Ditch the Suits - Start Getting More From Your Money & Life

Estate Planning: Designing a Will That Reflects True Intentions and Values

January 23, 2024 Steve Campbell & Travis Maus Season 8 Episode 99
Ditch the Suits - Start Getting More From Your Money & Life
Estate Planning: Designing a Will That Reflects True Intentions and Values
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In this episode, we unravel the complex tapestry of estate planning. We're dishing out crucial insights on why settling for a basic will could leave your legacy in a lurch. Our conversation takes you through the perils and pitfalls of oversimplified wills, underscoring the need for a well-drafted document that goes beyond the bare minimum to safeguard your assets against life's unforeseen twists and turns.

Join us as we delve into the fine art of constructing a will that communicates with crystal clarity, avoiding common blunders like the overuse of trusts or choosing an incompatible executor. The essence of this episode lies in the stitching together of your family dynamics with the fabric of your fiscal assets. We dissect scenarios that demonstrate how a nuanced will can effectively steer your inexperienced heirs toward financial stability and success while simultaneously preventing familial feuds.

It's all about crafting a legacy that alleviates the burden on your loved ones, rather than entangling them in a web of taxes and complications. Stay tuned for the next climactic installment – our 100th-episode celebration – and equip yourself with the knowledge to navigate the intricacies of leaving a legacy that truly reflects your life's journey.

Win some Ditch the Suits swag on us! This is episode 99, ONE AWAY FROM 100!! To celebrate this achievement, we want to give away some goodies. There will be a drawing with three ways to enter:

1. Like our NQR Media page on Facebook and share a recent DTS episode with your network. Visit https://www.facebook.com/nqrmedia
2. Like our NQR Media page on Instagram and comment on a recent DTS episode. Visit https://www.instagram.com/nqrmedia/
3. If you are an Apple listeners, leave us a 5-star rating and review. You can visit https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ditch-the-suits-start-getting-more-from-your-money-life/id1551210529

Once completed, send us an email at ditchthesuits@gmail.com and let us know your name and what've you done so we can track the entries and enter you in to win!

Three chances to enter! 

______________________________________________________________

Looking for additional content that can help you get the most from your life? Check out Unleashing Leadership with Travis Maus, premium bonus content from Ditch the Suits Fans, at https://unleashingleadership.buzzsprout.com/

Thanks to our sponsor, S.E.E.D. Planning Group! S.E.E.D. is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interest first. Schedule your free discovery meeting at www.seedpg.com

Ditch the Suits is produced by NQR Media. NQR also produces the One Big Thing Podcast with Steve Campbell.

You can watch all episodes, as well as other great content produced by NQR Media through their YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@NQRMedia

📧 For more information or to get in touch with us, visit https://www.ditchthesuits.com/ or email us at info@ditchthesuits.com

👍🏼 You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at @nqrmedia

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We'd also love for you to subscribe to this podcast and leave a 5-star rating and review

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Ditch the Suits podcast, where we share insights nobody in the financial services industry wants you to know about. We're here to help you get the most from your money and life, so buckle up and welcome to Ditch the Suits. Hey everyone, steve Campbell, welcome to episode 99 of Ditch the Suits. We are one away from the big 100. If you listened to our last episode, right at the beginning of the show, I took a moment to share that. To celebrate our 100th episode, travis and I would love to give away some DTS swag. This is a huge watermark Three years, 100 episodes were one away. So we put together a drawing and there's going to be multiple winners. There's a way that you can celebrate and get a goodie on us. Really, three ways to enter. Number one you can head over to Facebook and like our NQR media Facebook page. That's NQR media. We'd love for you to share a recent DTS episode with your network. Number two you can like our NQR media page on Instagram NQR media on Instagram and comment on a recent DTS video that we shared In. Number three if you're an Apple podcast user, we'd love for you to leave a five-star rating and review. We're not begging, but all these ratings and reviews help Apple know that our podcast is a good one and one they should reshare. Once you've completed, there's three ways to enter, three chances to win. If you want to do one or all three, once completed, send us an email at ditchthessuitscom. That's ditchthessuitscom. Just let us know what you've done so we can track it and after the 100th episode, we will pick a few winners to give away some DTS swag. So thanks for celebrating with us as we lead up to the 100th episode and, until then, enjoy number 99.

