Join Michael Bailey as he brings clarity to complicated estate planning topics. From discussing the unforeseen challenges of dividing family assets to understanding the unique value of art, collectibles, and memorabilia, this episode provides comprehensive advice for anyone considering their future legacy. Michael shares heartfelt stories, such as the choices involved in guardianship and the realities of adulting for his children, offering practical solutions to common dilemmas faced by families planning their estates.
00:25:36 The Value of Art and Memorabilia in Estate Planning
00:27:01 Closing Remarks and Next Episode Announcement
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with your host, Michael Bailey. Over a decade ago, attorney Michael Bailey turned his attention to estate law after he recognized the unacceptable number of adults without proper end-of-life planning. Michael recognizes that many of his clients have difficulty finding the time for making a proper estate plan. That’s why he became the Mobile Estate Planner. He will go to wherever you are to assist you with your estate planning, including writing wills, trusts, and giving you the information you need to avoid probate. Now, ATX, Ask the Experts, presents Mobile Estate Planning with your host, Michael Bailey.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good afternoon. Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM, 100.7 FM, the KLZ 560 radio app, or wherever else you are able to hear. I hear that there’s different places that you can listen, but those are the three main ones that I know of. So we’re here to do something besides just leave your family alone. Phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. And again, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. Once again, direct line 720-394-6887. So, you know, I was thinking about different places you can listen and things like that. And I recall a story I think was attributed to Lucille Ball where she’d had a… She had a, like a filling in her tooth. And she claimed that she could hear like radio signals or, you know, some sort of, I don’t remember if it was just like this. I thought she could hear, you know, the CIA communicating with her or something like that. And I’m like, yeah, that seems a bit far-fetched. Seems a little bit excessive. I don’t have any homemade radios. I have some friends who are ham radio operators, and so they will communicate with people across the world with their ham radios. Those are good people to know, especially during the time of if there were some sort of natural disaster or crisis or something, the ham radio operators will probably still be able to communicate one with another. Whereas my wonderful smartphone that I have that connects to the T-Mobile network, if the T-Mobile network were to disappear or not be functioning, I would have a tough time communicating with, well, much of anybody besides the immediate people around me. So sometimes our communication can break down, but sometimes it’s good to know all sorts of different things and different people to do different stuff. Now, some of my ham radio operator friends, they are also what we consider preppers, where they’re prepping either for the end of the world or the zombie apocalypse, maybe a little bit less so the nuclear holocaust. Although there are, I think there’s probably still people who have the… the bomb shelters and I’ve known some people who’ve converted like a missile silo into where they live. And I’m like, that would seem like a lot of work to me. It doesn’t seem, I mean, people, there are some people who really enjoy things like that. I’m good with doing home improvement projects, but I’m also good not having all of my time spent doing home improvement or different projects. I mean, we were sifting through, we’d gone onto YouTube to watch some highlights of a volleyball game. And one of the things that was there was somebody, they’d bought an old schoolhouse and converted an old schoolhouse into their home. And so, you know, they were talking about it and they’re like, you know, I wake up in the morning, you know, I wake up on Saturday morning and there’s nothing better than waking up on Saturday morning and being like, yes, I have a project today. And I like to wake up on Saturday morning thinking, oh, I’m glad that I got everything done so I don’t have a project today. I mean, there’s always going to be plenty of things to do on a Saturday. whether they’re this weekend, I’ll be in Spokane, Washington for a volleyball tournament. So I’ll wake up in the morning and I will have volleyball to watch and a daughter to support. And then I’ll do the same on Sunday and the same on Monday. And then I’ll be back Monday evening so that I can go back to doing work on Tuesday. now somewhere in there i’ll probably bring my computer with me because you know taking friday to travel and monday to be in volleyball yes it’s uh if i take two full days off there’s gonna be a pile up of emails that need to be responded to you know how that goes um but you know so i’ll probably do that but you know i’m not going to be available for a phone call