicly traded REITs, which combined account for about 8% of our portfolio. Office space exposure is estimated to be less than 3% of the portfolio. With respect to our CMBS holdings, our average rating is AA-, with a weighted average loan to value of about 60% and weighted average debt service coverage of 2.4 times. Our public bond issued REIT have an average rating of BBB+. There's also been a lot of attention paid to stress in the regional banking sector. With respect to regional banks, we have limited exposure at around $25 million, or less than 1% of the portfolio, with an average rating of BBB+. We hold a small position, less than $3 million, in Silicon Valley's bank bonds, on which we took a $2 million credit impairment during the quarter. We continually review our holdings and have not identified any other issues that would prompt us to record any impairment. Moving to consolidated insurance and other operating expenses, the total incurred for the quarter of $151 million increased $6 million or 4% versus the prior year period. We experienced higher technology spend during the quarter after a slower start last year and are also seeing higher employee and growth-related costs that are in line with the overall growth in the business. The year-over-year comparison benefited from lower sales force leadership event costs in the current period as we resumed our typical 2 per year event cadence after holding an additional event in 2022. Looking ahead, we expect second quarter insurance and other operating expenses to increase 2%-3% year-over-year, driven by continued growth in the business, technology spend and employee-related costs. We will also benefit from $5 million lower costs associated with sales force leadership events due to the convention in the prior year. We remain on pace for a full-year insurance and other operating expense growth rate of 4%-5%. Liquidity at the holding company remains strong, with invested assets and cash of $330 million, and Primerica Life's statutory risk-based capital ratio is estimated to be 455% as of March 31, 2023. We continue to take ordinary dividends from Primerica Life as available and plan to modestly reduce our RBC over time. With that, operator, I'll open the line up for calls, for questions. Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from Dan Bergman with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question. Morning, guys. Thanks. Good morning. I guess to start just with recruiting continuing to be strong this quarter, I just want to see if you give any more color on the key drivers of the strength? You know, were there any incentives or discounted fee offers in place during the quarter? Just any thoughts, you know, given the macroeconomic backdrop on the outlook for recruiting over the remainder of the year? Yeah, Dan, it was a good recruiting quarter. There were no incentives used during the quarter, so it was a good fundamentally sound growth in the quarter that we're very pleased with. What we're seeing is that we're, you know, we're getting better at telling our story. There's a better story to tell, you know, with our success as we go forward. We just see the desire in a disrupted kind of employment dynamic around us of people looking for alternatives, looking for additional part-time income to offset the higher cost of living or looking for alternative career paths. We just believe that right now we've got a very appealing story which is being well-received. There was no artificial stimulus used in the first quarter. Got it. Other than we generally, I will modify that. We generally kick off the year in January with and we've done that every year, so the comparisons are equal. We do have a discount in January to start the year, but it was identical to what was used in the same month last year. Got it. Makes sense. Thanks. Then maybe just one on the term life business. It sounded like persistency was modestly unfavorable versus pre-pandemic levels this quarter. I just wanted to see if there's any more color you could give on, you know, the drivers and how different cohorts of policies are behaving, and anything you can quantify in terms of the magnitude of the change in the lapse rate, versus, you know, either pre-pandemic levels or where it had been in recent quarters. Thanks. Yeah, I'll take that one. Really, it's best to look at it in line with pre-pandemic because obviously during COVID, we were dealing with some very unusual and results that we did not anticipate would stay in place forever. Looking at it versus pre-pandemic, I'd say there's been a slight deterioration. I'd say especially in most years, it's less than 5%, so you're not talking about anything significant. The interesting thing is we are seeing it across all durations, and that to me indicates that it's more economy driven than anything else. You know, the last time we really saw it across all durations, putting aside COVID, was back in 2008 during the financial crisis, during that period. Nothing to that level of extreme, just a little bit of a downtick and something we're keeping our eyes on. Really, that's probably the best I can provide right now. Got it. It's really helpful. Thank you. Our next question comes from Wilma Burdis with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question. Good morning, Wilma. Hey, good morning. The term life policy count grew 2%, but the face amount of new business grew 14%. Could you talk a little bit about why the face amount grew so much more quickly and give us some insight into which metric gives us better insight into the adjusted direct premium growth? Yeah. Wilma, I'd be happy to do that. What we attempted to do because we've changed the basis, you know, normally we've tracked the number of issued policies, but by changing the way we issue those policies to one life per policy rather than, on occasion, multiple lives per policy in the