Speaker 1:

Well, welcome back to Ditch the Suit, steve Campbell here with Travis Moss. This is a second episode of a three-part series where we're going to be leading up to complex beneficiaries. Whether you've heard that term or not before, stick with us. In the first episode, just in case you missed it, we laid out how start of the new year.

Speaker 1:

It's a great time to take inventory of all the things that are happening in your life and really one of the most overlooked areas has to do more so with estate planning and in line with the will and beneficiaries and how those work. So if you missed the last episode, you don't necessarily have to listen to that for this one, but we would encourage you to go back and listen. So in this one we told you that we wanted to lay out some different avenues when it comes to a will and our attempt to make wills that might maybe align with, as we talk through, these kind of where you are, so again that you can move the ball forward and get the most money in life. So, travis, why don't you kind of lay out the first level of a will, of maybe a starting point as to where most people may be?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and we're doing the will before we get into complex beneficiaries, because the will, remember, is the instruction manual. The will gives you guidance and, depending on how well the will is written, there can be a lot of contingencies in there. There can be a lot of guidance for different situations and, as simple as people want to make it seem, life has a way of happening and taking turns that we don't necessarily ever think could possibly happen and it just goes in that direction. And so will and will is going to count for all those different directions that maybe life could take you and your family. And the more instruction that's actually built into the will a lot of times, the more that we can actually do with beneficiary designations, which is where that complex beneficiary discussion is going to come from. So it really kind of sets up some opportunities for us, and the typical situation that we see is somebody will come in and they're looking for the least expensive or most familiar way to do this, and familiar meaning I have a friend who's an attorney. They're writing me a will, or I went online and I found a template and I printed it out like we go zoomed or something like that, and I'm going to fill it in. Or I heard of this attorney who will give me a will for $300. And the guy that you're suggesting is going to charge me $650 for it and so I'm going to pay the $300. And so the basic will that we're talking about for our discussion is the least expensive, easiest to get. However you get it, and there's a saying you get what you pay for, and in a lot of cases that's going to be right.

Speaker 2:

Every now and then, somebody just needs a simple will, especially people who don't have a lot of assets and a lot of things going on and maybe don't have kids or don't have much to pass on to the kids. I mean, there are situations where a simple will will do, but I would say that it's the minority of situations and somebody looking at their situation and going I'm in the minority, I don't need anything complex, I have people all the time, I don't need anything complicated. It's like, yeah, you actually do. When you go through the whole process and you kind of talk about all the contingencies, they didn't come back. I didn't understand. That's how those things worked. Yes, so now I understand.

Speaker 2:

I know maybe beyond basic, but we start with basic, so we've got the least expensive, easiest to get, and what basic basically does is it oversimplifies things. It doesn't provide enough structure for those contingencies, so it's like the super thin instruction manual that's missing. I've literally seen basic wills that their boiler plays that somebody created that are literally missing sections in the will. I've seen wills that don't even have the vernacular correct. Like they'll say they'll mix up. The way that they explain what should happen to their assets. Using the term for stirpes and stuff is actually wrong in them. If we don't have enough structure and if we're going for short, I want just a two-page simple will. Again, sometimes in very limited situations that's going to work, but in most of the time a two-page will is missing. You know at least six to 10 more pages that you'd probably want to have in there that talk about the contingency stuff.

Speaker 1:

I think, though, it makes you feel good. You know, like we talked about in the first place. Well, it's easy to understand.

Speaker 2:

It's legalities, right. You know who wants 14 pages of legalities. You can't actually understand what any of the stuff says because you're not an attorney. That's what it comes down to. People go and they sit down with their friend. The friend's like, nah, you just need a basic will. And you know the guy's an attorney and he drafts them up a will and it's really basic and it's like how does he even know that you only need a basic will? Is he projecting?

