In this episode of Mobile Estate Planning, host Michael Bailey recounts the many challenges he faces to balance his legal duties with his personal life stories. Bringing his narrative alive, Bailey shares a particularly emotional story of last-minute estate planning from an ICU room, coupled with his signature humor and personal observations. Dive into this captivating episode to learn why timely estate planning is critical, and the role family businesses and personal legacies play in this legal tapestry.
00:26:27 Episode Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser
SPEAKER 07 :
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 01 :
All right, good afternoon. Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning, where we try to do something besides just leave your family alone. You’re listening to 560 KLZ, possibly 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, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. Once again, that’s 720-394-6887. So it’s a Always an interesting time. It’s been a long time since I walked into the studio as my intro was playing. Normally I’ve been able to get here a little bit early, but today was one of those right at the last minute, even a minute after the last minute. Does that sound about right, Luke?
SPEAKER 03 :
We played some Phil to buy you some time.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, did you?
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s all right.
SPEAKER 01 :
It happens to the rest of us. I pulled into the parking garage at 2.28. And then I was walking in. And I was going to be on time. And then the elevator was slow. Because you’ve got to have the slow elevator. The slow elevator is just like a normal elevator. It’s just slower. And it was going to show up. I was going to be on time and all that kind of stuff. And then there’s all those people who were driving on the road. And they’re totally reasonable people going about their business, just driving on the road the way that they were supposed to. They don’t even know or care that I’m driving somewhere and they wouldn’t get out of my way. They kept driving where they were going. It’s almost like they had no clue what I was doing or any reason to know or care. So, you know, I was talking with a client this morning. We were talking about how during the COVID shutdowns and how it was nice that you could drive the roads, but you almost felt like it was the zombie apocalypse because you were driving between all the freeways and nobody was out. But, you know, it’s no longer the case. But, you know, so as the mobile estate planning attorney, I do drive back and forth and go see people where they are. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t even go that way. So I do try to build in enough travel time to get there. But today I had a client who called me and I called her back and then she called me as I was on the phone with somebody else. And I call her, I’m like, okay, this is just going to be a two-minute call. I can make this call. We’ll be fine. Well, suddenly the two-minute call became a 12-minute call. And we had, oh, it’s like, okay, well, I just, you know, we need to find a time. Oh, well, you know, I need to try to find our calendar. Let me see if I can… Oh, it’s not here. Well, I’ll have to go upstairs. Please bear with me. And I’m like, okay, come on. We’re just trying to pick a day here. And, you know, that’s… We definitely want to… I don’t want to ever shortchange anybody on time, and I never want to rush anybody, because when you rush estate plans, you get bad things. But I had missed what I thought would be two minutes. It ended up being 12 minutes, and that’s the reason I got here at 2.31 as opposed to 2.29, which is kind of the latest I should have been here to be able to get everything done. And, you know, that’s sort of the same thing that, you know, the timing that there’s timing that comes up with estate planning, too. You know, you need to get it done before you die. You know, an hour after you die doesn’t work particularly well. You know, an hour before you die, I suppose it’s possible. And I have done it. You know, as recently as a few months ago, I was in the ICU getting things signed for a gentleman. And he had had his, we had about seven weeks before we signed everything, I had sent him draft copies. You know, just trying to get it done, hadn’t heard from him. And then he got a call at 5.31 a.m. on a Saturday. Apparently he was in the ICU and wasn’t going to make it. And so they had him on some sort of drug that was keeping his blood pressure up. And basically that drug alone was keeping him alive. So, I was, I think it was in November, because I was hanging Christmas lights that day, so I didn’t even check, I didn’t even pick up my phone until 11.30 in the morning. And I listened to the message, and I’m like, oh, alright, okay. And I picked up my phone because we were on our way to a basketball game, so… Drove over, you know, got my son warming up for a basketball game and I went and called this lady back and she’s like, yeah, he’s probably not going to make it. And I’m like, well, so I usually don’t work Saturdays, but you know, I can make an exception for this, but I am in this game until two. And then I have to go home and I have to print everything. And then I have to drive out to the hospital where he is so I could be there around four. I was like, does that even work for your timeframe? And so she went and asked the doctors like, yeah, that we can do that. I’m like, okay, cool. So we went out about 4 o’clock, and he was completely mentally capable, knew what we were signing, knew what we were doing, was joking with my… I brought my wife with me to be a witness and joking with her that, well, if he had been 50 years younger, then he would have given me a run for my