from somebody who needs me to come try to do something, you know, that evening because they’re in trouble or whatever it is. You know, it’s just not how it’s going to go. And that’s okay. You know, it’s going to work out a whole lot better to, I mean, I still want to take care of people. Still got to do things. But last year, my wife and daughter went down to Orlando, Florida for a volleyball tournament. And I stayed here and got my son to and from school and things like that. But then last, on Sunday, my daughter came up to me and said, hey, this is the one year anniversary of when I broke my ankle. We’re like, well, we’re so glad that that’s not the case. So their next volleyball tournament I went off to in Salt Lake, she was there in a walking boot with her broken ankle. So we cheered on the team, but I didn’t get to watch her play. So this year I’m like, well, we have two traveling tournaments, one to Spokane, one to Las Vegas in April. I’m going to plan to go to both. I’m just going to plan just because she is 16, you know, we’ll maybe have one more year of club volleyball. And then I suppose if she does go on to play in college, then I could watch her play volleyball in college. But I’m running out of opportunities to do so. We have high school seasons and things like that. But I realize that my children are no longer going to be in the same type of situation as they used to be. I met with somebody yesterday who I wrote a will for probably 12 years ago. And he says, oh, so how are the kids? They’re probably getting pretty big now. And I said, yep. And we walked into my office and there’s a fairly recent picture of them. And he’s like, oh, so he’s looking at, he’s like, so which one was, I’m like, well, that one was like seven when I met you the first time. That one was four. And that one was like one. He’s like, oh yeah, I remember that. They were awesome. Because he didn’t meet the kids because when we met up that time, my wife was a notary at the time and I was not. And so, yeah. She notarized things for his will. But, you know, I’ve been around for long enough that, you know, many of my clients know that my kids have grown. They know that my kids, you know, I have some clients who knew me before my youngest was born. And so, you know, life is different now than it used to be. And so our needs are different than the way they used to be. You know, my 18-year-old, who’s almost 19, she’ll be 19 in April, she is not quite quite ready to take over all of my estate planning things. She’s capable, but not quite ready. And part of that is because I’ve seen what it can do to people when kind of adulthood and being in charge of things is thrust upon them sooner than what might be a good idea. And so my 18 year old is a freshman in college. And she’s enjoying being a freshman in college. When I talked to her a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that she’ll be home from college sooner so she could take a CNA qualification course in the month that she’ll be home before everybody else is. And that might not be the worst thing as opposed to trying to fit that in around the rest of her college schedule. She seemed to think that was a good idea because she’s a college freshman and she’s able to enjoy her college freshman year and, you know, be able to just, you know, it’s a good thing for her to be able to do so that there’s not a, not an issue with college. You know, trying to fit in a class that would be for a job that might cause her to not be as able to enjoy her freshman year as possible. And so, you know, she sees that just in adding one class. And, you know, if my wife and I were to die, do we really need her to come home and handle all the things that would need to be handled? And the correct answer is, I’m not willing to put that on her quite yet. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM. Also heard on 100.7 FM, the KLZ 560 radio app, or however else you manage to hear. Phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. And again, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. And once again, that’s 7 2 0 3 9 4 6 8 8 7. So, uh, we have some friends who the, they lost their parents early on. And so, you know, the, our friends, uh, the, she ended up kind of more or less raising her sister because when her parents died, when she was like 19 or 20, and so the, and her sister was like 10 or 11. So she ended up kind of raising her sister. And although this particular friend of mine is a wonderful, cool individual, a 20-year-old trying to raise an 11-year-old, I don’t know, it kind of presents some issues. So I wouldn’t want my 18-year-old, almost 19-year-old to be raising my 16 and 12-year-old if we don’t have to. It’s one of the reasons that I try to stay alive is so that I can help raise the kids and assist my wife with all the things that we do in trying to raise those children. But you know, my 18, almost 19 year old would probably be fully capable of handling financial stuff and figuring out what needs to go on and helping get her sister and her brother where they need to go. But I don’t think that’d be super fair to her. And, um, you’re just watching