In this engaging episode, attorney Michael Bailey combines storytelling with expert advice on estate planning. From navigating permits for a new deck to reflecting on how personal events can influence professional insights, Michael highlights the significance of planning for the future. Discover the importance of family time and the lasting memories created when we prioritize what truly matters, seamlessly linking these values to effective estate management.
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 :
Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM so that we can do something besides just leave your family alone. You could also be listening on 100.7 FM or the KLZ 560 radio app. And if you are, we’re happy to have you there. 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 720-394-6887 Now, if you’re going to try to call me on the 720-394-6887 line, for the next half an hour, I’m probably talking here. So it’s going to be a tough time, too. because I’m talking on the air and I’m just not talented enough to have two conversations at once. I’m just not that good. But, you know, although I suppose at home sometimes I’m having a conversation with my wife and one with my daughter and one with my son and one with my other daughter. And sometimes the puppy dogs get involved too. So there’s five, six, seven conversations going on. But, you know, there you can kind of tell when you’re looking and, you know, turning between people which conversation I’m having. And the puppy dogs, they don’t… Sometimes they listen. They do talk back, but since they are woofing and barking instead of speaking English, sometimes it’s… They get their point across quite a bit. Usually it’s, I would like to go on a walk, or… I am hungry. Please give me a treat. Or there is some sort of danger out in the front yard, whether it’s a rabbit or a squirrel or a neighbor dog walking by. Sometimes there’s a leaf that’s blowing by or sometimes there’s an evil wind current. You know how those evil wind currents are. We must be alerted to them. Otherwise, all bets are off. But, you know, so, you know, having conversations with people and, you know, it’s just usually, you know, when I’m doing estate planning, I tend to have one conversation with one person. You know, sometimes my phone will ring and people like, oh, do you need to get that? I’m like, no, it’s fine. And they’re like, oh, we know if you need to answer. I’m like, no, it’s perfectly fine. Like if it comes up with a picture of my wife and she calls two or three times in a row. Then I’ll think about answering it because if she’s calling me two or three times in a row, that means probably something has gone wrong and we need to address whatever’s gone wrong. The only time that has happened to me in my career, I did not pick up the phone. She called me like three times in a row. I was about five minutes from finishing up my meeting. So I called her back after I was done, but she was calling to tell me that our puppy dog was very sick and that she was going to take the puppy dog to the vet. And so, you know, she was calling to tell me about that. So that’s why she called a couple of times in a row. I’m like, well, that’s kind of where I came up with the rule. If you call a couple of times in a row, then I should probably answer. But that was the night that we had to take the puppy dog. She took the puppy dog to the vet. Vet said, well, puppy dog has this wrong with her. She had a pyometra infection, which is apparently a uterine infection of a dog. And just had a bacterial infection that spread to the rest of her body. And we had to say goodbye to her later that night. So I’m like, yeah, maybe that’s an important thing to be able to do. But otherwise, I can focus on clients and not get too distracted. Well, my puppy dog happened to become sick during a time when we were having our basement finished. So when we bought our house, we had an unfinished basement. And we always talked about finishing it and what would we do with it. And my brother-in-law is a general contractor. So several years ago, he had many things that fell through. So he ended up with a month where he didn’t have any jobs lined up. So he called me and said, hey, you still want to finish your basement? I said, sure. So he came and he finished the basement. And it was every day, so we’d keep the basement closed off, and then every night the puppy dog would go down and inspect what they were doing to her basement. So we’d open the door, and she’d go down, and she’d sniff around, and she’d try to figure out what these new wall things were, because when they first framed the walls, she could still go through it. But then they put up the sheetrock, and suddenly she couldn’t. And so she was… She was enjoying exploring what was going to be her new basement. And unfortunately, she did not live to see the end of the final finished basement. So that was kind of sad for her. But, you know, it was just kind of she would go inspect the progress. And I don’t think she quite was inspecting progress the way that we would have. Oh, look at this cool new thing. She’s like, wait a minute. What are you doing to my house? This is my house. My dogs are such that. They live at the house and we are their guests. Kind of like when people come to visit me, they don’t come to visit me. They come to visit the dog and, you know, I guess they can talk to me too, possibly. Because, you know, puppy dogs, ours kind of rule the roost and, you know, they’re very opinionated and all those type of things. But, you know, they’re still puppy dogs. So this summer we’ve had, since the basement’s finished, this summer we had our deck redone. And the deck was built with the house, so it’s probably 20, 25 years old now. So after 25 years, it’s probably time to take down the deck and do a new one. And the deck seemed okay, but when we knocked it over and demolished the first deck, I