In this enlightening episode, learn the importance of estate planning and how to ensure your assets are protected. Michael Bailey discusses the responsibilities of executors and trustees, the process of verifying identities, and the complexities involved in transferring estates. This discussion emphasizes the need for detailed planning to protect your loved ones and minimize stress during challenging times.
00:00:27 Introduction and Background on Michael Bailey
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. So we can do something besides just leave your family alone. You’re listening to 560 KLZ AM or 100.7 FM, possibly on the KLZ 560 radio app. I think that’s the only options right now unless you’re Luke. 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. One more time. 720-394-6887. So, I… I was in the Pacific Northwest this weekend. in Spokane, Washington, home of Gonzaga University, and a convention center that was set up to have volleyball. So I went for the weekend to volleyball matches. So we flew out on Friday morning, played volleyball. My daughter played volleyball all day on Saturday, all day on Sunday. And then Monday morning, they were in the gold bracket. They’d won all six matches the previous two days Looking forward to hopefully having a successful gold bracket tournament. And then they picked, I don’t think they picked it, but they had a horrible, terrible set. They lost a close first set and then just kind of fell apart their last set. And it was kind of sad. It was kind of sad to watch that happen. And then, you know, we’re all as parents kind of left going, well, it was a great tournament with one bad set and, you know, a match loss. But, you know, that’s going to be what people remember of, you know, this volleyball. It’s kind of the negative memory at the end of the tournament. And so it’s like, oh, no, oh, my goodness. You know, was this a terrible tournament? No, it was a great tournament. But, you know, just ended not the way we wanted. And so because I relate everything to estate planning, here we are. So when you do your estate plan, you know, when you pass away, what is the last thing that somebody is going to think of you? What’s the last thing they’re going to worry about? And, you know, people are going to be sad. They’re going to be your loved ones and your family members will be sad that you’re gone. They’ll be sad that you are. unable to talk to you and things like that. But if you leave them a mess, if you leave them nothing planned, they’re going to find other reasons to be not so thrilled with you because they’re going to have to deal with the money. They’re going to have to deal with the property. They’re going to have to deal with banks and other financial institutions who we would like to think that banks and financial institutions are going to be helpful in these type of situations. But banks and other financial institutions also have to be very concerned about fraud and giving money to incorrect people. Because if you’re, whether it’s your spouse that dies or your mom or your dad that dies, if they have money that’s still in the bank or in another financial institution, say it’s invested with Oppenheimer, for instance. When you go to say, oh, well, mom died. We need to get mom’s money out of the bank. And you’re like, okay. So we need to see that you’re properly authorized to do so. Well, I’m mom’s kid. Well, anybody can come in and say they’re mom’s kid. I mean, even if you brought in a birth certificate and showed that mom had signed it saying that you were her kid, great. But you can search public records and you can order a copy of your birth certificate. Okay, well, we can’t do that. Well, you know, so it’s, you know, proving your identity and who you are and how you’re authorized is one of the main things that you’ve got an estate plan for. It’s one of the reasons you have it. Because you have to name in a will a personal representative or in a trust a successor trustee who is the authorized person to access the assets. So we don’t want anybody willy-nilly being able to go get assets. I mean, you know, Luke does some pretty good impressions of people. You know, so if we found out that, you know, one of the Anschutz died and it was worth a billion dollars and he could go and impersonate and be like, I am the Anschutz’s son. Like, oh, sorry for your loss, Mr. Anschutz. Here, have a billion dollars. Luke would be like, cool, thank you. Luke wouldn’t do that because Luke is honest and straightforward. But if Luke had done that, then he’d have a billion dollars and he could take that billion dollars to disappear to some corner of the world where they wouldn’t try to track him down, whether it’s in a country that has no extradition or whatever. You’ll go get lost in a, you know, in the tropical island somewhere. You’re like, oh, no, I am now in, you know, a remote corner of the Bahamas that nobody’s going to come find me. You’re like, cool, sounds good. You know, as long as you’re trying to send you to a tropical location there, Luke, so that you can have, you know, you can sit on a beach and, you know, spend your billion dollars on yourself, right? Well, you know, if that happens, and then the real Anschutz kids come by and say, oh, well, we need the billion dollars. And the bank says, well, we paid it out to Luke the son. And they go, there is no Luke the son. Now this bank that