Estate Planning: Crafting Your Legacy and Mastering Beneficiary Designations

Celebrate a milestone with us on the Ditch the Suits podcast as we pop the champagne for our 100th episode and three-year anniversary! Thank you for being a part of this journey with us!  In this celebratory episode, learn how to shield your legacy from chaos, optimize your assets for those you love, and avoid potential tax pitfalls.

Have you ever wondered what happens to your assets after you die? We're shining a spotlight on the financial institutions and the potential freeze they can put on accounts when you're no longer here. It's a deep dive into the world of additional documents, the art of clear communication with banks and insurance companies, and the strategies that keep your financial intentions on track, even when faced with institutions that are more rigid than a starched suit. Discover the art of allocating beneficiaries and the myths about will amendments that may have you second-guessing your current estate plan.

In the last part of this episode, we'll try to convince you of how important it is to have clear communication and teaming between your financial planner and attorney.  We share tales from the trenches on how a harmonious relationship between these experts can prevent your last wishes from getting lost in translation. No matter how complex your beneficiary designations may seem, with the right team by your side, your legacy will be as well-crafted and unique as the life you've lived.

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

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

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 guys, steve Campbell, come on now somebody. This is episode 100 of Ditch the Suits podcast. We are also celebrating, travis and I, three years of being podcast creators. What a wild journey this has been.

Speaker 1: 0:35

If you listened to the two last episodes, we've been leading up to the fact that, for this 100th episode, travis and I would like to recognize some of our listeners by giving away some DTS swag. We've already shared some ways to enter, but in case you're just joining in today, there's going to be a drawing, multiple winners and really three ways that you can enter. To win, you can do all three or just one For one. Head over to our Facebook page NQR Media that's NQR Media and you can like the page. Once you like it, get on there and share a recent DTS episode with your network. Number two second chance to enter you can like our NQR Media Instagram page that's NQR Media and just comment on a recent DTS video. Number three if you're an Apple podcast user. We'd love for you to leave a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts. This just helps other listeners note the show is worth their time and we're ready to rock their world. Just complete it. Send us an email at ditchthesuitscom. That's ditchthesuitscom. Let us know what you've done so we can track along with you. After this episode today, travis and I will go through all the entries and at random pick a few winners and we will contact you to get you some DTS swag. Honestly, from Travis and I, we want to thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:42

2023 was a banner year for us. We got big beliefs for 2024. We couldn't do without all of you. We hope that you enjoy the last episode of this series. Good luck if you get a chance to win and thanks for tracking along with us. Welcome back to DTS. I feel like I should be playing bells or chimes or have some kind of like professional wrestler intro music, as this is episode number 103 years in.

Speaker 1: 2:05

We started DTS three years ago, at the end of January, and to now have this episode be released at exactly the same time. Right before we came on air, I told Travis partner we've come a long way and this has been an exciting journey. If you're brand new to DTS, welcome. We hope that it's not your last stop.

Speaker 1: 2:21

If you've been tracking with us for any amount of time, please don't hesitate to reach out to us and let us know of topics you want to hear about, because, again, we want to share with you, just like in this estate planning conversation, topics that are going to really challenge maybe the way you think or just expand your knowledge base so that you can do something with it.

Speaker 1: 2:38

So we've been leading up this entire conversation talking about annual reviews, taking inventory of what you have, and a major overlooked area is estate planning and beneficiaries. We've been leading up to first episode talking about wills and then episode getting into maybe a basic, a better, and then like please don't do this. And then in this one now we want to talk about complex beneficiaries, because I know you know Travis from your end as a planner this is an area that isn't talked about, so a lot of people don't know about it, but it's a huge aspect of planning if you really understand and get it right. So I'm just going to turn it over to you to talk about what is a complex beneficiary.

