Join Michael Bailey in this episode as he delves into the nuances of estate planning, contrasting the unpredictable life of a ‘Rolling Stone’ with the stability desired in family planning. He humorously likens the fleeting charm of gambling with the lasting importance of leaving a legacy for future generations.
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 :
All right, good afternoon. Welcome 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 again, 720-394-6887. Now most of my shows I start by saying we’re here to do something besides just leave your family alone. And of course we’re playing off the line of the song from my intro music of Papa was a rolling stone and when he died all he left us was alone. Well, you know, we’re trying to not necessarily leave just your family just alone. I mean, you know, the rolling stone and, you know, rolling stone. You know, biblically, we’ve got rolling stones can roll forward and fill the whole earth. We have the saying that a rolling stone gathers no moss, although I think the Mythbusters did an episode on that, and they determined that it might be possible for a rolling stone to actually have moss on it. But the The point is that the Rolling Stone was going to be moving so there wouldn’t be moss growing on it, all those type of things. And then you have the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger. And as we learned from some other songs, nobody has moves like Mick Jagger. Moves like Jagger. Or a different song where we can get kicked to the curb unless we look like Mick Jagger. Well, I do not look like Mick Jagger, so apparently Miss Kesho would, or dollar sign ha, would kick me to the curb. And I don’t know that I’m ever going to meet this particular individual, but that’s what the song says. So, you know, Rolling Stone, and the point of this Rolling Stone is, you know, Papa was a Rolling Stone. He kind of, you know, never found real roots and, you know, kind of kept going from place to place and never… accumulated anything or had anything that he could pass on to his family. Now, there are retirement planners out there, not necessarily Al Smith, but who talk about the concept of die with zero, where you end up spending all of your assets so that when you die, you don’t have anything left over to pass on. because you’ve planned well and it matches exactly when you die. Or places where you don’t want to have your retirement planning go such that you don’t end up… For those of us who aren’t going to die at the exact moment that we run out of money… Or I suppose you could run out of money on a Tuesday morning and die on a Tuesday afternoon or something like that. The goal is that your last check bounces. So the last check to the mortuary or to the cemetery bounces. But it bounces… a week or two later, and then they’re like, well, are we really going to dig him up? What are we going to do? We’ll just leave it alone. That type of thing. I think with electronic payments of credit cards or debit cards or ACH payments or Venmo or Zelle, it’s a little bit easier if it doesn’t clear. Well, we’ll know pretty quickly here that it didn’t clear, all that type of stuff. But in the world of electronic payments, a bouncing check or trying to float a check for a day or two may not quite be what we’re able to do. But the Rolling Stone, moving from spot to spot, is kind of a nomad and never accumulating anything. I think that would probably be an interesting lifestyle to explore. For me, I would be like, I don’t know that I want to explore that particular type of lifestyle. Because I have a 19-year-old, as of a week ago today, a 17-year-old, and a 13-year-old. And those children, I like to give them a little bit more kind of sense of place and stability than what a Rolling Stone would have. We’re not going to be wanderers where we… move from city to city and you know need to you know roam the countryside and you know maybe we have like a vw van that we can drive from one spot to the other and we’ll be like all right we’ll just you know oh you know we’ve had some fun in denver but now i’m just gonna i’m gonna take to the road and i’m sure that uh you know when i hit colorado spring somebody will be nice there and give us a place to stay and feed us and Then we’ll keep going. Maybe we’ll stop in Pueblo. Who knows? If Pueblo doesn’t work out, we can go down to Raton, New Mexico. If that doesn’t work, we’ll keep going to Las Vegas, New Mexico, which when you see the signs on the freeway for Las Vegas and you’re driving on I-25 South, you’re like, wow. This is much quicker to get to Vegas than going all the way down to Nevada or driving the other way. And, of course, it’s Las Vegas, New Mexico, not Las Vegas, Nevada. Not the same, not quite the same glitz and glam, not quite as many casinos. As a matter of fact, I believe there’s a grand total of zero in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sorry, Las Vegas, New Mexico, not Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s more in Las Vegas, Nevada. Not that I’m a big gambler. I’m very not of a gambling type. The last time I was in Las Vegas was about a year ago for a volleyball tournament. And they gave me $100 in promotional chips. So I took my $100 in promotional chips. and I turned them into $50 of cashable chips. You’ll notice that went divided in half. From $100 to $50, I managed to spend about half an hour at a blackjack table losing $50. But since they gave me the promotional chips and I gambled them and ended up with $50 in cashable chips, I then thanked the dealer, stood up, walked away, and I went and cashed in my $50 in cashable chips for $50. So my version of gambling was to turn $100 of casino house money into $50 of actual money because that’s usually the way it goes when you go gambling. You go, hey, I’m going to lose because there’s a reason why Las Vegas, Nevada has… Billion-dollar hotels and billion-dollar casinos. And it’s not because they’re paying out lots of money to the people who are coming and gambling. The concept is the house always wins, right? So I’m not a big gambler. And since I’m not a big gambler, I’m not going to gamble on I’m going to go to… different city and on the way I’ll be able to stop by the be able to stop by the road and pick some berries or I’m sure the people who are growing corn won’t mind if I just roam through the field and take a few years of their corn to eat and you know I can be like Johnny Appleseed who I believe was a fictional character and you know walk across the west you know throwing apple tree seeds and you know those type of things I don’t think that’s how it’s going to go And so I’m not much of a Rolling Stone. Do I do some things that could be considered nomadic or risky? Sure. But since I’ve got the three kids and we’ve bought a house and so we have a house and we have a yard and You know, the yard I need to get out when it’s kind of come springtime and maybe a little bit more rain than we got yesterday and put down some more grass seed because as we were redoing our deck last year, the grass didn’t get whole. And so there’s places where it’s died a little bit. So I’ve got to try to bring that back. And, you know, so maybe I can plant some moss so we can get some moss as opposed to grass. But still, so we have the house and we have some cars and we’ve accumulated some clothes and some food. It’s all the things that you have in normal life. And those are the things that I want to pass on to my family through an estate plan. Because you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on KLZ 560 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. Once again, 720-394-6887. So everything we do with estate planning is kind of looking at how are we going to take whatever you’ve earned, whatever you’ve saved, whatever you’ve built, and pass that on to people who are important to you. Usually your family. Not always, but usually. So, I mean, you get someone like Warren Buffett who says, you know, I’m not going to pass all my money on to my kids. I’m going to give half of it away. and then I’ll pass some on to them, but I want them to work for it too. And there’s certainly a lot of merit and good things that come from you have to earn your own money. If you earn your own money, you feel a little bit more connected to things, and you’re much more likely to protect that money and spend it wisely than if you’re just like, oh, hey, I had a million dollars fall out of the sky. Cool, I can play with this. And if that’s what you can do and it works for you, great. But I don’t know. Most people I don’t know have a million dollars fall out of the sky. I don’t know. Maybe that’s where Luke made his money with the million-dollar rainstorm that he walked through and ended up with a million dollars. But I don’t even know. I mean, I’ve seen game shows where they put – there’s like cash and it’s in a little – It’s like in a booth that the wind blows around like it’s a hurricane, and they’re trying to catch the cash. And you’d think it would be easy enough to catch this cash, but there’s like $100,000 in there, and the wind blows for two minutes, and the people, by the time they come out, they’ve caught like $950 worth of the $100,000. You’re like, oh, well. You got less than 1% of it. Congratulations. It’s hard to come by. I don’t have a mining claim up in the mountains. I’m not going to strike gold and become rich. I’m not Jed Clampett. I’m not going to be out shooting at some food and Up from the ground come a bubbling crude oil that is black gold and Texas sea. I don’t have that, you know. Plus, the next line of that song is, the next thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire. King folks say, Jed, move away from there. California is the place you ought to be. I’m like, I don’t know if California is the place that I would want to go settle, with housing prices being four or five times what they are here. California is a wonderful place. My dad grew up there in the Bay Area. I’ve been to visit California many times. But I don’t know that California would be where I would want to settle and raise a family, partially because I’m a Colorado guy and my law license is tied to Colorado. but also just because Cost of living. You know, there’s the congestion. My wife and I went on our honeymoon, and we flew into Los Angeles, and we spent a day or two at Disney World and California Adventure, and then we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, and we stayed at a place in a town called Pismo Beach there that was about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And then kept driving up to San Francisco and we stayed in San Francisco for a couple of days and went to see the, we walked on the Golden Gate Bridge and went down to Fisherman’s Wharf and got a bread bowl with clam chowder in it and you know, did all the kind of California things. And, you know, when in Pismo beach, we got there just as the sun was going down. So we didn’t necessarily spend a lot of time at the beach, but we