think all of us yelled timber as it all fell over. But then when it was down, you could look and see kind of some of the joints and things that were there. You’re like, huh, there’s a decent amount of rot there. Hmm. Good thing that we, you know, it’s not like it was going to collapse or anything, but it was time to redo the deck. Well, our house, the main floor, it walks out to the deck, but then we have a walkout basement. So if you walk out the main floor, there needs to be a deck there. Otherwise, you need to know how to levitate and not fall to the basement level. So for several weeks, when they didn’t have a deck or they were building a new deck, we had to block off the doggy door because we didn’t want the doggies going through the doggy door and then falling the 10 to 12 feet down to the newly poured concrete that we poured down there. Like that might not be great on a puppy dog. So we blocked it off. And, you know, this just yesterday, we got our final inspection, our final permit. So we have a fully built, fully permitted deck with a nice burglar. And now we have a deck. Yay. And we have, we can unblock the doggy door so the dogs can go in and out and our dogs will go out and they’ll lay down on the new deck and just kind of bask in the sun and enjoy the fact that they have a new deck. And you may be wondering, what in the heck does a deck have to do with estate planning? And the correct answer is absolutely nothing, but I’m going to relate them because this is Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM, also 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 once again, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. And once again, direct line 720-394-6887. So as we go through, as we went through this process of building a deck, We got an interesting education in all sorts of things. So apparently where we live, if you, so a DEC needs, you know, DEC doing things in the backyard, you know, building new structures attached to the house, they need to be permitted. So the city needs to issue a permit for that to happen because part of what we did was there was one piece of siding we had to take off so that we could put the deck in and then they had to build a little thing so the moisture would go away so that we didn’t rot and mold the house all to the, so it collapsed. I’m like, that makes sense. We don’t want the house collapsing and we also don’t want the deck collapsing. We want it to be built properly. They had to dig some holes and go dig down three feet so they could put three feet of concrete in there so that it would have a nice footing so it’ll hold up the deck and all those type of things. And so to get a permit, you have to apply to the city for a permit, and applying to the city for a permit is not exactly the easiest of things. The city has the permits that they will issue, but they also have their process, and their process isn’t necessarily the simplest and most straightforward and easy-to-understand process. because sometimes they’re pro you know they’ll be like oh well you need to we need to update that to um this and we need to update you know you need to submit this online okay well if we submit it online great well has it been properly submitted has it been received Has it been all, you know, do we now understand everything that’s there? Or is it a, you know, is there some sort of problem with it? And it’s not always clear what the problem might be with the, you know, there’s, if you submit something online, and you’re like, okay, now it’s submitted online. And they’re like, oh, well, there’s a problem with it. So it’ll come back and be like, oh, you know, this is rejected. You’re like, okay, well, why was it rejected? Well, I would like to think that there’s some sort of sheet that’s like, oh, hey, here’s the 10 things you need. You got these nine. This one was wrong. Okay, we’ll fix that. Or a little red circle that says that I need the measurements on this, or I need to know what the load is going to be on this support pillar, or we need to know what material you’re using for the deck itself. Is it going to be hardwood, redwood? Is it going to be stainless steel, which might get too hot in the sun and probably not work? Would it be the Trex material? And what are they going to do there? And so we eventually figured that out. And then sometimes you try to call to get clarification and nobody’s there to answer their phone or they don’t call back. Any of those things that can happen. And so just going through the permitting process, my wife took it on because it was a big thing. And our friends who’s a contractor who helped us build the deck, she’s like, well, the thing is if you have a contractor that is trying to do the permitting process, they’re going to charge us like $7,000 to do the permit. Whereas they’ll charge you like $700 if you do it yourself. If it was saving us $7,000 or $8,000 to do it on our own, we’re like, well, as long as we’re not spending too long, then we’re happy to go through the permitting process. But I was talking with my wife, and I thought, it’s one of those things where some of the larger construction companies that are out there, I drive around, and you’ll see Peterson Construction or Brinkman Construction or Shaw Construction or whatever ones are out there. They have whole departments. who are dedicated to the permitting process and getting the permits and pulling the permits and making sure everything’s done and, you know, scheduling the inspections and, you know, all of those types of things. And they have people who do that all the time. Now, my wife does not do that all the time. She is a, she’s a, an accountant by education training. She works as a reverse mortgage loan officer. So she helps people who are older and, you know, either want to be able to access the equity in their houses or, are you know in a financial situation where it would be you know