Speaker 2: 3:14

Well, steve, I would first like to offer my intro music from unleashing leadership to get us pumped up here. Because, number one, I have a lot of fun picking out the music and yeah, but number two, who else can take something as boring as beneficiaries and turn it into an hour and a half of? Let's hurry up and get through this, because we're going to try to limit it. Three episodes, I think we could. If we got into case studies and stuff, we could go on for hours. That's actually what's going on in my head. I'm tripping over myself because there's so much that I want to say about this because I've seen so much disaster with this. But yeah, I mean that's. We've taken a topic I think that most people take for granted and I hope that we're painting a picture about if you do this right, you can actually do some amazing things. The will is a very powerful tool, but it is a tool and it's how well you you know. If you go out to the hardware store and you buy the cheapest tool, it's probably going to break on you. So we really want to think about what's the utility of this tool and how do we need it designed, and let's make sure that we think about things. You know, let's just make sure that we've got some perspective on this and that gives us the complex beneficiary, which is a type of it's internal terminology that we use.

Speaker 2: 4:41

Basically, you made this up. You have a will and you have beneficiaries Remember the beneficiaries who precede the will, so they stop things from actually getting into probing. But every now and then you actually want things to do what the will says, like you want them. Hey, if the will says, you know, if they're under 25 years old and they inherit assets, put it in that. Or if you are in a state tax threshold, you know, put my stuff in a credit shelter trust to preserve my exemptions, or something like that. So every now and then there's stuff that you want to happen in that will and so you have an option you can either circumvent the will completely with the beneficiaries, or you can send it through the will and send it through probate. But what, what? How cool would it be if you could actually send your assets to the will that's, only to the part of the will that you actually want to utilize, but not actually do it in a probate fashion? So you, basically, you tell the investment company, you say, okay, my money's over at Schwab or my money's over at Fidelity or wherever it is, and you say, hey, fidelity, when I die I want you to give all my money to Steve. But first I want you to check article three of my will, and if article three of my will says that a trust should have been set up for Steve, give it to the trustee instead.

Speaker 2: 5:59

And so this is where complex comes in. But that's complicated enough that it's not going to it's. It doesn't work on the forms that the investment companies or the insurance companies normally give you, because it's this or that type of thing or it's like hey, you know, a lot of times you got to do percentages on your beneficiary forms, unless it's life insurance right, life insurance, you know exactly what the benefit is. But if you have an investment account, you don't know what the benefit is. So you can't go to your IRA company and say, give $50,000 to Steve and split the rest equally between my two kids. And the reason why you can't do that is because they're going to come back and say, yeah, but what if there's less than 50,000? We don't know what to do. And then you look on the form and there's no place to put that on the form. There's no place to say well, if there's not $50,000, do this. So what do you actually do?

Speaker 1: 6:46

Let's pause and hear a word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by the One Big Thing podcast. If you're in the thick of life as a parent or a spouse and just trying to grow as a person, then you won't want to miss this show. And I want you to pause right there and get ready for your this, then that. Yeah, because I'm thinking about the listener who's like what in the world is unleashing leadership and what's he talking about with music? So you prepare your part, because I do want to give a shameless plug.

Speaker 1: 7:38

We're celebrating three years, or a hundredth episode. We've grown as content creators and unleashing leadership. We found different ways to express things we're passionate about. Obviously, you're here on digital suits to get the most from your money in life, but, travis, you are also a visionary. You love building into our team and you started your own solo podcast, the Daily Kick in the Butt, if you call it 15 minutes every day and you're waiting to work to become the best leader you can be. So if you like Travis's tenor and tone, I will tell you that there's some explicit language on the show.

Speaker 2: 8:05

So if you need to feel alive. Yeah, I know you use the word butt in that show. We don't say butt.

Speaker 1: 8:10

That's me folks. I'm the one with four kids. But if you like a daily dose of leadership injection, then check out unleashing leadership. I think it's a very cool maturation of just our passions for reaching more people and that's a huge component to get the most from your money in life. So you can check that on every podcast platform. I love this idea of this, then, that why don't you kind of walk us through kind of the thought pattern, if you will, behind it.

