[music] Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with your host, Michael Bailey. Over a decade ago, attorney Michael Bailey turned his attention to a state 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. [music] Good afternoon and welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey, where we’re trying to do something besides just leave your family alone. You’re listening to 560 KLZAM, 100.7 FM, possibly on the KLZ 560 radio app. Phone over to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. Again, that’s 303-477-5600. My direct line is 720-394-6887. Once again, that’s 720-394-6887. It’s been an interesting, it’s always an interesting week in the state planning. Whether interesting is good or bad or otherwise, that’s a whole set. It’s a separate question. It’s been an interesting week in general. I’m just looking out the window here and I can see in the foothills smoke building up from what appears to be some sort of a fire over there in the foothills. Luke, can you see that from where you are as well? Can you see the smoke? I can see how it’s coming up off the foothills over there. It’s a little hard to see, but yeah, you can make it out. We’ve got smoke, we’ve got fire. That means as we walk around, as we walk around and enjoying the outdoors in the summer, it’s a little bit smoky. It’s not as bad as it was several years ago. I don’t remember, it was like maybe five, six, seven years ago when it was so bad and you had ash raining from the sky. That was probably the worst that I’ve experienced. I don’t know how to prevent forest fires. I realized that he’s told me that only I can prevent forest fires. It’s my fault, so I’m sorry there’s forest fires, my bad. You should be ashamed. Yes, but did you know that only you can prevent forest fires, Luke? I guess I should be ashamed too. No, I’ve transferred all ownership of this fire for me to you. I’m ruined, Michael, I’m ruined. Now you have to find somebody else. You listener, you can prevent forest fires. Now it’s everyone’s fault. That’s what Smokey the Bear says. I’m not smoking the bear, I cannot prevent forest fires. I am a responsible camper though. So when I go camping, if there is a fire band, number one, I don’t have a fire. But if there is no fire band and I do a campfire, then I am… I make sure that I put the fire out. So you have to camp fire, you keep it in the fire ring to start with. And then when it’s time to go to bed, you put it out, you dump water on it, put dirt on it, so that it’s cool to the touch before you go to bed. And then you have a lot less likelihood of starting a forest fire for other people. Now I realize that not all forest fires are started from campfires and there are many different causes. But it makes the view of the mountains a little bit hazy. I was up in Fort Collins a couple of days ago and that was before this other fire down here, appears to have started and they had a fire up there, so it was a hazy year as I went further north. But it’s unpredictable. The beginning of the summer, remember how much rain we had and how it was nice and wet. We’re like, “Oh, this is great, this is awesome. Maybe we’ll have less fires this season.” And yet here we are. More fires. And what we really need is we need a big giant rainstorm to come in. No thunder, no lightning, so that we’re not starting more things. But just a big giant rainstorm to rain, put things out. Right? That’d be great. Although a lot of the forest fires are truly put out by the snowstorms and the winter. But we’re a little bit early for a snowstorm. I mean, do you think July 31st would be an okay day for a snowstorm? Luke or no? No, no. I don’t think so. Definitely early. Yep. So we’re not going to get a snowstorm any time soon. It’s a snowstorm any time soon. It’s 100 plus degrees. My daughter has band camp this week. Last week was volleyball. This week is band. So she’s out marching with the marching band playing her flute. And telling us that she’s not actually sunburned as her skin turns a nice shade of pink and then red. She’s like, “No, no, it’s a tan. It’s a burn kid. If you’ve got my genetics, it’s a burn. It’s just the way that it is.” And when there’s just not a whole lot you can do there. But, you know, so it’s unpredictable. And you know, it’s summer. We’re supposed to be enjoying the outdoors and enjoying all these things. I mean, especially if you’re trying to be right where the fire is, you can’t. It’s harder to enjoy it. We actually, in June, as we drove up to Idaho for our vacation, we drove by a… It was a prescribed controlled burn that they were having. And never been close enough to a fire, like a forest fire to kind of see it. But as we’re there, we could like see the flames on the trees. And we can see them kind of leaping. And this… It was amazing. It was kind of… It was nuts because you think of… I mean, it wasn’t quite… Not quite animated, bamby forest fire, where there’s, you know, sweeping waves of flames coming after you. But there were some pretty good flames there. I was like, “Ooh, that is pretty intense.” You know, you can see why… I mean, you know, the nature and… The power of nature and, “Oh, hey, we’ve got a fire and we’ve got a… So I think the Marshall Fire from a couple of years ago. And I happen to be able to see the smoke from the Marshall Fire from my office up in Brumfield. And I remember seeing it and thinking, “Yeah, it’s kind of blowing in the line.” And I’m like, “That’s a weird set of clouds.” And like, later on, I found out it was a