the outcome of these two sisters. And I’m like, sometimes I watch them. Like, I think there might be a few things that got missed there, but What I would do as a 20-year-old is different than what I would do now as a 46-year-old. And as a 46-year-old, I have an 18, almost 19-year-old, a 16-year-old, and a 12-year-old, almost 13-year-old. So I can take my life experience and I can take what I’ve learned in life about parenting and how to teach children what they need to know, and I can apply that to them. Now, each child is different. Whatever worked with My oldest doesn’t necessarily work with my middle child and what works with a middle child doesn’t necessarily work with my youngest. And what works with my youngest probably wouldn’t have worked with my oldest and so on and so forth. But we’re in a different life situation and we’re doing the best we can to raise our kids and none of them came with an instruction manual. And so we’re doing what we can to raise the kids the best we can. And so, but one of the decisions that comes into estate planning is who would raise your kids if you’re not around? And I don’t, you know, a person who raises your kids is called a guardian. A person who controls the money for your kids, if it’s through a will in the court process, is called a conservator. And if you set up a trust, then the person who controlled the money is called a trustee. So, you know, there’s all sorts of different wonderful things to be done there. Um, and you know, not everybody has to fulfill the same role. Now, you know, sometimes I will talk to families and they’re like, oh, well, you know, I have a brother who’s a financial planner and he’s really good with money, but he’s also single and doesn’t really quite know how to interact with my kids. So, you know, we’re going to have him be in charge of the money, but we’re going to put my sister who has four of her own kids and knows how to raise kids. We’re going to put them in charge of raising the kids. I’m like, cool. And they’re like, well, you know, then does one have to ask the other for money? I’m like, technically, yes. But hopefully your two siblings will work together and not be too stingy and not be too terrible to work with. In my case, I have an older sister and two younger brothers. And then my wife has four younger brothers. So we have seven different siblings we can choose from. And of those seven siblings, we have one that we feel like is most closely aligned with how we would raise our kids and how we would want our kids raised. And so that’s who we have chosen to raise our kids if my wife and I were to die. Now, the nice part is that we’ve only got a couple more years for the middle one and five more years for the youngest one. Then there’ll be adults and can handle things on their own. Although, you know, still once you’re 18. So we jokingly refer to our 18 year old as a baby adult because she is an adult and she can make her own decisions, but she’s just barely become an adult and just barely learning how to do all of these things. So, you know, she’s not a baby and she’s not incapable, but she is kind of new at being an adult. You know, whether she, you know, we sent her off to college and, oh, well, you know, where are you going to go? How are you going to go get groceries and things like that? You know, when we when we dropped her off at college, we were going to go get our groceries and Things, as they always tend to do, took a little bit more time than what we anticipated. So we went down to the grocery store that’s run by the BYU Creamery has a grocery store. And it’s run by the university. It’s probably not quite as cheap as Walmart would be, but it’s similar prices to somewhere like a King Soopers or somewhere like that. So we were going to go drive to the Walmart and get groceries and then bring her back. But the drive to Walmart would have been, by the time we got to where we were going to leave, it was like five o’clock. And yes, it’s only a three or four mile drive from her apartment, but that three or four miles at five o’clock was going to take 20 to 30 minutes. And so we were like, well, it’s 20 to 30 minutes there, then shop, then 20, 30 minutes back. And we were trying to meet some of our friends for dinner at 630. And we’re like, that’s going to be pushing it. It’s going to be very close. So we walked the five minutes down to the grocery store. And we walked all around the grocery store and bought her what she needed. And she’s like, well, I don’t know if I need that. I’m like, well, I’m not going to be here to buy it next week. So take advantage of the dad bank right now. She thought that was a good deal. But we also walked the whole grocery store so that we could find all of the things she needed because that particular daughter is a vegetarian. So as we went through, we found where they had tofu and where they had all the things that she would want and need as a vegetarian. So we could show her how those things could be found. And then she could, you know, do all the things that she needed to do and buy food and cook can be self-sufficient when we were gone. And it was a really good thing that