Speaker 2: 8:36

So think of it as turn by turn directions. All right, so your will is kind of the instruction manual. Right Now we're going to actually draw a map and what our intention is is to help the financial or the insurance company transition your assets to your heirs. So this is even less about your financial or investment person. You're talking directly to the investment company now, because when you're gone, your agent or your representative has, they have no control anymore. The second that the insurance or the financial, the investment company finds out that you're passed away, they freeze the accounts. At that point, your person on the account, there's nothing they can do for you other than administer the instructions on the account. And so really, what you're doing is you're saying I'm going to clearly articulate to the investment, the bank, the insurance company. I'm going to clearly articulate to them what I want to happen in certain situations. And of course, they provide you a form and you go well, there's no room on this form to do that, and so we're going to create additional language that goes with that form.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Basically and this is where you have to really understand how the financial industry works, because they'll reject it 50 times on you. They'll tell you there's absolutely no way they can accept certain things. And there's certain companies like 401ks. A lot of 401k plans will not accept anything complicated because, again, it's not your account, it's the 401k plan. You just happen to have a sub-account in it and you're going to go by their rules. So it's a little bit daunting for somebody who really doesn't know what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 10:16

But we're going to, if we're good at what we're doing, we're going to take our will. We're going to say, okay, we've built in the contingencies and now we're going to create this additional document that says these are the contingencies that I want you to look for if something happens to me and something goes to this person. So I could say, well, I'm going to leave all my money to Steve, but if Steve and I are going in a car accident together, then I want $50,000 to go to charity X and then I want $5,000 to go to Steve's wife and then I want the rest of the money split equally between my nephews and I want, if a trust has been established for any of those people in my will, for that money to be turned over to the trustee of the said trust. So like I'm going like many, many layers down here, right, sometimes I have seen it too, where somebody could create such a complicated situation that doesn't have an answer or a resolution for certain situations, like I've seen people list 60 different scenarios basically, but they didn't think all the way through to the resolution of some of them. So it's not practical, it can't happen, because they don't kind of close the loop, if you will, and so there is an art to putting these together so they can be fairly simple, like our earlier examples. They're going to be really, really sophisticated and certainly not something that you're going to fill out in a little three sentence or a three line form that says what's the name, what's the date of birth, what's the address, what percentage you want to leave them. Right, you're going. Or sometimes you'll say well, what's the trust? You can leave money to a trust. Well, the trust isn't here yet, it doesn't exist. It may never exist, right, it may be something that never happens, but it needs to be listed, and that's another issue.

Speaker 2: 12:21

When we go back to the will, a lot of people think they have to rewrite their will when things happen. Like you might say leave assets to my kids, you know, in a trust if they're under the age of 30. And then the kids are over the age of 30. Well, do you have to go rewrite your will or not? No, you don't, because they're the trust won't be triggered because there's nobody under the age of 30 to trigger them, right? So it's part of this is just understanding what stuff you got to be worried about and what you're not.

Speaker 2: 12:49

But the complex beneficiary can easily include things and this is where we're getting to charities or one-off designations or percentages that are different. I might create a beneficiary that you know will list. Again, I'm not going to list the charity and the will, or I'm not going to list my God children and the will, but I'm going to go on and put them on a certain account. So maybe the charity goes on the IRA and maybe the God child goes on, you know, the Roth or the after-tech, the joint account with my spouse or something like that. Like we're really going to think kind of through how we're going to list people on accounts to get the maximum value out of the accounts, not just cut them all in half.

Speaker 1: 13:33

Hey guys, steve Campbell with Ditch the Suits, 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. Your rating and review will let other podcasters know if the show is worth their time. So let's get right back to the episode, and thanks for listening to Ditch the Suits podcast, and I think that's a great point to talk out right In the last episode, even in the first one, we talked about the role of an attorney.

Speaker 1: 14:03

Right, and go to an attorney because you want to have something. They are mostly going to be an order taker. You tell them what you want to have happen and then they draft the document. What you're talking about is, I think so, somebody understanding the ins and outs of your life, who and what's important to you, and be able to come to you with ideas of hey, remember that you said this, this, then that Like this is where that fills in versus somebody who, if you just go, sit with an attorney and they take out their yellow legal plaid and they start their little taxi cab fare thing that they do, and then you just start telling them like this is this and this is where I want it to go. They're going to go, okay, great, what's next? It's more of just taking inventory versus like bringing to life what would maybe fill in the complex beneficiary.