fire. And I’m like, “Ooh, even worse.” But the fire… That fire was… A… A… Fueled by… It was… Pretty… It was… Yeah, it started in the… The high winds kind of made it spread quickly. But the high winds were also brought in the snowstorm that put it out because that fire was in December. So, you’re just kind of in the awe and awe of the power of nature and the ability, “This is not much you can do there.” I mean, even as many as much as we have fire fighting equipment, and we have my wife’s cousin as a firefighter up in a Cheyenne area. And so he’s been… You know, they’ve gone into lots of wildfires and those type of things. They’re not dumping a whole bunch of water. They haven’t got hoses that they take out into the… They’re not a whole bunch of hoses that are taken out into the forest and trying to hose down the trees to stop the fire from spreading. But rather, they’re kind of like digging trenches and cutting fire lines so that the fire will be contained. So, it’s just a whole separate different set of things. We’ve had a couple of house fires over the last 10, 15, 20 years that we’ve seen happen in neighborhoods in your ass. And there you’ve got the fire trucks there and they’re spraying water and trying to get it. Sometimes they’re just trying to keep it from spreading to the next house because fire can be unpredictable and fire can be… No, this is not a fire fighting show. We are talking about a state planning. I’m sure I’ll connect it somehow. But you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on KLC 560 AM. Also heard on 100.7 FM. The KLZ 560 radio app, or phone number to talk to me on the air, is 303-4775-6000. And again, that’s 303-4775-6000. And my direct line is 720-3946-887. And once again, that’s 720-3946-887. So, when my 18-year-old was probably three or four and they happened to be driving and they saw a house fire. And so they got to stay and watched the house fire. And fortunately, it was just the house that was on fire. You feel bad that people had lost their stuff. But nobody was killed or injured in the fire. And there weren’t any pets that were killed or injured. So, they were just… it was just… I mean, maybe I just like the physics of fire. But watching it is it would like… You could see the fire and it would like come out from underneath the use of the roof and kind of lap around. And you’re like, “It almost looks like it’s a substance.” It looks like it was like a liquid fire that was… It was kind of mesmerizing to watch. And I’m like, first of all, I feel terrible for the people whose house it was burning. But… and I’m glad it wasn’t my house. But it was kind of cool to watch. But, you know, I’ve also seen the movie “Backdraft” where they talk about fire. And they almost talk about it. Like, it’s lovingly or admiring it. And I’m like, “Well, I don’t know that I admire fire. It’s just kind of cool.” And, you know, we will… our street… kind of on Saturday nights, so we’ll do a fire pit like in their driveway. And so we all go gather around the fire and, you know, have… it’s not quite a block party, but it’s close. But it’s kind of a fun thing. But each of those fires are different types of fires. You’ve got a forest fire that we can see from the window. We’ve seen a house fire. You’ve got a controlled fire. And well, when we have fires on the street or we have a controlled campfire, or I have a propane field fire pit that’s a little bit safer to use when there is an extremely high fire danger because it doesn’t really give off sparks or things like that. Yeah, actually the last time that my son went camping, they took the propane fire pit and I was going to put it back in the backyard. And it slipped in all of the rocks inside of it fell out and I’m like, “Great, and it fell right into my river rock that I have in my house.” So I’m in the dark I’m trying to have my cell phone as a flashlight as I’m picking out rocks to put back in the thing. It was not my fighting moment, but it makes for us at least a story because it all turned out okay. But each type of fire is fought slightly differently. So if you’ve got a forest fire, you’re not trying to. I know there are like forest, there’s fire fighting aerial equipment where you have like a helicopter that’ll dump a bucket of water or there’s a little dump some fire retardant slurry stuff from a plane. You know, those exist. But for the most part in a forest fire, you’re not trying to douse it and put it out. A campfire, you should douse and put out so that it does not become a forest fire. A house fire, you know, they’re trying to save the house, they’re trying to save the house as an extra one, they’re trying to do, you know, they’re using hoses and water and all that type of stuff. So each type of fire is fought a little bit differently even though they’re all fire. So similar to a state plan, each situation is a little bit differently and needs to be approached a little bit differently. If you have a house, a car, an IRA and a little bit in savings, there’s one approach that we, you know, there’s not just one approach, but that’s one thing. If you’re somebody who has bought up real estate properties and you fix them up and then you rent them out, so you’re a real estate investor or real estate rental person, that’s going to be a very different way to approach things and you’ve got one house that you’re passing along to as well as just the kids. If you have, let’s say you’re like some of my friends who they don’t want the, they don’t want to be tied down to just one house, they move