had given Luke a billion dollars is on the hook for another billion dollars. Because if they give it to the wrong person, then they have to make it up by giving it to the right person. Now, I don’t know about you, but most banks are not super keen on just handing out a billion dollars to one person or another and being like, oh, yeah, we’ll just take a billion dollar hit. That’s fine. Now, most people don’t have a billion dollars, but let’s say the person has $10,000, and that $10,000 can be the difference to make or break one of the kids being able to make rent or something like that. Well, the bank, if they give it to the wrong person, then they have to make that up. If they don’t, then they can be sued. All of those type of things that go on. So banks and other financial institutions are very interested in making sure you’re the right person to give money to. And we all can appreciate that. If I walk into my bank and I say, hey, I’d like to make a withdrawal from my… they’ll want to verify that it’s me. We did that right before Thanksgiving. We went down to find a car. We went to look at a car with no intention of buying it, and then we bought the car. And so to buy the car, we drove over to a bank, and I asked for a significant amount of cash out of my account because I was going to pay cash for the car. And they had to take my driver’s license and verify my identity. And they had to get my Wells Fargo card and have me input my pin. And then they had to verify my wife’s information because she was with me. And then they had to have me fill out the form that says you’re withdrawing more than $10,000 in cash. So there’s a form that the federal government has us fill out because they’re concerned about money laundering and all those type of things. And I’m like, I just want to access the money that’s in my account. And even then, it was interesting that the branch just tried themselves as being a smaller branch. So they didn’t have the amount of cash that I needed in the hundreds. They had to start dipping into their 50s. And I’m like, OK, I can understand this. You know, it’s it would seem like it would be a lot more difficult to go rob a bank when you’re like, well, we don’t have this much in cash or, you know, we have to open the safe or whatever it is. but they’re you know in order to access my own money i mean it wasn’t a big deal it took 15 20 30 minutes but and then we could go pay for the car but the the banks and the financial institutions aren’t interested in giving money to the incorrect people because they’ll be on the hook for it and have to make it up and so What should be an easy process of just, oh, I need to go get mom and dad’s money becomes complex because there are people who engage in identity theft. And I don’t think anybody listening is a big fan of identity theft. If you are, well, I’m not sure. I just don’t understand that. But we want to make sure that they want to make sure that you are getting your own money and not somebody who shouldn’t get it. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM or heard on 100.7 FM or the KLZ 560 radio app. Phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. And again, 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. And once again, that’s 720-394-6887. And it makes perfect sense that we don’t want to give money to the wrong person. If Luke goes into my bank and says, I’m Michael Bailey. I need $20,000 in cash to buy a car. I would hope that the bank would say, well, let’s see your driver’s license. Let’s see your debit card. Let’s make sure that we don’t just give Luke $20,000 to buy a car when Michael isn’t here. And I think we can all understand that. And Luke, you probably wouldn’t want me to come to your bank and just withdraw $20,000 from your account, I’m guessing.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’m getting a head shake here. If you could find $20,000 in my account, I think that would be a bigger miracle.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Is it a… I think you could withdraw maybe about $0.37. Okay, that’s fair. Depends on if I had lunch today or not.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, fair. I can understand that, yeah. So, you know, we’d been saving money for a car, so that’s why it was in there to be taken out. Yeah, because, you know, you said the money bags, and I’m like, hey, it’s up to $1.43 in mine, okay? So, you know, got triple the net worth of you, Mr. Luke, at $1.43 and $0.37, right?
SPEAKER 1 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Moving up in the world. But, you know, whether it’s a billion dollars or a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, you want your money to get where you want it to go and not be picked up by somebody else. I mean, and, you know, there are those who they will pay attention to obituaries and they’ll pay attention to, you know, announcements from the funeral homes of who has died. And they will try to go and get access accounts. That’s what they do. I mean, I think that’s a terrible way to do things. And I’m like… If you’re that clever to figure that out, shouldn’t you try to be doing something, oh, I don’t know, legal and morally correct instead of trying to steal other people’s money? There I go exposing myself. I’m not a big fan of stealing. Ooh, controversial statement there, huh, Mr. Luke? I don’t like it when people steal.