Speaker 2: 14:46

And I would say that because we vet attorneys, because we recommend clients go to attorneys all the time, and we want to make sure that they go to an attorney who understands what we're trying to set the client up for Right. It's not going to be fighting us and saying, oh, you need to buy these trust or something like that. It's clear they're coming to them with like a shopping list. This is what I need to do at attorney and we have some attorneys that do phenomenal work and we have we've got some in many different states and they'll come back to us and be like just so you guys understand this, how this would work or this stuff, and they actually bring really good ideas back to the table. But one of the challenges that you have with anything legal is somebody without a law degree has to interpret it, who maybe is going through this for the first time ever and has very minimal background with any of the terminology. So we constantly have clients come back and look what I got. We look at them and we're going this is clearly not right and they're like but my attorney's really good. It's like, yeah, your attorney's really good, but you don't understand what they're saying, so you don't know when to tell them. That's not actually what I want, and so I think sometimes people need an advocate, and one of the challenges that attorneys have is I don't want an advocate in the room that's going to kind of push me to do something for the client. The client doesn't necessarily want, because from our profession you know this is the so-called financial advisor part of it.

Speaker 2: 16:07

You got insurance agents out there all the time trying to get attorneys to help them close the life insurance or the annuity sale. They're going to the attorney with the client and they're putting pressure on the attorney to tell the client yes, that's a good idea, buy that insurance or buy that annuity. And what's the attorney get out? And I've actually had attorneys sit in my office and say this what do you want me to sell for you so that they can write the trust or write the LLC? And it's like holy cow, you know, if you're doing this right, you're, you're the planner, and the attorney ought to have a relationship where it's like hey, attorney, I really appreciate the way that you do your work and we're going to help package up a client and send them to you and they're going to come to you with a pretty good understanding of what they need, and if you see something that deviates from what we've seen, please let us know so we can help interpret that to the client, we can help explain that, or maybe we can learn and we can get better so we can set the next client up better and let's work together on this to make sure. And I think that's the big difference between fee only and fee based, or fee only and commission right, like our fees, what it is. So what do we care? You know if, if you want to buy insurance or not, the only thing that we care is if you have what you're supposed to have or what you need to have, and so it's a it's a different relationship, but I think it's just.

Speaker 2: 17:29

I don't want to pick too much on it because we both have hammered the attorneys and they rightfully deserve it, but there are some really phenomenal attorneys and we we we have the pleasure to work with some of them that, I think, add an awful lot to the process. In the feedback that I've gotten from those attorneys is that they really appreciate the prepackaging, they really appreciate the fact that we've informed the clients. The clients understand, they go in with good questions. The attorneys can talk to them about the legalities of things, but it's pointed, you know it's. It's like you know here's an issue that can spend more time on a real issue and less time on just basic, very kind of trivial things and you get a lot less of the. You know, and I guess some attorneys like this because they can make money over and over again. But I think the good attorneys are busy and I think they want to work on other work, right? And so if the the client has to come back every year to update the charity and how much they want to leave the charity in the will, yeah, for some attorneys they can keep making money on that, but for the good attorneys they're like that's annoying. You know, I don't have to do that all the time. That's one of the benefits.

Speaker 2: 18:36

That, back to the benefit of a complex beneficiary, is if you put charities, all those other little stuff in your will and you change your mind, or if you say and I've seen people do this leave my IBM stock to my kids, well, where the heck's the IBM stock? What if the IBM stock is sold Right? Like what if you got last? Like late bills and stuff you got to pay. You know, should you cash out your IRA to protect the stock, like, what should you do versus going into the IBM account just putting a beneficiary on it says leave it to the kids and then again, if you want to put it in trust through the will, reference a situation in the? You know the section in the will to go to look at.

Speaker 2: 19:15

But to update the beneficiary designation, if I change the amount that I want to do, or maybe I change who I want to leave stuff to, because this happens all the time all I got to do is file a form, and I mean for the most part that's free. You know it depends on your relationship with your advisor and stuff or if you're doing it on your own, if you understand how to do it, but that's normally free or much, much less expensive than rewriting a will. You know, because normally the attorney is going to either rewrite the will or you know sometimes they'll charge you a discount just to make a quick update, because it's the same template. But sometimes laws have changed since then, right, so the wills the other got to be updated into their new pro forma kind of structure that they're using, or your attorney retired and the new attorney is like I'm not touching that. Well, I didn't write it. I'll update this for you, but you got to be out. You know I'm going to write you my version of your will and that's where the cost starts to come in. So it's. And we have clients that stuff changes all the time. I mean it's constantly changing.