frequently and so they just want to live in apartments and then they invest their money somewhere else instead of putting money into a house. But that takes, that’s a different type of thing. I was talking to a client today who they have a couple of real estate properties but then all the other things they have are all set up in IRAs or 401ks or life insurance policies. So we have beneficiaries on all of those policies, so they were very concerned about avoiding probate and what’s going to happen. I said, well, you know, if you’ve got real estate in the trust and then everything else with this will, you know, it’ll happen here. It took me a few times to realize they weren’t quite grasping what I was saying about beneficiaries and beneficiary designations. So a real estate, so an IRA or a 401k will have beneficiary designations, which means with the company that is administering the IRA or the 401k or where it’s held. So let’s say you’ve got your IRA at Fidelity, for instance, then Fidelity will have a form where you can designate who the named beneficiary of that IRA is. So that if you die, the named beneficiary is going to receive that money. And if you have that beneficiary designations set up with the Fidelity in my example, and Fidelity is not the only one that does them, they’re just the first one that came to my mind. So if you die, Fidelity says, oh, well, this money is supposed to go to person X. So person X has to come claim it. They’re not the Fidelity is not going to spend lots of time and effort chasing down person X. Because it doesn’t necessarily, they’re not legally required to do so and it doesn’t necessarily be who they do so. Because if you’re Fidelity and you wait on person X to come claim the assets when they come claim the assets, it is very possible that person X will take several weeks or months or even years to come claim the assets. And there’s time frames where you can claim assets. If you’re outside of those time frames, you may not actually be able to claim them. But for the most part, you can. So if Fidelity can hold on to a significant asset, let’s say that you die and there’s $120,000 left in your IRA. So Fidelity has use of that $120,000. They can use it to keep as cash reserves or when Fidelity on the investment side of things makes loans to people and issues, you know, backs, bonds and stuff like that. And the more, the longer the Fidelity can hold on to that $120,000 of extra IRA money that doesn’t need to go somewhere, the more that they can use that money to make money for themselves, whether they’re charging interest and making interest or they’re. Using it for whatever purposes Fidelity is. So as long as they’re not required to, they’re not required by law and it’s not really in there. They don’t have a whole department that goes out and’s like, oh, somebody died. Let’s go track down the. Let’s go track down the person who’s supposed to receive this money. You know, that’s not not part of what they are required to do legally or that would be, you know, it’s not necessarily just part of not part of what they have to do in their business. So they’re going to hold on to it. Now, if you’re the person who’s the beneficiary, obviously you want to go and claim that asset. Often times if you’re a surviving spouse or if you’re the kids of somebody who’s passed away, you’re going to be going for the money. You know, if my dad were to pass away, then my mom would want to access the retirement account money so that she can use it for herself instead of just having instead of just having it sitting out there and eventually going to us as kids. Because that’s not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for getting the money to where it’s supposed to go. And so, you know, if fidelity or the other companies aren’t looking, aren’t actively looking for the beneficiaries, who is it that’s going to look for those beneficiaries? Why I’m glad you asked. See, this is why you’re listening to a mobile estate planning with Michael Bailey show on 560 K L C A M or on 100.7 FM. The 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 720-3946-887. And once again, that’s 720-3946-887. So the person who’s going to go looking for these assets and trying to gather them and bring them all in is a personal representative for a will or a successor trustee for a trust. And these are the people who are tasked with gathering assets and distributing them to where they’re supposed to go. So, in a will or a trust, there’s usually not a list of all of the assets. I mean, in a trust, we will have a list of what’s been moved into the trust. And you can usually put it at the back of a trust as a schedule A that says here, your assets that have been put into the trust. So then the trustee knows where they should go looking. And then the in a will, you have to just kind of have to go looking for the assets to find where they are. Now, a lot of times it’s not an official part of the will, but I will tell people, hey, it might not be the worst idea to kind of keep a list of your assets and where people can find stuff and keep that with them. It’s not an official part of it, but it’s kind of a guide of here, here’s where you can go find stuff. That can be important. Because sometimes people die suddenly and then the survivors are stuck back behind going, hey, where are we supposed to go? What are we supposed to look for? And if you don’t claim assets, eventually they’ll either be claimed by the government or claimed by a company that’s holding them at