Speaker 2:

Again back to this? It's legal, yes, but is he projecting, he or she projecting their personal opinions on you and saying your family can just your family can do this out, you know at the end, because you know that's what families do. Well, that might be how his family does it, but is that how your family should do it? I think it's avoidance. I think is one of the biggest reasons why we do it. It's scary to go meet an attorney you don't know, in a situation that you're not comfortable with, when you don't normally deal with attorneys. You know, and then you get this huge document of stuff. You're trying to figure out what it all means and for some people it's extremely overwhelming.

Speaker 1:

Hey guys, steve Campbell with Ditch the Suits, I want to take one quick moment to make a big ask. If you haven't already, travis and I would love for you to subscribe to this podcast, but if you haven't, also we would love for you to leave a five star rating and review.

Speaker 1:

Your rating and review will let other podcasters note the show's worth their time. So let's get right back to the episode and thanks for listening to Ditch the Suits podcast. Well, it's overwhelming too, because if you are somebody who's gone from nothing to at least having a will, it makes you feel better. Right, you can. There are some very, very good practitioners out there that are attorneys, but you can also walk by a lot of places in downtowns and wherever where there's an attorney that kind of does everything and all things. But you know what I mean? It doesn't really specialize in anything, and if that's hard for you to understand, you can look at the glass window and it says wills and estates and you know Business and Social Security and Disability.

Speaker 1:

And you're like well, I don't really understand what that means. You've ever been to an all-American restaurant that has everything from shellfish to steaks to tacos to? You know what I mean? You know, as a consumer, when you go in and the menu has everything that it's like, is there anything that's actually really good, or is it just inexpensive because they want to cater to a larger audience? The flip side is, though, that doesn't mean you just run out to the most expensive steakhouse in town and go put 10 times as much down on a steak if it's not good. Right, and I think that's what we're trying to shoot for is like very noble to go from nothing to simplicity, but, as you said in that first episode, what would it look like if you really understood all the moving parts in your life? And it deserved a little bit more time and attention to make sure that not only do you get what you wanted, but you're setting up whoever's going to receive these things in a situation that affects their taxes, their livelihood, family conflicts, and that's worth it.

Speaker 2:

Well, here's a great I mean I have two examples. Actually my very first estate planning that I ever did. I had a young couple. They had two young kids and they had some life insurance. I had a bunch of term life insurance that's life insurance that goes away at some point, and I think they had like a half a million dollars of life insurance. So something happened to two of them. The kids would inherit the half a million dollars.

Speaker 2:

And well, you can't have miners just inherit money and know what to do with them. And if both parents were gone, obviously you want to pick which of the grandparents or which of the uncles takes care of the money for the kids. Plus, you want to talk about guardianship and all these other things. Right, there's a lot of stuff that there are reasons why you want to go do it. We go and we get the will done and the will becomes very basic. They just did a really simple kind of couple page will and because they wanted to make sure that there was a trust established for the kids, the attorney wrote a trust and so they set for $2,500. The attorney actually established a trust for the kids and we took the life insurance and put it in the trust. Now, most people actually don't die young, right? Most people don't actually collect on term insurance. That's the whole reason why it's cheap. So we created a trust for something that's unlikely to happen and we pay $2,500 to do that.

Speaker 2:

When, if we had just worked on that instruction manual within the will, what we could have said in the will is you know, if anybody dies and they're under the age of 30 and they inherit money, put it in a trust for them until they're 30. Of course, you can get much more sophisticated, like you know. I'm just simplifying this. So we could have said you know, put the assets in the trust for the kids, if in fact it's there, and we could have directed the insurance policies to that trust, if it in fact is ever created. And it wouldn't have added any cost to establish the will, or very minimal. It certainly wouldn't have cost $2,500. And there's no reason to pay $2,500 and put life insurance policies and trust and deal with all the stuff that triggers for what they were trying to do.