Speaker 2: 20:20

You know, there's a funny thing that happens from your 60s to your 70s. When you're early in your 60s, you're worried about retirement, you're worried about having enough money. When you get to your 70s and you're looking at these RMDs and you're going I don't need that money, what the hell am I going to do with that? You start thinking a little differently about what am I going to send to the grandkids, what am I sending to the kids, when and how, and that kind of stuff. And it impacts your beneficiaries. You start thinking about charities differently. Well, if you're going to go back and rewrite your will every time, you're starting to think differently. That's kind of expensive, you know.

Speaker 1: 20:54

Well, I was just thinking I don't want to oversimplify it, but just maybe to give people a word picture in their mind and you can tell me if this is completely off base. But it would almost be like if you wanted to. You know, put together a dream home. Yeah, you can just go hire a contractor and a designer. But what if those two had the ability to work together? That you know you don't want to micromanage and come in and tell the contractor how to do their job or just knock out this wall or that wall? But what if you had somebody that knew your family so well that, as the contractor was laying out a blueprint, they were there to say, yeah, but don't forget, this family really is passionate or cherishes XYZ, so let's design the living room in such a way that they can all be together. They would say, great, here's how we would do that.

Speaker 1: 21:36

It's almost like having two people at two advocates working together, not trying to do each other's job, but having somebody from a designer standpoint that can bring to life what's important to the family, so that that house is exactly what they need. You can still function it if it's not, but just almost that tandem working together. So, like you said, we've had some really great experiences, you know, with attorneys over the years and I think it's when those two things are working together the planners understanding the situation so well that they're bringing to light scenarios that maybe the individual didn't think about more. So to let them know hey, you've said over and over this is really important, but I think there's maybe a lot of missing parts as to why this doesn't always happen sometimes.

Speaker 2: 22:19

Well, you get and people listening may have heard this before you get these financial professionals, whether they're accountants, cpas, cfps, insurance reps, financial planners, attorneys, whatever they may say that I want to be your quarterback, I'm going to coordinate everything for you and that sounds really good. But if the quarterback doesn't know all the plays, you know, if you've got a third string quarterback and you're a championship level team, you're probably going to lose. And that's one of the challenges with this is that I do think that a lot of people go out there and hire people and they say, well, I'm here for your state planning, I'm going to take care of you, and really what they're doing is they're selling whatever their product is. I'm selling my life insurance, I'm selling my annuity, I'm selling my investments, or I'm selling my trust and my wills, or I'm selling, you know, whatever you know, I mean LLCs and all that kind of stuff and it just it makes it very, very difficult and that's my biggest hope with Ditch the Suits and any of our podcasts is that people hear some of these things and they go. These are the conversations I should be hearing about. So if I'm sitting down with somebody and I talk to them about estate planning, and they don't talk about these things. If I say, well, what about my beneficiaries? And they don't talk about these things, if they don't talk about contingencies and how to use your will in conjunction with your beneficiaries and what stuff you might want to go through your wills, what stuff you might not want to, and how to coordinate with the attorney and stuff.

Speaker 2: 23:54

If you're not having those conversations and you know you're kind of with a so-called financial advisor, you're with somebody who is a portion, they're doing part of the quarterback's job. They know some of the plays, right, but they're not the star. But they're trying to be the star because if I'm the star I get paid and think about it. I mean there's, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of financial advisors out there. You think they're all stars, you know. I mean, and you've never even asked them any questions like this, you don't know, and they may be a star in one part of it that's the other part of this.

Speaker 2: 24:30

Like your planner might be a star on investments. They might be a star in taxes. They might be a star in projections. They might be a star with disabled, you know special needs, trusts, things like that. But they may not be or they may be a star with your business.