some point. Okay, we’ve had this IRA sitting here for 35 years and nobody’s come to claim it. Now I guess it’s ours. So it’s never a bad idea to have a list of assets. Well, several years ago, probably seven or ten years ago, I had a gentleman who he worked with me, we created a trust, and then he assured me he would put all of his assets inside of the trust. And I gave him instructions on how to do so and let him go to it. Well, he never actually put the assets inside of the trust. So when he died, his family was very concerned about what are they supposed to do and how are they supposed to find these assets? And, you know, how do we track them down? I’m like, well, it’s not like there’s a set of people that are just out there that keep track of who owns what and, you know, can go find their assets and things like that. You know, you can try to track them down and things like that. But sometimes it doesn’t work out. And so they were like, well, what am I supposed to do? None of them were experts at tracking down assets. And I’m not an expert at tracking down assets. So they asked me what they thought they should do. And I said, well, the thing is that usually investment companies and insurance companies and the new-odd companies that issue quarterly or yearly reports. So really what you want to do is kind of check the mail for the next three to six to 12 months. See what comes in. If something comes in saying that he has an, you know, that here’s a statement of your life insurance policy at mass mutual. Well, then you go contact mass mutual see if you can track it down. You know, that’s not always the case. A lot of that there would be the case if it was an insurance company policy that had some sort of investment component to it. A term life insurance policy that’s just a payout when somebody dies, you might have a tough time just finding that. So in that case. You have a, you have to go looking in people’s houses to see what you can find. You know, my, you know, my house. I have a filing cabinet that’s got various things about insurance policies that I’ve purchased or, you know, there’s a whole section there on life insurance. You know, I’ve got folders that have important documents like my kids birth certificates and things like that. Got another spot where we’ve got, you know, passports, you know, just all of these important documents. You know, that’s one of the things that you start looking for when somebody dies and that’s what the personal representative or the successor trustees. One of it’s an important thing they have to do is to go find all of this paperwork. Now you can help them out by keeping a record of it and putting it somewhere where it’s easy to find. So if you’ve got a will or a trust and you’ve named a personal representative. First, you can give them copies of the documents and then you can say, oh, and here’s where the originals are along with a list of assets and things to find. And then this is where you can find them. So my dad, years ago, did that. He put together a binder that had the various insurance policies and where his investments were and, you know, the house and all that kind of stuff. So he went and he put that all together in a three-ring binder and he says, well, you know, if anything ever happens, this is where you can find it. This is where you can do it. I’m like, cool. Now I’m not 100% sure on how well he has kept that up as things have changed because I know they’ve switched where they have investments. I know they’ve switched. We’ve done a little bit of planning on who actually owns the house and things like that. So those things have switched up and changed over time. But as they have, we’ve been able to, but I would imagine he’s been keeping it up to date. But, you know, maybe he hasn’t 100% kept it up to date and that happens too. It also happens sometimes that, you know, you bought an insurance company from, about an insurance policy from XYZ company. And XYZ company was bought up by ABC company that then merged with an LMNOP company and eventually ended up with the Alphabet Soup Company. So you go, you’re like, ooh, I’ve got XYZ company insurance policy and then you go to contact XYZ and you’re like, oh, XYZ company doesn’t exist. So you follow the chain to the Alphabet Soup Company. You’re like, okay, hey, Alphabet Soup Company. I have this policy here that I need you to pay out on Alphabet Soup Company says, well, we’ll see if we can find it and so we can issue things and get everything taken care of. But this is part of why it is so important when you’re setting up your state plan to pick somebody as your personal representative or as your successor trustee who can go through and do all of these things. If somebody is trying to look to do this in the least amount of work possible and, you know, see how quickly they can do it and spend as little time as possible, that might not be the right person. Because it does take time and effort to do things once somebody’s passed away. Your state plan gives them good guidance and direction, but you also want to make sure that you pick somebody who’s capable, willing and able to handle administering and carrying out the instructions of your state. So thanks so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. John Rush and Rush Reaser up next. Stay tuned and I will talk to you next week. Thanks and bye. Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey will return to ATX next Wednesday at 230, here on KLZ 560. AM 560, FM 100.7 and online at klzradio.com.