Speaker 2:

So got the really basic will, the cheap will, and then the attorneys sold the big trust. You know, and I see that a lot of times and I think that there's attorneys in certain retirement communities that a lot of times pray on older folks. So you're trying to do the right thing. You join a retirement community. You're 60, 70, 80 years old and you go to one of those dinners where they talk about getting your state plan or everybody's like.

Speaker 2:

You gotta talk to this guy. They get you all set up and you go and you get this huge binder and you got this 50 page trust and it's got all these things in it and it wasn't needed at all. They could have easily just put a little bit of extra instruction in the will and if you ever needed it in the future, it could have been established, because the chances are that you wouldn't need it. It was just way overkill. So being too basic in the will actually can force you to become too complicated because you gotta do other things to achieve what you want, which and the reason why you would do that is because you're buying more stuff.

Speaker 1:

Well and I'm thinking about it as you talk about it there's almost like this weird word association with the word trust. That makes people feel exclusive. You know what I mean. If an attorney comes to you and says you know, you too, I wanna establish a trust. It's almost like you look at each other like we made it Like let's get a trust. You know, it's kind of like that concept of money management used to be really reserved for the altruistic, very wealthy. You would have your own personalized money manager and that's how they would manage the family fortune. Well then, over the years they developed mutual funds and then they developed single money managers. Now the big story from financial advisors is you wanna deal with us because we will get you a money manager. You know it makes you feel good. But then the question is like okay, but then let's look at the track record and how they're doing, because you're making us pay this additional fee to get access to this thing, but I, at the end of the day, can't call whether they're actually helping us. It almost feels that way with the trust you know where it's kind of like a lot of people don't understand it, but because the professional across from them says we should get a trust. It almost makes you feel secure, in a way, without really understanding what it is that you just got. Let's take a quick break to hear a word from your sponsor.

Speaker 1:

This episode is brought to you by Seed Planning Group. If you're looking for a life-giving experience working with a financial planner, then Seed is here for you. Seed is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interests first. If your goal is financial freedom and independence, without sales products or really glorified salespeople, then check out Seed Planning Group. Today you can visit wwwseedpgcom. That's wwwseedpgcom. In the best part. You can schedule a free consultation to find out if their fee-only planners and their process are right for you.

Speaker 2:

We've had a lot of people that come in and they say I need to get a trust. And I'll say, why do you need to get a trust? Well, I was talking to so-and-so and they have a trust and I was like, okay, you know it's, you may need a trust. For the most part, most people have contingencies where they may need a trust. Right, like, we overuse the trust off an awful lot for people who don't know what they're doing. You know what I mean. It's just it's because it makes it look sophisticated and it can, you know, and obviously it drums up fees and you know, if you're into selling life insurance and those types of things, there are all things that attorneys and life insurance agents like and it just. But anyway, let's move on from that. The next type of will we have is a developed and practical will. So you kind of see where we're going with this. We don't necessarily want the basic wellness that's truly in your best interest and, again, that's in very, very few situations. So we really want to develop the will. We want to look at this instruction manual and say, you know, maybe we don't need a 500 page instruction manual, but maybe, you know, a couple of chapters would be good, and one of the things that I always talk about to people is we also want to make it practical. Though you can come up with all kinds of crazy stuff in your head and your attorney will say, yeah, that's legal, we can do that, this is how we'll build it, it doesn't mean you should do it Right. You can make it very, very difficult, or you can try to oversimplify something that makes it impractical in that route too. Right, like back to I'm just going to leave everything to my brother and he'll take care of it. Right, I'm oversimplifying that Because to me it's practical, they'll just deal with it, but it creates an impracticality to it because you create so many other problems that it really is not a good idea. So we want to really think about, when we're developing our instruction book, the relationships and how the different members of our families work, how they work with each other.