money and stuff like that. I’m like, that’s fair. If you’re… And so we got everything signed, left the hospital about 5.15, and they stopped administering the medication to him at like 5.23. And by 5.40, he was gone. Now, in that case… there weren’t any questions about his mental capacity. He knew exactly what he was doing. His body was betraying him. Well, not everybody in the ICU is that the case. Lots of people in the ICU are unconscious and whether they’re Medically, they can’t really be awake and alert or whatever it is. To be able to sign an estate plan, you have to be mentally competent to know what you’re doing and to understand what you’re doing. That just seems like a good idea. And so because of that, I really don’t like doing things at the last minute. I mean, I… I think I end up doing more things at the last minute than the average bear, so to speak, simply because I joke that lawyers don’t do things at the last minute. We do things in a timely manner. Just somebody else’s last minute is before your last minute, so I have to get their last minute stuff done before I can do your stuff last minute. But I also try to encourage people to do their estate planning before the last minute so that it’s not in there and trying to be rushed. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on… 560 KLZ AM, also heard on 100.7 FM, or the KLZ 560 radio app. The phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. And once again, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720- three nine four six eight eight seven and once again seven two zero three nine four six eight eight seven so as we’re you know and you you want to plan ahead for things like this i mean i’ve you know it’s we’re We’re at the end of April, coming into May, and I’m starting to get the group of people who call me about estate plans and say, oh, hey, we have an old estate plan. We would like to update it and get it all ready because we’re going on an overseas trip. And I say, well, when’s your overseas trip? Well, we’re leaving on June 15th, so we’d like to get it done before then. And that’s where I have to say, well, I’m booked 90 days out. I’m sorry about that. So I’m probably not the right one to try to squeeze you in when we’re running out of time. And a lot of people will be like, oh, okay, well, we’re sorry. We didn’t know it would be that far out. And I’m like, in all fairness, it’s kind of a newer thing for me. you know, it’s a last year and a half, two years that it’s been that way for me. So it’s not like it’s a, you know, everybody should expect that. Like, well, do other attorneys have that long of a wait? I’m like, probably not. I don’t know. You’d have to ask them, but it’s, it’s kind of like, it’s just, I want to help as many people as quickly as I can, but I need to do it the right way and I want to do it the right way. And I can’t compromise my ability to help one person by prioritizing one thing over another simply because people haven’t… done, you know, I haven’t done something different. And so I help as many people as I can as quickly as I can, but within the parameters of the time that I have and the ability that I have to get people scheduled. And so, you know, to me, that kind of parallels with estate planning and, you know, the law anyway. You know, I’ve had many people over the past couple of weeks, they’re like, oh, well, you If we have a house in a trust, it can be sold, it can be rented. How does that all work? And I say, how would you like it to work? What do you want to have happen? Well, no, but what does the law say about what’s supposed to happen? I said, I just asked you the exact question. How do you want it to happen? There’s not necessarily a default rule for every single situation, every single possibility, and every single thing that might ever come up. If you put a house in a trust and you don’t say anything about whether it can be sold or rented or what needs to happen, then it’s up to the discretion of the trustee. So your trustee who’s in charge of the trust would then have the ability to decide what to do with things. Eventually, those assets would probably need to be distributed out to the named beneficiaries. But in the meantime, what do we do with assets? While they’re still in the trust, it’s up to the discretion of the trustee. but you can also give directions to the trustee. You can say, well, I don’t really want it to be to the discretion of the trustee because I want to make, I want to give instructions on what’s supposed to happen. And there are some very understandable situations when that would happen. And it makes perfect sense. So I have several clients who are kind of real estate investors, and they’ve bought many of the… They’ve bought many of the… the apartment buildings, sorry, I can’t think of a word, apartment buildings. And so that’s what they do. So they are a, they have rent apartment buildings. They’ve got a few of them. And so, you know, my biggest one probably has like 3,000 apartment units that he rents out. And his trust has very explicit and specific directions on what’s supposed to happen with each apartment complex and how they’re supposed to continue to be rented and which apartment management company they should use. Because he does real estate and real estate management. That’s what he does. One of his children… is a horticulturist. So she is like the head horticulturist at a greenhouse. And that’s what she does. And it’s great. One of his other children is a like owns a grease monkey or something like that. Maybe it might be a Jiffy Lube. I don’t know. But they’ve gone different directions with what they do with their lives. And so the children don’t necessarily know or understand real estate investing and property management to the level that he does. And so he’s trying what he’s trying to