beneficial to them to have access to the um equity in the house and can help them stay in the house or things like that that’s what she does she’s not a work with the cities and the counties to get permits all the time person But she had the time to be able to do this. And so, you know, she was, you know, we were talking about it yesterday after we passed the final inspection. We’re like, hey, like, well, you know, that’s really if that was a seven thousand dollars you made and you kind of treated that as a part time job. I wasn’t it wasn’t bad wages if we saved that much money and it worked out well. But, you know, she did the frustrations of, oh, well, what do they need and what format they needed and who do we contact if there’s a problem? And if there’s a little red flag that says, you know, waiting on this review, how do we know who’s reviewing it and how do we figure out who we should be contacting to kind of push the review along and all those type of things? Those are all things that we… didn’t know about. And so she had to learn about and, you know, for for the one time deck that we were doing and getting it up and running and working, she could do that. Well, you know, when we’re doing estate planning, I kind of feel like I’m a little bit of the person who knows the permitting process. And I know the, you know, how we can go through and get everything set up so that it works properly. And, you know, there’s, there is a final inspection of an estate plan, like of a will at the end, where if we have the estate plan and it gets taken to the probate court, the probate court will, you know, help, will, you know, be the ones that, you know, oversee the implementing of the estate plan. So there’s going to be kind of that final inspection, but the final inspection of that estate plan isn’t going to happen until after you’ve died and it’s too late to change or fix something. So the original framing inspection of our deck. We they they came in and the inspector came and he measured the height of the poles. And he said, oh, well, the height of the poles is not correct. It doesn’t match what’s on the plan. And so, you know, we caused a delay. So we, you know, we talked to our the person who was helping us build it, the contractor. They’re like, well, yeah, they are the same. They go to the correct height. But the pole itself is shorter because we measured the height of the pole from where the deck was going to be to the ground. And that’s what we put on the plans. But then before we built the – before we actually put the pole up – We poured some new concrete, and the concrete is not, it actually has thickness. It’s not a kind of translucent, super strong layer of concrete that doesn’t actually, that doesn’t have any thickness or any mass to it. So we had to talk to the inspector and say, oh, well, it is the right height. It’s just there’s two inches of concrete here. so that the total height is correct, but there’s some new concrete here, so that’s why it’s not exactly the same. And the inspector’s like, okay, I understand that. But when they first came by and nobody was there, they’re like, nope, this is wrong. Well, I mean, it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation to say, hey, this is fine the way it is. But we could do that where we could call the inspector up and say, yep, all right, this is perfectly fine. We you know, just you’re measuring the criteria as you’re just measuring the wooden pole instead of the total height from, you know, including the concrete. But the total height is correct. You know, once we explain that to the inspector, they’re like, OK, that’s great. We’ll go ahead and, you know, pass this on and you can continue building. We’re like, Yay, go us. Well, 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. 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, 720-394-6887. So the inspection is the checking of the work and making sure it’s okay. Well, checking of the work on an estate plan isn’t going to happen usually until after you die. And then if something goes wrong, it’s hard to tell the person who, you know, it’s hard to ask the person what they meant or what they had in mind or to clarify things because once they’re dead and gone, what you have as a written record is there. So it’s even more important to make sure you do things the right way. I mean, I will have lots of conversations where they’re like, oh, you know, we want to do this. I’m like, okay. I want to, you know, and we’ll kind of drill down to understand what it is that they’re saying. You know, we want this so it’s protected for our kids. And I say, protected from what? They’re like, well, we’ll just protect it. I’m like, okay. Well, there’s lots of things to protect from. Are we protecting from going through the probate process? Are we protecting from it being stolen by their siblings? Are we protecting from… the government coming in and taking money in taxes or the government coming in and taking money as a Medicaid reimbursement? Are we protecting from a lawsuit? Are we protecting from an alien invasion? By the way, I don’t know how to do a protection from an alien invasion and estate planning is just not something I plan for. But protection can mean lots of different things. Are we protecting from a rainstorm? Well, don’t take your paper will out in the rain and it’ll be okay. Woohoo! Now we’re protected! Yeah, but that’s usually not what people mean. But I have to understand what it is they want to protect from so that we can build that in. And, you know, so, I mean, I have, you know, our house, it’s probably like everybody else’s house. Sometimes there’s home improvement projects that’s needed. I’ve taken, you know, we had a landing on our stairs that we had a visiting dog that marked the landing, and then our dogs kept marking the landing. And no matter how many times we cleaned up the, you know, would use the, carpet cleaner