Speaker 2: 24:44

They may not be a star in this area, and this is where you've got to ask questions and you've got to find resources or people to help you with this type of thing. And so, whether you know people call up seed and want to use seed, or whether they've got their own people, if you're having conversations like this, you know you're on the right track. If you're not having conversations like this and you've started to accumulate some assets, you probably and you've got either children or multiple beneficiaries and charities and stuff like that then you probably need to have a more sophisticated conversation. The more different types of assets the businesses and real estate and stuff the more this gets even more challenging, because now you're talking about different types of ways that you might designate beneficiaries and sometimes even where you might use a trust. In reality, you know where you might need trust to actually come into the picture.

Speaker 1: 25:44

Well, and you had kind of talked about this, and I just want to challenge people to be leery of professionals that, when it comes to emotional conversations, over deliver on something that you could never actually quantify. It's very easy for individuals to want to make a sale or to make you feel good and they'll say things like you know, I always take care of people, I deliver checks, I hold their hand, I take care of the family when they're no longer here. But there's no way for you as an individual that sounds good in the moment, but once you pass, you're gone. There's no way to come back and just validate that they actually did what they were going to say. So just be careful of just because somebody says you know, I see people all the way through, you know that you really understand what that entails.

Speaker 2: 26:25

Yeah, and how many people have they seen all the way through? Like we have some younger planners that haven't seen somebody all the way through yet, but if somebody that they're working with has to go all the way through, they're going to. They have a lot of resources and a lot of people on the bench because of how we work as a team right. But if I'm hiring a singular person out there to basically take care of me, if that's where the relationship belongs and they're like I'm going to see this all the way through, it's like how many have you actually seen all the way through? What does that actually mean? You know what are the results. And if it's like, well, I show up on the doorstep, you know the week after with the check. That's not what I'm talking about. Right, that's that, that's your vanity, that's you being the hero. You know I'm talking about, like you know, how do we put the pieces back together? What's that look like? So what I want to talk about is where you actually get these complex beneficiaries, because they have to be drafted in a certain way.

Speaker 2: 27:21

We have worked with a lot of attorneys. We actually learned how to do this from working with a law firm that was drafting these for us and they were the only local firm that would draft them for us and they're constantly getting rejected by the financial companies and stuff. So sometimes they go through, sometimes they went out. We never knew why there was always different issues and stuff because we really didn't understand the form, we didn't understand illegally within the form and we would have clients that worked with different law firms and we'd go ask them for it and they either I mean who knows which would get back. You know from that would get really bizarre stuff. We wouldn't get anything. They charge client extra. We've had attorneys that try to file the forms for the clients. So you have an attorney that you know $350, $400 now are trying to file these forms for you that are getting rejected. That's awfully expensive and the reason why they're getting rejected is because they don't work with that company. Very often they don't know how the company wants to receive the form. So there are few attorneys that actually draft these forms proactive.

Speaker 2: 28:24

We've only run across one firm that does it proactively and then even then, what we've done actually at SEED is we actually created our own complex beneficiary structure in coordination with certain financial companies, because the attorneys were creating very nice legally pieces, and what was happening was it was projecting things into the beneficiary designation. There's nothing to do with the actual process of transferring assets from one person to another. And so the financial companies were saying we're not taking on that liability, it's not up to us to do that. Like they were saying, hey, I'm going to give it to the trustee for the trustee to act as the trustee should act. Well, the financial companies saying don't tell us. You know we can't tell the trustee how to act. We don't like that's not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to get it from point A to point B. You know we're not necessarily concerned what they're doing with it once they get it. And if you say that we are in this beneficiary designation, then that's implying that we have some kind of liability. And so we actually had to take it a step further and develop these in-house.

Speaker 2: 29:36

And I'm certain because there are very, very, very good firms out there, I'm certain that there's other firms that you know do this. I know that this is not completely unique to us and there are other law firms that do this, but the point there is, it is a level of sophistication, and one of the other challenges that you'll have is I've seen, attorney, when we get the templates from the attorneys, they're the same for every account or sometimes they're just slightly different. And sometimes we have to go in there and say, well, you know, we want to leave X amount of money to somebody and we have to build out more, if than that Contingencies because they're they're not actually matching up with the will or anything, sometimes anything that the, the decline even said to the attorney, and so we've seen the clients that take the, the templates an attorney gives I'm and just start sending them in. Here you go, everybody, and it's like whoa, wait a second. That will was the catch all remember, it was the default. We don't actually want to do anything. The will says we, we want to use the contingencies built in it Just in case, and then this is the stuff that we're gonna do. So we have to be really careful that we're working with people who have some experience in this or that can get you to people who can kind of round out the service needs with this. So I'm pretty confident that if, if you went to, for instance, one of the law firms that we work with and you said to them I'm trying to do this and I really need a good partner with us. Somebody understands what you're doing. They're gonna be able to tell you. Well, here's firms that understand how to handle this.