past, even though we changed the historical numbers to try to adjust for that, we realized that we were getting a little noise in that comparison. We wanted to give more color. Traditionally, you have a policy count in our industry as one way of tracking. Premium is another way of tracking, and face amount is another way of tracking. They obviously relate to each other. As we made the change to our products, as we anticipated more accurately pricing the product and the risk gives our clients an opportunity to be able to increase their purchase. Their dollar goes further when we've more correctly priced good risk, and your dollar doesn't go quite as far when we more correctly price bad risk. Some rates went up and some went down. Ultimately, people are getting more for their money in a lot of cases and are often buying a little more. We felt like tracking all three of those numbers gave the outside world a better opportunity to kind of triangulate how our life business was moving. The other, you know, the others are estimate, the new premium use and face amount use. We have to make some estimates in that, but it gives you a little more color around that, and I think it's, it gives you a better flavor of our business. We did anticipate that when we changed the product, we would have this kind of movement, so it's clearly what we expected. As I said, we're pleased with the excitement around the new product line in our sales force. I think that's part of what's giving us some sales momentum in this high cost economy, inflationary economy, high cost of living that Allison was just describing. We're overcoming that resistance on sales and continuing to grow sales, which I think a lot of that goes to the excitement around the new product set. One thing I would add is the 2% is our best estimate. I mean, we, you know, we used to sell multiple lives per policy, and now it's a single adult life per policy. We did a calculation to estimate what we thought that meant it looked like last year. Really, the 2% is not necessarily indicative of the activity that's happening day-to-day in our sales force right now. When you look at the other two metrics with it, we thought you'd get a fuller picture. The other important thing is that the other two metrics, both annualized issued premium and face amount, include things like add-on riders or IBR riders. It's not just the new business, it's what we're increasing the book of business for. Just a couple of other things, we just felt like given the nuance in the definition year-over-year on issued policies, some more color was necessary. Thank you. Just on Senior Health, should we expect Primerica to put any capital into that in 2024? Also, if you could just talk a little bit about. sorry? 2024. Keep going. I didn't write that down. Oh, oh, yeah. If you could just talk a little bit about the, how many leads are coming from the life licensed reps to the Senior Health licensed reps? Yeah. I think what we've said thus far is we won't need to put any capital in for 2023. In 2024, we'll use up the remainder of the net operating loss carryforward that we have. Once that's done, there will probably be some need for capital. That being said, we won't position ourselves to be putting anything significant into the business until we're comfortable with the profitability metrics of the business and are comfortable with our game plan going forward. I think at this point, with regard to 2024, we should put that on hold until we continue to work through our operating plans. The one thing I can say is we will definitely limit whatever capital is needed. We will continue to grow the business judiciously, we will only put capital in to the extent that we feel like we can create a profitable book of business that will ultimately become cash generating. Obviously, just like life insurance, if we do try to grow the business, there's a lot more that goes out up front than you get in, you know, in the first year. There would be some strain, but again, we will maintain good control over whatever those levels will be. I think that's when we should wait until later in the year to discuss further. I'll just quickly talk about this other... I think an important thing to note is it doesn't have to be a life licensed representative on our side to be able to participate in this program, and that's one of the attractive things, is that people who are going through the process of getting a life license can actually get involved with this, can get certified to sell Senior Health, or to refer Senior Health, excuse me. Then specifically, I think what Glenn said was we're about 10% we were 10% during AEP. Of sales, yeah. Our leads accounted for about 10% of the sales. Again, you know, we are seeing those leads are higher quality than what can be generated just out from the, you know, from the public lead sources. We're encouraged by that growth, but we recognize that's a business that needs to have multiple sources of leads, and so we're continuing to grow on all fronts. Thank you. Certainly. Our next question comes from Ryan Krueger with KBW. Please proceed with your question. Morning, Ryan. Hey, good morning. I had a couple of related follow-ups. First was on lapses. When lapses deviate from your expectations under LDTI, is the primary way that will come through results? Will that come through remeasurement gains and losses or annual assumption updates? I know it doesn't come through DAC anymore. Yeah, it's interesting. It's pretty unlikely it's going to come through anywhere that you'll notice it. You're right, where we used to see it extensively with DAC, and as I explained last quarter, we're not going to see that anymore. Even if you remember when we were talking during COVID, we used to have a very large impact from DAC with a much smaller offset in reserves. The reason you don't see a whole lot of impact in reserves is