to suck up all of the things in the markings um eventually i was like you know what i’m gonna so i pulled i cut up you know ripped up the carpet got all the way down to the floorboards and put down different you know kind of vinyl laminate flooring So that it would, you know, they would stop marking it all the time. Well, on the landing in my house, I could put down the new flooring. And, you know, I attached it so it wasn’t slipping around. And I, you know, I tried not to have a big, huge ridge that we would all trip over and things like that. But, you know, it was, I’m like, okay, now we can walk up and down the stairs and not slip and fall and trip over something. Or we don’t have loose carpet that we’re all, it’s going to, you know, fall out from underneath our feet as we’re walking. And it was fine. But I didn’t necessarily need a permit to remove the carpet and put a new carpet back on. But it was something that I could do myself. Now, from everything they did in building the deck, it’s probably things I could have done myself. I probably could have poured the concrete myself. I don’t know that I could have, we had this, we had the concrete stamped. I’m like, I don’t know that. I mean, I don’t have the knowledge of how to do a stamped concrete, but I could have poured the concrete myself and it would have been fine. Cool. And then, you know, building the, the support poles and putting the framing. I’m like, I probably could have done that too. I’m removing a piece of siding and then putting in a drainage system so that things don’t mold. Don’t know that I would know how to do that. I could probably look it up. I could probably figure it out, but it would probably take me a long time, and I’m not sure that it would be the greatest use of my time that I have. Putting up the railings, I could probably do that. We had them build the pergola. I could probably build the pergola. So probably 90, 95% of what they did, I could do. But also, if I were to do that, since I am still working full-time, it would have taken probably every weekend, every Saturday and every Sunday, every free moment that I had for the next two and a half or three years to get it built and get it done. It just would have been, or every time I come home from work, I’m like, oh, I’m going to go work on this. Well, the problem is that over the next two and a half or three years, I have a 16-year-old who’s going to be playing her junior and senior volleyball season, and I would like to go be able to watch her play volleyball. I mean, she has the chance of getting a college scholarship, and she is good enough that that may be her future. if i miss two years worth of her growing up because i’m busy working on a deck to me that’s not a great trade it’s not something that i would not where i would want to spend my time so i would rather have the people who you know our friend and the workers she had who know what they’re doing they came they built the deck yeah it was delayed because of the rain you know when we we were supposed to frame things and it was raining you know downpours in june And I’m like, well, that’s not working so well. But it’s not like I’m going to be disappointed in my contractors that, man, the contractors couldn’t control the weather. Oh, my goodness. Oh, wait, that’s not something they can control. They can control how to build it. They know how to build it to code. Even if there were, whether it’s the height of the poles or, oh, we need to put an extra support beam here or whatever it is. You know, all of those things they know and they can do. And, you know, the time, money and effort saved may not have been worthwhile for me as a. as an estate planning attorney to go do all those things. It was cheaper for me to hire them to do it, even though it wasn’t an inexpensive project. It was plenty expensive. But what I would have lost in two years worth of not being able to see my daughter play volleyball, I mean, one of the Things that I’ve really enjoyed is we went to Spokane, Washington, and we went to Las Vegas to watch her play volleyball this season. And it was just a – I wouldn’t want to miss the chance to go and watch her play and interact with her teammates and just all the things that come along with that. I wouldn’t want to be like, I’m sorry, I need to stay home and make sure that I’m putting more things on the deck. That’s just not – Not really how I want to do things. So the cost may not have been purely monetary to me, but it would have been in memories and time. And what I have, I mean, my oldest just finished her freshman year of college. She’s home for the summer, but she’s off as a college student and all those type of things. And the time that I have with her is now much more limited. I mean, we sent her back to college right after Christmas, and then we didn’t see her again until the end of April when we went to pick her up. It was just four months where we talked to her on the phone, but we didn’t see her. And so because of that, those costs are there, and those costs are things that we want to do. So just like you can do your own estate plan by yourself if you want to spend the time, energy, and effort to figure it all out, but if you want to let me do it faster and cheaper and hopefully better than what you might do, That’s why we do estate planning and, you know, lessons I’ve learned from rebuilding a deck, which, you know, we do get to go out and eat dinner on and, you know, enjoy our, we bought a fire pit to go with it, all the fun stuff. So thank you so much for listening to my story. That’s somewhat related to estate planning. I’ll be back next week, but John Rush and Rush reason up next. So stay tuned and we’ll talk later. Thanks. And bye.
SPEAKER 02 :
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 03 :
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 01 :
Rush to Reason with John Rush is coming up next on KLZ 560.