SPEAKER 03 :
Very controversial. Hot takes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, hot takes. Stealing is bad. I believe there’s some sort of commandment about that as well. Maybe, I don’t know, thou shalt not steal. Whatever, I got nothing. And so we’ve got banks, financial institutions, cool. you know if somebody’s going to come and you know be like oh well i need the car well they have to get the keys whether those are you know physical keys or the fob key so you can push button start or you know however it is you know my key to my tesla just has to be inside the car so that it will start and drive and that’s that’s nice you know every once in a while i’ll sit down and be like the key is not inside the car i’m like i’m pretty sure it is so i’ll push a little button that unlocks the doors it’s like oh hey look we found the key i’m like yeah just sometime i had to replace the battery and the key not too long ago because it was dead enough that it wasn’t you know providing a signal but yeah that’s what you got to do But, you know, banks, financial institutions, money, I mean, if you keep, you know, if you’re like some of my, the friends and my grandparents’ generation, where my grandparents would keep cash in, like, jars. And so they didn’t trust, you know, having lived through the depression, they didn’t trust the banks and things like that. So instead of putting their bank in an investment or in a financial institution, they would keep cash in like jars and they’d put the jars in their basement. Sometimes you’d find a jar out in the garage or whatever it is. So, I mean, if you have cash and somebody comes into your basement or your garage and clears out the jars of cash and shatters the mason jars and takes the cash, there’s not a lot that can be done there. I mean, hopefully they will be. caught somehow is a thief and you know, you don’t want anybody to be Thieved or burgled either but banks and financial institutions because they’re Because they are wanting to keep somebody keep your money safe and you know use that money to you know support other people for investing and Pay interest and all of those things They don’t want to be giving up money. Totally understandable. And then think of something like a car. Okay, well, if you’re going to steal a car, you need the keys, right? But what if you go try to sell the car and you don’t have the title in your name? You can’t sell it. The person won’t buy it. You’re like, oh, yes, here’s the keys to this super fancy Porsche 911. You can have it. I’ll sell it to you for $50. Can I see the title? Well, why would you need the title? I mean, you know, it’s only $50. It’d be great. And you’re like, okay, great. So then you have keys. You’re driving around in your $50 Porsche. And then you get pulled over. And they say, can I see your license and registration? You give them their license. You pull out the registration. You’re like, oh, this Porsche 911 belongs to Cortland Slunton of the Denver Broncos. It was reported as stolen. you know, 36 hours ago. So how did you end up in possession of Mr. Sutton’s stolen Porsche 911? Uh, I bought it for 50 bucks from some dude. And you didn’t think to look at the title? Well, no, I just, I believed him that he owned it. Well… I mean, I suppose if somebody wanted to give me a Porsche 911 for $50, I’d want to see the title, but I wouldn’t turn it down. I’d be like, yes. Even if it’s a spend $50 and turn around and resell it on the market because I don’t really want to have a Porsche 911. I’m sure it’s a great car. I just don’t know that I could afford the maintenance and the upkeep and insurance and all those type of things. Normal cars, yes, I’m good at those. High-end cars, they’re more expensive than what I want to do. And then we have what we would do with a house. So with a house, I get this all the time. People are like, okay, I need a copy of the deed to your house. They’re like, well, I still owe money on it, so the bank has the deed. I’m like, actually, it doesn’t. And this is one of the things that I’ve learned only because I live in this world and I work in this world, When you buy a car, if you have a car loan, they don’t send you the title to the car until you’ve paid off the car loan. Instead, the lien holders or the bank or the lending institution that’s out there will hold on to the car title until such time as you pay it off. And that’s so that if you don’t make the payments, they can come and repossess the car and then they can sell it because they own it and all those type of things. Well, Houses and real estate work the opposite, where when you buy a house, you get the deed, you get the title to the house, so you are the owner of the house. Now, the bank or the other lending institution will have a pretty hefty lien against your house, so they will say, You bought this house for $200,000. We loaned you $200,000. So if you sell the house, we need to get paid back our $200,000. So they’ll go and they’ll file with the county so that if you ever sell the house, they know that the government knows and the lending institutions know that the other bank needs to get paid back first. Because if you go to sell a house, the people who gave you a loan, they want to get paid back. They don’t want to be like, oh, well, yes, we lent $200,000 on this house, but hey, they sold it three years later. So they still owed us $187,000, but that’s okay. We’ll get it somewhere else. Most banks are not super keen on just not getting paid when somebody sells a house. They want to be paid back. That’s part of the deal. You borrow their money, you sell it, they get paid back. Now, if you pay off your house, then you won’t owe anything, and they will send you what’s called a release of deed of trust, which means, hey, you know how we needed to get paid back that $200,000, and if you sell the house, we need to get paid back? Well, you’ve paid us back, so we’re going to go ahead and release our claim on the house. It’s all yours. You can do whatever you need or want to with it. Okay, that’s fine. We can live with that. But in doing so, you’re not, oh, hey, I get the deed now. It’s like you’ve had the deed all along, or you’ve been the owner all along. The bank just needs to be paid so that they don’t have to come and take it back from you. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM or 100.7 FM or the KLZ 560 radio app. 