as a parent, I could show her this lesson. I’m like, okay, here you go. Here’s the lesson. Here’s the, how, how to do this. Here’s where you can find it. And, you know, so then I could leave and come back here to Colorado, leave her over in Provo, Utah and let her. um kind of go through and you know start being an adult and you know we give i could kind of give her the guidance in the direction taking what i what i know and i learned you know i did go to byu as well so you know most of the campus is the same some of the buildings have changed out but the layout is more or less the same and you know it’s amazing how i could still you know navigate my way all around things 25 years after i graduated from there but I have, I and my wife both graduated from there. So we had the life experience and, you know, we’ve lived on our own for a while. So we know how to help her do things. You know, so that’s a little bit like what I do as an estate planning attorney. I’m like, okay, I know the rules. I know how those rules are applied. So I can kind of help you go through and guide you and help you understand what the process is and what you need and also what you don’t need. Because sometimes people can get hung up on various things that may not be they seem like really great ideas and I don’t want to take away anybody’s thoughts or ideas on what they want to do. But sometimes their ideas are more than what needs to be done. So like, for instance, I will meet with people and talk about, okay, who do you want to leave stuff to? And they’re like, oh, well, you know, let’s go through all our different assets. I’m like, okay, do you have specific items or specific assets you want to give to specific people? Or do you want to split them up amongst the kids? Oh, we probably want to just split amongst the kids. Okay, cool. then we don’t necessarily need to list out every single asset that you have and who’s going to get what. We can say, oh, yep, you can split the house three ways between the kids. Well, splitting a house three ways between the kids usually means you take and you sell the house and you split up the money. Because splitting a house three ways between the kids could be an interesting time. You know, are they all three going to live there? Well, if it’s a normal house, are there three, are there three floors to the house? So each one gets a floor. Are there three bedrooms? So each one gets a bedroom. How do you divvy up the kitchen then? Do you say, okay, well, this is your counter space. This is your counter space. This is your counter space. And if you do that, then it’s almost like living at the apartment that my daughter at college lives in, where they have a certain amount of fridge space and a certain amount of shelf space that’s for each of them. But there’s six of them, and they’re all trying to have the correct amount of space so that they don’t get over on top of each other. And when a mom and dad die and you have adult children, that may not be the best arrangement to have all of, you know, everybody living in the same house, especially if they have their own families and dogs or cats or whatever, you know, that might not be the best living arrangement. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on KLZ 560 AM, 100.7 FM. KLZ 560 radio app. If you’d like to talk to me on the air, phone number is 303-477-5600. Or once again, that’s 303-477-5600. That is the studio line. Or my direct number is 720-394-6887. And once again, 720-394-6887. So you split up a house that way, that’s fine. Or sometimes people will have a rental property. They’re like, okay, well, we’ll split the income. Okay, cool. So if you’re renting the house out for $1,500 a month, Then $500 a month goes to each sibling. Well, that’s fine. You know, $500 a month is certainly not the same as $1,500 a month. But I don’t know about the rest of you, but if someone said, hey, we’d like to offer you an extra $500 a month, I would say, thank you. Not, no way, we can never do that. But if you’re splitting a house, you know, so if you’re not renting it and you don’t want to live there with your siblings, you’re like, okay, so how do we split this house? Well, one way is you can get some chainsaws. and you can just start from the roof and start cutting the house into thirds. And if you choose that methodology, you’ll probably make the local news, if not the national news for cutting up a house with chainsaws. But then you can cut through the walls and cut through the doors and the floors and the furniture and just, you know, kind of slice it all up. And then I don’t know if you, maybe you could find a forklift or something or a big spatula and then carry away your third portion. But I think that that might diminish the value of the house because part of what you want with a house is for a house to be intact and not cut into three different pieces. Now, if your house happens to be something like some of the properties I’ve seen up in the mountains where what’s built on the property is like three shipping crates that are put together and you know, or there’s a shipping crate that makes a little tiny house. I was like, well, if