did go out and watch, walk along the beach as the sun was setting and in the, as the sun had come down. And so it was still, you know, fairly warm and all that good stuff. But I don’t know that I would want to live in California. It’s just not my place. Now there are people who are from, I have many friends who are from California and have move here to Colorado, and they will extol the virtues of California. And I’m happy to listen to them and say, yes, that sounds awesome. That sounds great. But my dad, having grown up in the Bay Area, and when my grandfather died and my grandmother needed to move out of the house, and the first thing that the people who bought the house did was raise it to the ground, you know, bulldoze it to the ground and build a newer, bigger house. You know, the dirt is very expensive there in California. And, you know, being able to be on that dirt is an expensive proposition. And, you know, for people who have, you know, wonderful, you know, I mean, someone like my dad used to work for Hewlett Packard. So, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard who started HP and have done very well and now it’s a multi-billion dollar company and they’ve both passed on. But they were the founders of a tech company. Someone like Mark Zuckerberg or other Silicon Valley people who made it and struck it very rich. They can totally afford to live in California. It’s great. But even those who, for normal people, everybody finds a way to live where they are and accumulates things. But when my grandpa died, and then my grandmother, so they sold the house, and my grandmother ended up in assisted living for like 10 years. And, you know, the $750,000 that they got from selling the house, that $750,000 was gone by the time that grandma died 10 years later. Because… Money got spent on assisted living. Money got spent on all these things. And was it really good that there was $750,000 worth of money that grandma could live off of? It absolutely was. I joke about how if grandma had stayed healthy for another 10 years, then… By the time that she died, they could have sold the house for like $3.4 million. And then that $3.4 million could have been split up between my dad and his siblings. So they each would have gotten $1.1 million since there’s three of them. And then we could have been rich. We could have won the California lottery. Or the California real estate lottery. Maybe winning the California real estate lottery is similar to playing blackjack in Vegas where Eventually, unless you can keep paying for the house and the real estate and everything, you lose. But it would have been great if my grandparents had been, oh, well, we built this house, and now we’re going to build another. We’ll buy up. you know, houses along the block and we’ll buy some other houses along the block. And by the time they’re done, they own, you know, so they own 10 to 12 houses in California. Well, you know, had they done that and, you know, been real estate investors, then we could have been rich. But instead, we’re like most people that I know where we’re not rich. And we just have the normal stuff we have of the house. And I have some investments and I have some cars. We’ve got clothes. We’ve got furniture. We’ve got all the things so that we live a kind of normal, comfortable life. Well, if I pass away, I want to pass what I’ve accumulated on to my children. Well, first to my wife, if she dies after I do, which based on the actuarial tables and the life expectancies of men and women, she’s two years younger than me, so likely I will die first. And not that I’m hoping to do that anytime soon or that any of you out there are going to leave us anytime soon. But If I die and I leave everything to her, I want her to be comfortable. I don’t want her to have to be scrambling to try to figure out how to pay for a house that hasn’t been paid on or scrambling to try to figure out how to pay for life and groceries and things like that. I want to leave her in a good spot where we say, okay, you’ve got the house, you’ve got some money left over, you’ve got some retirement accounts where money’s coming in, all the things that Al does for you. And then when my wife and I both die, we want to pass it on to our kids. Because if we have anything left over, that just seems like a better place to give it to our kids. than to just random people on the street or the government or the nursing home or the assisted living place that we might need to go live. If we can keep money and preserve it for ourselves instead of passing it on to those other folks, hey, cool, that sounds great to me. So that’s kind of one of the things we’re doing is trying to leave your assets and your money to your family so that you’re not a rolling stone and the last thing you do is leave. And the only thing you do when you die, the only thing you do is leave your family alone. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on KLZ 560 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, as we’re going through and doing things, and then we consider, okay, well, if we want to leave stuff to our kids, cool. Do we want to leave it to them all at once? Do we want to leave it to them over time? What would be the best way to do so? Because getting a large sum of money all at once… may not be the best thing for somebody. We have a, I have a friend from college and she has inherited money from, uh, like three of her four grandparents. And that money that she inherited, you’d think you’d use to spend on maybe trying to buy a house or something along those type of things. But it was… It was one of those things that it didn’t quite work out that it went like that. And so she inherited this money, spent it on stuff, and now it’s all gone. And now she has $30,000 of credit card debt. And you kind of look at it and go, didn’t you inherit like $80,000 over the course of the last couple of years? And then you pause. You’re like, where did all that money go? And the correct answer is none of us knows where – none of us can tell other people how to spend their money. And I’m sure there are many things that I do with my money that people would not be big fans of. And – Uh, you know, I’m sure that there are plenty of things that, um, other people do with their money that I wouldn’t necessarily know, you know, and be able to say, Hey, it should be one way or the other. You know, that just doesn’t seem to be how things would work for me. Um, so I’m not trying to tell people how they should or should not spend their money or how they should or should not do things, but it does make a difference. on what they’re able to do or not able to do. And so in this case, it becomes a tough thing to tell people how they should or should not spend their money. But if she had earned that $80,000 over the course of the last few years, She may not have spent it all at once because it wasn’t brand new, everything money that was going to become problematic for her. And so with that, we had, you know, there’s just all sorts of different things that we do. And we go, okay, well, you know, so maybe instead of giving everything away, to somebody all at once, we say, well, that might not be the best idea. So we’re going to try to do things maybe not all at once, but rather, you know, spread out over time, or things like that. And so, because of that, it’s a In your estate plan, you might want to say, hey, if we’ve got a million dollars, and I use a million dollars just as a big number, and that’s the number that I have, that if I were to pass away, the million dollars would go to… I have life insurance that would pay out $3 million between my wife and I, so that if… my wife and I die, there’s about a million dollars per child. Well, my children are young enough. I don’t want to give them a million dollars all at once and say, oh, hey, sorry about that. Good luck. But instead, I want to have it paid out to them over time. So while they’re young and they’re under the age of At 25, I have my brother-in-law and sister-in-law who are going to use that money to take care of them. And then I say when they turn 25 or graduate from college, they can have whatever’s left over from the rest of their portion of the million dollars that they haven’t spent. And they can have half of it at age 25. And you can have the other half at age 30. So I split it up into two different payments so that I hope that my kids will, if I am dead and gone by the time they’re 25, that they’ll take that money and they’ll spend it wisely, whether they put a down payment on a house or they invest it or they pay off student loans or do whatever it is that they do. I hope they use it wisely and don’t just blow it. But I also look at it and say, well, but if they do blow it, then at age 30, they have the final half coming. So they’ve got two different chances to use the money wisely. Other people I’ve had say, well, I’ll give my kids, if there’s a million dollars, I’ll give them 10% per year for every year after I’ve died. So that’s $100,000 per year. They can do that for 10 years, and then from there, they’ll move on and see how it goes. I’m like, okay, well, that’s not the worst thing either to have $100,000 a year for 10 years, but then you don’t have a million dollars all at once. You’re like, ooh, I’m rich. I can live forever and never have to work again. $100,000 a year, you’re like, that’s significant money. I mean, I would love to have had somebody give me $100,000 a year, but glass, I have not. And so you can decide, hey, do we want to do this all at once? Do we want to do it over time? And then that’s where you really look at your own family. And you say, let’s talk about our kids. How are our kids doing? And some of the kids may have the ability to take that million dollars, not spend it all in one place, invest it wisely, and make it last. Other kids may not have that ability. They’re kind of a buy all sorts of stuff when they’ve got money and then worry about the consequences of that later. And so you may want to treat those types of kids differently, where you go, okay, well, One is this way, one is another way. I have some people who are like, well, you know, we’ve bought a house for our kids, so we’ll give them that house. And then, because otherwise that kid’s never going to understand how to pay a mortgage or buy a house, so we’ll do that for them. And we’ll give the other kids cash because they already have a house and they don’t. You don’t want to do things the same way. So when you’re setting up an estate plan for your family, you really want to consider who your family is, who you want to benefit, how you want to benefit them, and what’s the best way to benefit them so that your money will enrich their lives and not just go away. And so we can do something besides just leave your family alone. So thanks so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. I will be back next week, but stay tuned for John Rush and Rush to Reason. And I will talk to you next week. Thanks and bye.