Speaker 2:

A lot of people leave multiple kids as co-executors on their will, and being an executor is not a fun job, it's not a status job, it's kind of a sucky job. Yet we don't want to insult anybody because we picked Joe over Suzy and it's like no, you pick Joe or you pick Suzy so that they can do what they need to do to administer your estate, and if the planning is done right, there shouldn't be a lot that's going to come down to their level anyway that they got to deal with. Where the other one might get upset about the problem is, is the more you leave for them to do yeah, there's more room for them to come in conflict with their siblings, but so then we're going to have co-executors and we're going to make everybody get along while they're trying to administer your estate and everybody's got to sign on stuff and everybody's got to. You know, it's just we can create a complete, really disaster if we don't understand how the family works or what assets are actually held, and we get this even with clients a lot of times. We work with clients for years, believe it or not, because people laugh at this.

Speaker 2:

I've had clients that found $300,000 accounts that they forgot about. Like, these things happen and it's very easy to go in and tell somebody what you think they need to know and not understanding what they do need to know. Like, if you have a bunch of money, it makes a big difference if it's an IRA form or if it's an after tax form. You know if you own real estate but you own it in an LLC versus in your name, that's a big difference. There's all these little things that you wouldn't necessarily always think about, but we need to think about that when we're writing the instruction manual and how to deal, like what stuff is actually gonna get there. For instance, if I own a rental property and I have it in an LLC and there's a buy-sell agreement on it, it doesn't even get there. You need to understand that Right, because I've seen people list things in their will that actually won't get to the will in the first place.

Speaker 2:

So now it's something that's supposed to get into the will and people do this with asset, like personal things, all the time. Like I wanna leave a ring or something and I put it in the will. What happens if I already gifted it? You know now there could be a lot of infighting, but we need to think about the goals too. If I have a child that I'm trying to set up for life, because they struggle making financial decisions, probably don't wanna leave the money outright, so I wanna be thinking about how I'm doing that.

Speaker 2:

Your will, if it's developed correctly and if it's practical, is actually designed to work cohesively with your beneficiary designations. So it's not an either or. It's designed to provide some additional instruction as we get into our next episode, but it's designed to provide additional instruction for those complex beneficiary designations, for those beneficiaries that, hey, I wanna leave money to my kids, but if they're under the age of 25, make sure it gets to a trust Well, what trust? Well, they talk about it in the will. So, if it's designed well, we have that contingency, even if I don't think it's gonna happen.

Speaker 2:

There's a places for me to reference stuff and it really simplifies administration and most people, when it comes right down to it, it's not probate that they're afraid of. They say, well, I wanna keep it out of probate, it all costs. No, they're afraid of expensive privacy, invasive family conflict type of situations. That's what they're concerned about. So it's like, okay, that's what you're really concerned about is administration. We wanna make this as easy as possible on your hairs Right and we wanna remove as much conflict as possible.

Speaker 1:

Well, and just for context, over the years, being the first point of contact for our financial planning company, talking to people, even callers from the show, when they talk with me, I can tell you, folks, that there are very few people that call me excited that they are the executor, executress, like it's some kind of win. Most times people call and it's hey, I'm the executor on mom and dad stuff and I really have no idea what I'm doing.

Speaker 1:

You know what I mean. It's usually met with a place of confusion, anxiety. So, like you said, just to add to being named an executor, executress. Especially if you have multiple siblings, think about the kind of conflict that that can create or division that one of the siblings has to enact what's been put into the will and kind of be painted in a certain picture. So a lot of moving parts, but I think we got one more area that you wanted to get into.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think it's important bringing up siblings. Do not think that your children will not see each other. I've seen it now in a couple of different estates, where children will see each other and the more clear you can be, the more practical you can be, the more you can use your crystal ball and realize where the conflicts might show up and set the rules before we get to that point, the less likely your children are to team up on each other or to fight each other or to never talk to each other again because they're fighting over your stuff and you might say, well, you know, that's for them to work out. You know, it's like if I didn't feed, if I had two kids and I didn't feed them for a week, and I throw a sandwich in the middle and I say, okay, they'll figure it out. You know like what kind seriously, what are we doing here? Cut it in half and give it to. They have to each one. Or if you don't want to cut it in half, if you think one deserves two thirds and the other one a third, do it and write them a letter that they get when you're gone, right, but don't create the situation, because they will do it, and sometimes it's not siblings. Your kids can love each other and have tough situations at home with their significant others, right? Or it may not be your kids, it might be their bratty kids. You know what I mean, that you know are stepping in and driving some of this stuff, because I've seen that happen before. Let's avoid the situations where we let other people create an absolute disaster and then blame it on us for leaving that mess behind. Right, and that's what we're trying to do by being well-developed and practical. But now we can get well-developed but disastrous because we can go. You can try to manage people from the grave, right, you can try too hard, for I see it more often.