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, 720-394-6887. So if you have a parent who dies and you try to go sell their house and the person who’s buying the house says, oh, well, I need to get a loan for this house. The bank to give a loan, they will ask. They have all sorts of safeguards in place to make sure that the person who’s selling the house is authorized to sell the house and not somebody else. It’s a lot of what we read lots of cases about this in property law. in law school where you know before and we’ve we’ve pretty well developed systems now but you know you know before there the counties were as vigilant as they are and banks being as vigilant as they are you’d have things like you know somebody sells a house and the buyer buys the house moves into the house and is living there and the real seller comes home for vacation the real owner comes home for vacation say like what are you doing in my house well we bought it from person a well i’m person b and i actually own the house oh, and now we’ve got a problem. Now we have, it’s big trouble. And so, you know, banks and, you know, they’re going to protect their interest. If they loan money on a house and then the person, you know, ends up buying it from somebody who didn’t own the house and then they’re like, oh, well, well, so the bank’s like, well, we have to collect against that house. And the original owner says, but I’m the original owner and I didn’t sell anything, so now you can’t sell my house because I own it and you don’t. The bank says, oh, well, gee, well, we should have protected our investment of a couple hundred thousand dollars in this loan better. You’re like, uh-huh, you should have. So real estate, selling a house. I mean, I have my house that I own with my wife. If I want to sell it, I need her permission. I can’t just sell it out from underneath her. I’m not like, oh, hey, babe, sorry you don’t have a house anymore. Sucks to be you. I mean, that’s not going to play so well. It would also not do well for my marriage. But that’s a whole separate thing. So all of these types of assets that we’re trying to give away, even people who have, if you have a stamp collection or you have a coin collection or things like that, stamp collections and coin collections, there’s not really somebody like a bank or a county or something like that watching over it to make sure that it goes where you want it to go. But as you can come get a physical asset and, you know, sometimes I get calls from people like, oh, you know, my mom died and my brother went into the house and he took a whole bunch of furniture and what do we do? And I’m like, well, you’ve got to check to see that he was not going to receive that furniture through the probate process. And then really, if you think it was something untoward and you need to either file a civil lawsuit against him or you need to report him to the police for theft, you know, all those type of things to try to recover that. and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t because sometimes people go and you know they’ve oh well you know people are like well where did all of mom’s jewelry go i don’t know where all mom’s jewelry went except for the person who took mom’s jewelry went and sold it either at a pawn shop or you know sold it online and now it’s all gone and the money’s there and they spent the money and now you’re in trouble because if if the asset was there but then it was sold and the money’s gone trying to get it back it can be problematic so this is a huge reason why when we’re setting up who is in charge of carrying out an estate plan, we need to be very careful. Be very careful to pick somebody who knows what they’re doing. We need to be very careful to pick somebody who’s capable of doing what needs to be done. We need to pick somebody who is able to carry out the instructions, do it the right way, and that will go through the proper channels to get everything finished off and done for you. And that they will take, if it’s a will, they will take the will to the probate court. And part of what the probate gets them is what’s called a letter of testamentary or a letter of administration. It’s legal permission from the court to act on behalf of the deceased person and transfer assets out of that deceased person’s name. So with a will, the court will tell you, hey, You are the correct person. We see that from the way it’s all done here. So you are now in charge. You’re responsible for things. Go do what you need to do in a trust. You name a successor trustee and that successor trustee oftentimes will need to get a new certification of trust or statement of authority that shows that they’re the currently acting trustee because the person who originally set up the trust has now passed away. So there’s there’s those things that you have to be concerned about and you have to worry about and you have to look at so that the proper person is authorized to do so. And that proper person can either be somebody you know and trust who is able to handle such things. There are professional fiduciaries out there who do that. They certainly charge for their time, but sometimes you don’t get anybody in a family who could handle it or just whether people are bad with money or there’s, you know, rifts between siblings or oftentimes when I have a blended family where the parents married a little bit later in life and they have each have kids from previous marriages and they’re like, oh, if I put one person in charge, then the other side of the family will be angry and mad and it won’t work well. So we a lot of times there will end up picking one child from each side of the family. So they can work together and then they’re, you know, just because we don’t want one set of kids thinking that they’re getting hosed by the other set of kids. So who is in charge of your estate plan and giving them proper authority to be able to carry out your instructions is very important. It helps ensure that your assets will get where they’re supposed to go. And, you know, sometimes those people don’t act in the correct manner. But then there’s courts and other resorts and other ways to try to prevent them from doing things that are outside of what you want. So thank you so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM. I will be back next week. But for right now, stay tuned for John Rush and Rush to Reason. And everybody have a great day. Thanks and bye.