do is keep those 3000 apartment units so that they’re being rented And that after he dies, that those 3,000 apartments that are being rented will then be 1,500 apartments per child. But the rents from those will help pay for their lives or maybe completely supplant the income that they have of what they do. and he doesn’t want, because he’s a real estate investor and real estate landlord, he doesn’t necessarily want to leave everything up to his kids to try to figure out how to do all of that. It’s just not really big on his, he wants to make sure that they’re okay, and he wants to use the assets that he has accumulated to make sure that those assets continue to take care of his kids and his family in the future, which is perfectly understandable. But that doesn’t mean that none of his kids wanted to go into the, quote, family business of being real estate. It wasn’t appealing to them. And I can understand that. I mean, we’ve had, I mean, whenever people ask me, they’re like, oh, are your kids going to be attorneys like you? I’m like, not if I have something to say about it. You know, my brother-in-law, who’s an interventional radiologist, he’s a doctor. He would love for all of his kids to become doctors. So far, none of them have the desire to do so. But my oldest daughter, she wants to be a doctor. And she’s been trying to find someone to shadow or someone to, you know, have control. to, um, you know, learn from. And, uh, she’s, you know, we know lots of doctors, but for whatever reason, a lot of those opportunities have fallen through and we’re like, well, see, the thing is that, uh, your uncle, he, uh, works from home a fair amount, so you can go do that. He also, he’s not the, he’s not in charge of the radiology department at the hospital where he works. But he is kind of the one running it because the department chair is busy and off and doing other things. So we’re like, well, then he can kind of tell the hospital that that’s the deal is that you’re going to be there and following him. That’s just how it’s going to go and get over it. He’s got that ability. So it’s kind of a cool opportunity for him. The family business, so to speak, my dad, his hobby is to buy and fix broken sound equipment. And so as such, we’ve ended up with lots of sound equipment, so we’ve been a family of DJs. And I’ve DJed 1,000-plus weddings in my life, and I’m mostly retired now. Every once in a while, somebody from our church congregation who hasn’t planned ahead comes And his getting married will ask me if I can come out of retirement to help them out. And I’ve done it twice in the last five years, but I’m mostly retired. But when my dad had quadruple bypass surgery, he kind of got out of the DJing business, mostly because he couldn’t carry the equipment anymore. He was restricted from being able to carry the heavy equipment. So my youngest brother and I literally picked up the company and moved on without him because we had the speakers and things like that. And so when I was newly married and he was living down here in the Denver area, we would go do bridal shows and work things. And it was kind of a fun thing. And then as I had kids… And as things became more busier, I kind of found myself not being able to do a wedding on a Friday night from 6 p.m. to midnight or 1 or 2 when a wedding would end. So you had a Saturday night, and you’re like, okay, we’ll start at 6, do the ceremony. It’s supposed to go until 1. They want to keep going, so you’d tell 2 a.m., And then one of the last ones I did, I remember it was about 2 a.m. that we finished and we got everything packed up. And so it’s like 2.30 in the morning when we left. And we left Grand Lake. Anybody know where Grand Lake is? It’s up through National, on the other side of Rocky Mountain National Park. So you have to drive all the way through Trail Ridge Road to get there. So we left there about 2.30 a.m. And I was driving Trail Ridge Road at 2.30 a.m., where your headlights go, and they drop off, and they just go into darkness, and it’s just darkness there. And you know full well that there’s a sheer cliff down there. I drove on the opposite side of the road, far away from the edge. Just so that I’m like, 2.30 a.m., yeah, I’m pretty awake, but also don’t want to take chances and there’s nobody else on the road. Oddly enough, at 2.30 a.m., driving through Rocky Mountain National Park. Dropped my brother off at his house in Loveland. I got home about 5 a.m. I’m like, all right, cool. And I was in a church leadership meeting at 6.30 a.m., so I got a good hour of sleep. And that was the day where I’m like, maybe I don’t need to do this anymore. Maybe I don’t need to carry on the family business, and rather I can kind of give this one up. And, you know, everybody has that moment, whether it’s as an adult or as a kid. You don’t want to do the same thing as your parents or your family. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning on Michael Bailey here on KLZ 560 AM or heard on 100.7 FM. Possibly 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… That’s a pretty good reason to not be, you know, to have more direction in your trust or your will of you have knowledge and expertise in an area that somebody else may not. And so you kind of, if you’re trying to preserve the wealth and keep things going, then you want to do that so that you want to do it in such a way that you’re not going to create problems or difficulties and things like that for your family. You know, sometimes it’s not always that way, because sometimes we have sometimes people just they either want to have more control or they want to have more control. I have clients who are like, oh, well, my kids don’t know how to invest or they don’t know how to preserve things. So I’m going to give a whole list of how these are to be invested