you have three of those, you’ve got three shipping crates, then by all means, you could have a three shipping crate house. And that’d be awesome. That’d be neat. But most people’s houses are not like that. My house is not like that. I don’t think Luke’s house is like that. Not built in modular things. It’s not quite like assembling the International Space Station where you put up one different part and bolt them together. It’s just not how most houses are constructed. So when you go to split a house three ways, you can sell it and then divide the money by three and split it up. Sell a house for $300,000. Each person gets $100,000. They go on their merry way. Life is good. But that’s so not that many people think that they’re going to cut their house with chainsaws or anything like that. But people do get very concerned about how are we going to split up assets? And some assets are better to keep together. I have clients who they… have collections of things. So, I mean, I just, I think of something like, you know, I’ve, I own the entire Lord of the Ring DVD series. Well, that’s not exactly a collectible item. They made millions and millions of copies of the DVDs of The Lord of the Rings series. Well, someone like Michael Jackson actually purchased all of the rights to the Beatles songs. So he owns all the rights, or at least at one point he did own all the rights to the Beatles songs. Well, that’s something that’s going to be, if you start splitting it up and parsing it out, it could be less valuable as you parse it all out. It could be more valuable if you keep it all together as one set. I know that Taylor Swift has gone and she’s released a bunch of her songs. And then she’s released Taylor’s version where she’ll make a slight change. And then so the Taylor’s version of the song, that’s a lot of what gets played on the radio now. But she owns all the rights to that. That’s part of why she’s able to receive music. so many of the royalties and become as rich as she has as because of the way that she’s done things with her own property there her own intellectual property and you know sometimes um yeah just things work better as a set you know if you have a if you have a chess set that was um you know carved out of stone and used by uh, the, and used by various, um, people who were, um, done in, or, you know, used by like, say some set or set of, um, you know, royalty or something, or, you know, American royalty. If you had a set, if you had a chess set that was owned by John F. Kennedy, um, And you’re like, okay, it’s cool to have this chess set, but if you’re like, oh, I’m going to start selling off the individual pieces. Well, that’s not going to be nearly as cool as having the whole chess set. So some things it makes sense to keep together, you know, so my, so my clients who have collections where they’ve collected autographs for the collected sports memorabilia, and they want to keep that together so that it’s all the together. I’m like, that’s cool. Or I have lots of clients who are, they were World War II vets. And so they’ve collected a bunch of, you know, whether they kept their, you know, military issue clothing and firearm and things like that from World War II. Or they, you know, just have collected different things, you know, whether, you know, sometimes I have people who have um, military memorabilia from the Vietnam era, which is different from military memorabilia from World War II. And so we’ve got, so those collections make sense to keep together more than to break apart. I mean, I have, uh, I have some friends, too, who their grandparents or great grandparents were fairly wealthy and fairly prominent in the Philippines. And they had artwork from some lesser known artists at that time. by the name of you know like picasso or rembrandt and things like that and so you know there and when the family fell on hard times some of those paintings not having any clue that they would be worth what they would be worth today got used and you know like actually you know used as like a firewood or something like that well that’s going to be very different and yes I mean, I think that’s part of the reason why arts things can be so valuable now. It’s like, well, you know, Picasso and Rembrandt and Michelangelo are not around to be producing any more paintings. So it’s going to be more scarce. but not that I have a Picasso or a Rembrandt to sell. If I did, I’d be rich, but I’m not. So as you set up your estate plan, you want to pay attention to who gets what, how’s it to be distributed out, who’s in charge, and how do you make those things work so that you don’t upset your family, but rather you make them happy with what you’ve done and take care of them the best you can, even when you are gone. So thank you so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM and 100.7 FM. I am going to… Music tells me my time is up. But stay tuned for John Rush and Rush Reason next, and I will be back next week. Thanks and bye.
SPEAKER 01 :
Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey will return to ATX next Wednesday at 2.30 here on KLZ 560, AM 560, FM 100.7, and online at klzradio.com.