because a lapse decreases both the expected future premiums you're going to get and the expected future benefits. You know, both components go down, so net-net, the liability doesn't change all that much. It would have to be a very dramatic change for us to see something come through. Really what you're seeing in remeasurement gain loss is going to largely be claims activity. Okay, got it. Then can you comment on your subsidiary dividend expectations from the life subs? I guess either this year but also just what you think a reasonable annual amount would be? Yeah. One of the reasons the RBC has crept up a little bit over time is because, you know, the way the rules work is it's the greater of 10% of surplus or the gain from operations before realized gains and losses from the prior year. Our 2021 statutory gain from operations, which is the higher of the two metrics, was $257 million because in 2021 we were still having significant claim payments from COVID. Our statutory earnings were a little bit lower, which constrained what we took out in 2022. Looking at 2023, the equivalent number or for 2022 of gain from operations is $446 million. Without asking for an extraordinary dividend, we have the ability to take $446 million out of Primerica Life, in addition to what we would take from the Canadian operation and our non-life operations. We can always ask for an extraordinary dividend, but we really see no need to do so at the current time. I think looking at the $257 versus the $446 gives you some feeling of how much more we're going to be able to take out from subsidiaries year-over-year. The one thing to keep in mind is on the non-life side, you know, depending on how the markets go, we could continue to see some strain on what we can take out from our ISP business. Understood. Thanks a lot. Our next question comes from Andrew Kligerman with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question. Morning, Andrew. Hey, good morning. Morning. Nice to talk to you. Shifting over to senior health again. I think Alison talked about a 5% full year net loss. Given, you know, your efforts and the terrific progress that you've made over the prior year, do you think a line of profitability is in sight for 2024? Another thought on that topic is, have you considered layering in other products, maybe term life onto the platform to help scale it? I'll start, and then Glenn can fill in with some of the product discussion. Just to be clear, it wasn't 5%, it was a $5 million. I thought I said five. Yeah. Just so you know, obviously it's early in the year. We'll continue to update that figure as the year goes by. My rationale in giving you that number is just to frame up that we're not expecting much of an ultimate financial impact out of this segment, good or bad, if you will, on a full year basis. I do think we're doing the things necessary to put the business into a profitability, a profitability mode. The real thing as we go through this year will be as we continue to build out the agent force, making sure that we can, as we scale the business, we can maintain a level of profitability we are comfortable with. The team there is very actively working on all sorts of things, both on the lead acquisition side, the lead identification side, as well as the cost side, and making sure we have the best agents available, paying them the best way possible, and so forth. It is not an immediate, you know, do this, then that happens. There's a lot of fine-tuning we've been doing and will continue to do throughout this year. Glenn, I don't know if you have anything you wanted to add on that. Yeah, just on the question about the other products. You know, first priority is to make our current profit set profitable, that's where the focus has been. The e-TeleQuote team is doing a fantastic job of looking for adjacent products and adjacent markets. Lead generation from adjacent markets that might be possible. Are there other products to round out the product set that are still relatively close to the senior health business? There are no plans right now to load Primerica products into that sales center. That would create a tremendous amount of channel conflict potentially. It's a very different client base. Our team down there are experts at dealing with seniors and their needs. We feel like right now branching them out into other markets that aren't adjacent would work against us rather than for us. There's no plans for that on the horizon. Got it, Glenn. That's very helpful. Just sort of thinking about term life sales. You know, you came in with, you know, policies of 2% growth. Then, you know, per Wilma's question, you were talking about face amount up 14%. It feels like the face amount is the better in metrics. Maybe a little more color on that. Then more importantly, you know, with the licensed sales force up about 5%, again, you had, you know, is that kind of a good indicator of where we could start to see sales coming in maybe next year? Is that kind of, you know, give it a year and we'll start to see that mid-single digit kicking in on a steady basis, maybe even better if productivity picks up? Yeah. There's a lot in that question. I, we do think that-. Sorry. That's all right. We do think that as Allison said, using the additional premium and face amount metrics in addition to policy count gives you a little better feeling for how the business is evolving. I will say that I do believe we are overcoming the headwinds of the higher cost of living with our sales numbers right now. To the second part of your question, it's gonna be tricky to project how this looks throughout the year or beyond the year without getting some clarity on how we feel like cost of living and the budget pressure on middle income families, which is extreme right now, how that might change. If it gets worse, it won't be good for sure. If it gets better, you know, then we could see some easing of that pressure and families might have a little more leeway to make some different financial decisions. Looking into next year, it's very cloudy right now. We do believe, and as Alison pointed out, the face amount and premium numbers include additions that don't come in through a brand new app, through our Increasing Benefit Rider, which is automatic or manual policy additions the client just asked for. It gives a more holistic view of our entire life insurance business than just the new issued policy count. That's why we believe that adding those, not moving completely away from policy count, but adding those give you a fuller picture. Very helpful, and it seems like you're doing the right stuff with the sales force, so thank you for that. Certainly. Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Hughes with Truist. Please proceed with your question. Good morning, Mark. Yeah. Thank you. Good morning. I missed some of the earlier call, so I apologize if this has been gone over. The YRT ceded premium ratio was little bit higher in the 1st quarter compared to the Q1 of last year. I think compared to last full year, wasn't that dramatically different. Is this kind of 31%? Is that what we should expect? Was there any increase in cost, anything like that? No. Actually, I'm gonna tell you, Mark, you win the prize because that is a technicality of the business that I didn't know if anybody was gonna pick up on. Really what it is, and we didn't put it in the script because if you're going back to here, it's a pretty technical answer. YRT ceded premiums are paid annually on the policy anniversary, which is very different than how we collect our direct premiums, obviously. If you look at last year, if you look at how COVID happened and when our sales were growing tremendously, that cycle sort of ended the first quarter of whatever year it was. I'm sorry. I'm lost on years right now. I have a head cold. I apologize. This is the last year that you see sort of this step up in the first quarter, and it's why the rate is a lot closer to what you saw sort of for the rest of last year. It's because it all steps up annually. Yeah. You pick that up in the first quarter, and it has nothing to do with a change in rates or anything like that. You'd never see a change in YRT rates be that impactful that quickly because, one, they're only for new business, which is a small part of our total business. Two, as we've mentioned in the past, YRT rates aren't level. They match the mortality curve. If you think about it, the first year a policy is written, the YRT rate is probably almost zero, and it grows very quickly after that. That's why the rate of that other ceded premium line actually grows faster than any other line in that premium revenue section. I will remind you also that if we had our druthers and we didn't have to follow GAAP, we would actually treat the other ceded premium in our case as a benefit line item, which is why when we do the benefits and claims ratio, we actually include that piece in the benefits cost. You'll see that on a year-over-year basis, the benefits and claims ratio was very consistent. Okay. It sounds like for the full year, pretty consistent with last year. Is that the way to think about it? I have to actually look at the number, but I think last year had a lower first quarter. I think the rate you're seeing right now is more consistent with what you're gonna see for the rest of the year. I don't think you're not gonna see a pickup like you saw in the first quarter in the next three quarters. Yeah. Just to remind you, and I think it's important because I wanna make sure everybody's doing the calculations the way we do since, you know, we quote all these rates. That 58.8%, I think was the number, 58.7% number we quoted included the other ceded premiums. Right. Right. and I'll just note, like last year, the YRT ceded premiums, it went from $29 in the first quarter to $32.5 in the second quarter. Is there some normal seasonal phenomenon or is that just another one of these variability things? We've talked about in the past that the second quarter has historically been our strongest quarter. Yeah. Maybe end of con incentives, whatever the case is, people are happy in the spring. But the second quarter's historically been a very, very strong quarter for us. Since, like I said, the YRT premiums renew annually, if that's when we have a large amount of policies coming up on their annual policy renewal date, that's when those YRT rates are gonna go up for all of those policies. And again, they're gonna grow, you know, at much faster rates because they max the mortality curve. Well, I will wait for my prize. I'll send you my address so you can ship it to me directly. Maybe some Primerica swag. Okay. Second question would be investment in savings. Asset-based revenue was down 1%, even though the assets, average assets were down 9%. Anything there that is noteworthy? That seems like a good trend, but I don't know whether that's just something else driving that. That really has to do with a mix shift we've seen. Two things have happened. One, we've continued to see more and more of our sales going towards managed accounts. As that's happening, we're obviously not getting the sales-based revenue, but our ability to generate asset-based revenues are growing. You're seeing that compounding effect. The other is the PD model that we launched for mutual funds in Canada last year. That is continuing to grow, which again, will put some pressure on what we call revenue generating sales because a lot of those are no longer creating a front-end sales load, but does contribute to our ability to grow faster on an asset base. Okay, great. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We have reached the end of our question and answer session. This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.