because I understand how they will be invested. And I will understand that then those investments will continue to work because my kids don’t understand investing at all. And I’m like, this all makes sense. When you’re trying to do things to take care of assets and preserve them for the next generation or even future generations, it’s a good thing to do in an estate plan. Now, sometimes there are people who are like, oh, I just don’t trust my kids, so I don’t want to give it to them, or And it’s a little bit trickier when you’re like, oh, well, I want my kids to learn the value of work and not just live off the money that I have. And I’m like, okay. So I had one client like that where we developed an entire thing where we said, okay, your kids can get money out of the trust. But what we’re going to do is say they will be limited to… pulling money from the trust to the same amount that they earn in their own work. So if somebody has a salary of $80,000, then each year they can bring their W-2 to the um trustee and say look i made eighty two thousand dollars they look at us okay we’ll distribute another eighty two thousand dollars or somebody’s self-employed they bring their schedule c and say look i yes i had um income of you know two hundred fifty thousand dollars but then after expenses i ended up netting fifty thousand they’re like okay well we’ll give you fifty thousand Now in the Schedule C thing, if you brought a Schedule C that just showed income and no expenses, you’re like, well, let’s see if we can maybe look at the expenses. But what they wanted to do was incentivize their kids to work and not become just dependent on the trust to support them in life. And I can see that. I can see wanting to instill a value of work in your kids. I mean, I did go to the University of Denver for law school, and it was pretty obvious that there were some what we would call trust fund individuals there where mom and dad had done extremely well. And so they were at the, uh, they were in law school and they were, um, So they were in law school, and they were going to get there. They were going to go through and do things, and I went to school with them. And here I was in law school knowing full well that my parents weren’t going to be able to help me out at all. I ended up having a lovely wife who had a job that was working full-time, so she paid for life. And I did law school, and then afterwards when we decided to have kids and she wanted to stay home, we could switch. It was great. But that was a discussion we’d had between ourselves to figure it out. But some of the kids that I went to school with, and some I was friends with, some I was just classmates with, but I had one who he drove his brand new BMW to school, and his dad was worth $190 million as a land developer in Canada. And I’m like, yeah, that must be a nice fallback to have of, If your law career doesn’t work out, your dad will probably at some point pass away and pass on $190 million to you, and then you’ll have to live off $190 million. And you know, it’s hard to survive on $190 million, except that it’s not at all. And, you know, I don’t have any work, you know, I have $1.90, not $190 million. I can put a whole bunch of zeros after the decimal point, but it doesn’t help me out much. But As you’re constructing your estate plan, you’re getting your assets to your kids, but you’re getting your assets to your family in such a manner that you take care of them, but you help them learn, grow, and improve, and you want the best for your kids. I suppose I’ve met a parent or two here and there that didn’t want what was best for their kids. But that seems very unusual and not the norm. So your estate plan is an extension of your ability to take care of your kids and to make sure they’re okay even after you’re gone. And your will or your trust, the terms of that are part of what you can do to help make that happen. 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 John Rush and Rush to Reason are up next, so stay tuned, and you can listen and learn. Thanks, and have a great day. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER 07 :
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.
SPEAKER 05 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ Management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
SPEAKER 03 :
Rush to Reason with John Rush is coming up next on KLZ 560.
SPEAKER 04 :
John Rush here on the next Rush to Reason. It’s Health and Wellness Wednesday, and Dr. Scott Faulkner will be your host and always has some great guests and will, of course, answer all of your questions. It’s three hours of health and wellness with Dr. Scott. That’s the next Rush to Reason. We take some 3 to 7 p.m. Brought to you by one of our great sponsors, Cub Creek Heating and Air Conditioning. Find them at klzradio.com or download our free app, KLZ Radio.
SPEAKER 02 :
Be sure to tune in to 560 AM and klzradio.com for ATX. Ask the experts every Thursday at 2 p.m. for Water Talk with Paul the Waterman. Paul is KLZ’s expert on all things related to the water we use and drink in our homes. So don’t miss Water Talk on ATX. Ask the experts Thursdays at 2 p.m.
SPEAKER 06 :
It’s springtime in the Rockies with Sportsman of Colorado. Hi, this is Scott Watley. Tune in Saturday afternoons at 1. We’ll tell you where the fish are biting with our fishing experts from Discount Fishing Tackle. We’ll talk with some of our favorite outfitters for turkey and the upcoming Colorado big game seasons. No Limits Archery will be here to get you ready for your archery season. All that and more on Sportsman of Colorado, Saturdays 1 to 2 p.m. right here on KLZ 560. Check out our website, sportsmanofcolorado.com. If you like the outdoors, you’ll love Sportsman of Colorado. Your home, the safety zone, a place where you rest, invest.