Speaker 2:

The attorney allows it to get a little bit wild. I've seen I had a case where the clients really just wanted to leave their house to their grandchildren, if their grandchildren run the house. So the attorney created like a Chinese auction type of scenario, like a blind I think that's what they call like a blind auction, right? Like basically, everybody could make a bid and whoever won the bid could buy the house. So you're going to pit grandkids against each other and kids, you know, parents are the grandkids against each other, and it was just a really, and that's not what they asked. They didn't ask for an auction. What they asked for was a methodology to, if they're going to put the house for sale, allow a family member to buy it with rights of first refusal basically right, and so that's very, very different.

Speaker 2:

But what happens is then the attorney says, well, this is how I would do it, and they put it into the will and the client goes, okay, well, that must be how we can do it, because that's what the attorney said and it's like no, you can literally write whatever the heck you want in there. You know, in most cases, so it has to do with your creativity or your perspective on things. Or, you know, if you're an emotionally void person and you're writing rules about, you know that people are going to have to follow that are going to impact the rest of their lives and you don't understand the emotions that they're going to be going through at the other end. That's a dangerous place to be. You know that's a dangerous projection, and so we want to. We want to be careful that we don't create these situations where you know you'll go to the attorney and you end up with a will and it's literally I'm putting my hands about six inches apart it's literally that thick. It's all this stuff in there and it's you know, we've got lists of charities and we've listed where every piece of furniture is going and you know every person in our life. They're getting 5,000, they're getting 5,000, that charity is getting 10,000, that's getting 15,000. Or we do percentages. You know they're getting 1%, they're getting 1%.

Speaker 2:

I had a client that went they came to us because of this problem they had been going to an attorney who was a friend $26,000 later in hourly fees. We've got a will that basically was carving everything up and sending it to all these charities, half of them in which the client didn't even know about. I mean, it was just a really bizarre thing. And it's like there's a percentage going to all these charities. Like, wait a second, remember when he's married, so you can't disinherit the spouse in the state that they live in, so the certain amount has to go to the spouse. So you can't even do what they were trying to do in the will. And you would think, well, I'm talking to an attorney, you know, I would have figured this out by now.

Speaker 2:

But then the other thing was the percentages. So the amount that would have gone to the charity was about what he had in an IRA. So if I leave, let's say, 1% of 50 different charities of each of my accounts, that means I'm leaving 1% essentially 50% of my IRA to charities and 50% out of my after tax account. With the after tax account, nobody's paying taxes on that anyway when they inherit it, but the IRA they are. So why wouldn't I leave the equivalence of the IRA to charities because nobody pays the income taxes and save a couple hundred thousand dollars in the income taxes in this case? Well, because I was going to list it in my will. It's like well, forget about that. Why don't we list it as your beneficiaries, you know?

Speaker 2:

And then one of the challenges came with that that there was. I had an error client who was doing that and the attorney didn't actually understand how the financial companies work. So they're like, well, we would do it like that, but the financial companies don't accept our beneficiary designations. It's like, okay, because you don't understand how the beneficiary process works at the financial company. So we're trying to skirt this, we're trying to keep the financial people out of the picture because we don't want to pay anybody but the help that we do have doesn't actually understand, you know how some of these systems are going to work.