Speaker 2: 31:06

And the bigger issue, I think, is on the financial world, because everybody thinks of financial advisors a financial advisor, and one firms as good as the other. They're not, and we've talked about this years ago. Maybe we should revisit it someday. But how the firm is designed and the, the, how the employee or the represent the financial planner, that or advisor that you think you're working with, how they're registered with the firm and what the firm's compliance regimen is will strongly dictate if they. Number one, if they have any clue in this stuff, but number two, if they're even allowed to practice in this area. Because the idea of of this Sounds like a legal issue, and so what they're gonna say is I'm not an attorney, you have to go to an attorney for that. It is not a legal, you do not, it's not lea, it's not a. You don't have, you're not practicing law by listing beneficiaries. Now, we learned how to list it the way that we list it through attorneys. They taught us how to do it, but the, the act of referencing a will. That is not a legal action.

Speaker 2: 32:21

But since you're doing stuff like that, what happens with a lot of firms that are like we're not gonna touch that because there's liability there if you screw that up? You know, I mean, we might be liable, and the way that most firms work. In order to do that there have to be really structured training. We really, if anybody's going to do that, we're gonna make sure that they're trained and they know how to do it, and somebody's looking at every single one and that kind of thing and they don't have the compliance regime for that. So what happens is is that we've got we're using liability, legal liability, as a shield, but really it's. We're not providing any training and we don't. We don't trust that somebody's not going to screw up and come back and sue us and we can't figure out how to make money on it.

Speaker 2: 33:03

You know, because a complex beneficiary designation to draft one even off of a template can take an hour for an account, depending on how complicated it is, and they're sitting there going okay. Well, if I had to do five of this for somebody, you know it doesn't. Once you get one done, normally it's a little bit quicker, but if you have different things going on with different accounts, it can take longer. It's a lot of busy work, it's a lot of it's a lot of time I got to spend on this stuff and how do I make a commission on a beneficiary form, you know. So it's just. It's kind of like it is we're unfairly Explaining an issue to people and Steve, and in this, in this particular series, we're saying look, this is something that you need to take really serious and this is something that this is what a state planning should sound like, right, but it's the solution is hard to get, because this is where the rubber meets the road.

Speaker 2: 34:00

You want to know the difference between financial advisors and financial planners and agents and fee only versus fee base versus commissions. It's competencies like this, like you can be a CFP and still have no, no, no capabilities of doing this Right. You can. You can have that. It's a specialty level of knowledge and I just think when you're out there in your shopping for financial planner, you're working with somebody and you're accumulating stuff. Understanding how to handle your stuff is really important. Well, we made it through complex beneficiaries. There's two layers to Travis and I, as the host of this show.

Speaker 1: 34:35

We want to make ourselves available to you if you should have questions. So the first layer if you got any questions at all, you can head to ditch the suits calm there's a contact us but and reach out to us, pose your question, let us know. But if you want something more I know Travis has mentioned a few times, but if you're brand new to ditch the suits seed, we do also offer a few different options. We do offer a fee only financial planning firm. We've been very fortunate over the years to have listeners of the show reach out to us because they need help in regards to planning. So, yes, if you have somebody go use, go use them. But if, at the end of the day, you just want to know how our team can help, you can head over to seed PG calm. That's a PG calm. Obviously we're passionate about this. We want you to get the most of your money in life.

Speaker 1: 35:16

Don't overlook this area of planning. It can be complex, but it's a good idea to have a good team. Don't overlook this area of planning. It can be complex. There can be some people that you can go to. Just make sure you know what you're getting, what you're getting into. But a simple step, even from that first episode Go, make sure that you have beneficiaries on file and that they're exactly what they want you to be. But again, we hope this episode helped you. Thanks you for stopping by digital suits and don't don't miss our next episode.