Speaker 2:

So we get these wills with lots of things listed in them. And number one we wouldn't want to do it that way anyway because it's going to cost us a lot more money. Number two let's say that both of those accounts for the first example, where it was, you know, 50% of the IRA and 50% of the after-tax account let's say that both of those accounts have a beneficiary listed on them. That means there's nothing going through the will. If there's nothing going through the will, there's nothing to sell to, you know, fill the bequest, so the charities are actually going to get nothing in that case. Or possibly the house maybe the house is the only thing passing through, you know or an office building that you otherwise wouldn't have wanted to sell. Now that's got to be liquidated. Or debt put against it. Now, yeah, obviously you could buy it back out with the other inheritance, but it's got to come from the estate, right? Because the estate owes the bill.

Speaker 2:

So it creates a lot of issues sometimes by being so developed and putting so much in the will without thinking about how could we use the beneficiary designations, to take pressure off of the document itself, or how do we make this more practical? We talked about socioeconomic and other dynamics within a family situation. You know, not everybody's created equal in a family and there's just. We talked about it. With the house, we can create lots of situations. Conflicts can arise.

Speaker 2:

We see this a lot of times with I don't trust my kids. Here's the deal. Steve, I'm going to leave you as the executor of my will, but any money I give to you has to go into a trust. And the reason it's got to go into a trust is because your sister I don't trust your sister and if I leave her money, I have to leave it in a trust. So because I'm going to leave her money in a trust, I'm going to default to leaving your money in a trust. So I trust you enough to distribute the assets from the estate, maybe even be your sister's trustee, but not actually manage your own money.

Speaker 2:

Or maybe you don't want to be.

Speaker 2:

Maybe I've listed you as your sister's trustee and you're sitting there going I can't even be in a room with her for five minutes and now I've got you listed in there as the trustee or the executor and you're going to have to wait for your sister to leave her money in the trust and you're going to have to deal with her, and so there's a lot of challenges that can arise, and the whole point here is that we need to be careful that we don't.

Speaker 2:

We said don't be too basic, right, and then we said we want to be developed and practical, but don't go the other way and try to control everything, right. What you're trying to remember, that will is a catch-all and it's contingencies. Then it needs to beCOF or anything that you don't have a beneficiary listed on, and you're trying to provide contingency clauses for what should happen if you know a minor inherits assets or if somebody's disabled or something like that. You're you're you're trying to do some contingency stuff there, and then you're trying to create that in a way that the beneficiary designations can do a lot of the heavy lifting, partly because, if you've changed your mind, it's a lot cheaper to do it that way.

Speaker 1:

And as I was just listening to all of this, I think there is an over assumption that people are going practical and do the right things. I think it's very easy, when you're in a quiet room making documents, to assume that you know your children, who have always had a good head on their shoulders when they are met with a situation where they're going to be taking over money or health concerns, that everybody just acts. You know relationally the way that they're supposed to, or rationally. If the last few years have showed us anything is that we all can react in different ways that we never assume based with information that we never had before. So just to assume that your, you know beneficiaries or whoever that you're naming in these documents, are going to make good decisions the way that you would want them to, you're missing the human element. So I think what you're saying in this is don't don't simplify it to the point that you're saying nothing at all and creating complexities once you're no longer here, but don't over complicate it to the point that it's a mess for the people that are thereafter. There's a fine line right down the middle of the road that can achieve both of your goals of wanting to do the right things and take care of those are important, but then also doing it a way that makes sure that you're taking into account that things are being passed in a way that's smooth, taking into account taxes, so that you're not leaving a mess. And I think, as we bring this last episode talking about complex beneficiaries home, hopefully light bulb goes off with for you of how this is involved and really maybe the concern as to why more people aren't talking about it.

Speaker 1:

So, as always, thanks for stopping by Dish the Suits. Stay tuned, as we got one last episode, kind of a kind of a big one, number 100, three years in. Don't miss it. Stay tuned, dish the Suits. Get the most from your money in life. Music plays.

Understanding Different Levels of Wills
Developing Practical Will With Clear Instructions
Considerations for Crafting a Will
Balancing Simplification in Estate Planning

Podcasts we love