[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. Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on KLC 560AM, 100.7 FM, the KLC 560 radio app, or if you’re Luke, you’re pushing the buttons to make everybody else able to hear it. Which is kind of awesome of Luke. We appreciate Mr. Luke for that, because if it wasn’t Luke, it’d have to be somebody else. We like Luke, so there’s that. Phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600, and again that’s 303-4775-6000, and my direct line is 720-3946-887. Once again that’s 720-3946-887. So just before I was coming in to start my show, I was talking to John Rush, who’s show will be right after mine, and so you should stay tuned for that. But he was talking to me about his parents, and apparently John’s parents are ailing, and he’s spending a lot of time taking care of them. I thought about, so we were talking about how he’s trying to, they’ve had to move them out of their kind of like home that they lived in for a long time, and they moved them, but then there was all of this stuff that gets left behind, because when you move out of the home that you’re in, lots of stuff gets left behind. This is kind of how it goes. It kind of got me thinking a little bit about people who are aging and/or have passed away, and what happens to their stuff. Now, from a legal perspective, we create a will. We say, “Here’s supposed to get what?” And then, that’s what happens, right? Except for there’s a little bit of the practicality of what do we do with all of this stuff. Now, about a year ago, I was scrolling through Facebook, and there was a cartoon, and it was a guy standing there, and he had a walker or a cane, and he was standing in front of a garage, and the garage was open, and the garage was just filled to the brim with all sorts of things, like filing cabinets and papers and tools, and paint cans, and all of the things that one would find in a garage. It was completely full. No room to walk through it, no room to park a car, nothing. And at the bottom of his head, he was talking to a son, he says, “Son, one day, all of this will be yours.” And it’s kind of the, “Oh goodness, really?” “Yeah, I’m so excited to have all this stuff that I don’t want.” And so, I think most of us have that in our lives. Now, I remember moving into my house, and we moved from a two-bedroom townhouse to our four-bedroom single-family home that we live in now, and we moved everything in. I remember going down to the basement, and we’d put like three or four boxes down in the basement. And thinking to myself, “There is no way I will ever have enough stuff to fill this basement.” So, five and a half years ago, we decided, my brother-in-law, who’s a general contractor, he had some open time, and he asked if I still wanted to finish my basement, and I’m like, “Sure.” So, we went down to finish the basement, and I went down to the basement. Now, I’d lived in the house for, you know, five and a half, six years, and you go down to the basement, and the three blocks, three or four boxes, had suddenly multiplied. There were shells down there, and an entertainment center, and a couch, and a whole bunch of boxes, and all sorts of other stuff, and, you know, toys that my kids had, and, you know, when they stopped playing with, we just kind of put the toy down in the basement. And suddenly, there was this, you know, it took us like an entire day to move everything out of the basement, and we moved most of it up to the garage, and so they could work on finishing the basement. And when the basement was finished, we then moved about 10% of it back down to the basement, because most of it were like, “Nope, we’re going to throw this away,” or we’re going to try and sell it, or there were several things that we put on the curb, and posted on Craigslist and next door saying, “Hey, this is free. Come pick it up,” because, you know, you accumulate stuff. And this last, and this week, on Monday night, I got home, and the hail storm that hit our house, a few, a couple, a month and a half ago, was not kind to our patio furniture. It pretty well shredded it, and then, as they were taking the solar panels off of our roof, so that they could replace the roof, on Friday, actually. Someone, one of them had a bolt that rolled off the roof, and the bolt fell, and landed on our patio on the table that we have, we had an outdoor table, and it was this safety shatterproof glass, so the bolt hit the table, and it shattered into a billion pieces. And we’re like, “Well, we already lost the chairs, we’re going to need to buy a new set, so, hey, the table’s done too.” So, we had scheduled a large item pickup where you can put all that kind of stuff out, and they’ll come by and pick it up and throw it away. And so, that was going to happen on Tuesday morning, so, Monday night, I was at the, I got home, and I was looking like it was going to rain, so I grabbed a coat that’s fairly waterproof, and then it downpored. So, as it was downpouring, I was carrying things out to the front curb, and we did that, and our netting on our trampoline had gotten shredded, so I took that out, and it’s pulling the, and trying to take the poles off, that held the netting up, and, you know, of course, some of the nuts didn’t want to do anything, because they sort of rusted, and I’m like, “Yep, and I’m in the pouring rain as I’m doing this.” I’m like, “This is a good time.” Yeah, it’s just fun. At least it wasn’t the 100-degree heat trying to do all of this, and then we had some extra, just, you know, some barrels that, you know, were supposed to hold water, but we’d never really done anything with them, like we pulled those out there, and I was like, “Okay, honey, can you think of anything else?” She’s like, “I don’t know, let’s go down to the storage room and see what we can find.” So, we went down to the storage room, and down in the storage room, there were boxes of like half finished quilting products, or half finished sewing projects, and they’d been down there for five, six, seven, eight years, and we’re like, “Yeah.” My wife’s like, “You know what, I’m never going to finish these, so we started hauling that up to toss it.” And then we have some food storage items where we’ll keep, it will buy, like, instead of buying like one can of green beans, we’ll buy like a whole flat of green beans, because then we’ve got them for when we need them, but we had purchased some, like pancake mixes, and I pulled out a box and had pancake, because then I’m like, “When is the last time we ordered these?” She said, “I don’t know, probably five years ago.” I’m like, “Well, the hour’s probably not good enough.” And they’d gotten just tucked away behind something else. So we’re like, “Well, the pancake mixes can go.” And then we’re like, “Well, we have the, we’ve been holding on to this toaster oven from like our college days, and our youngness is going off to college, and she doesn’t want to take the toaster oven with her really well.” It was probably okay back then, but who knows now? So the toaster oven went out, and you know, all of these things, and you know, by the time we were done, we had a pretty decent-sized pile out there, getting rained on, so that you can then get picked up the next day, which is, you know, it’s fine, it’s, you know, but we, there was a canvas that had my wife had gone to a, like, almost like a paint and sip type of class, and so she painted this picture, and she’s like, “Well, like we haven’t put this up anywhere. Do you want to keep it?” And she’s like, “You know what? I haven’t.” And she looked at it closely, she’s like, “Yeah, it looks like a little pole got punched there, so I’m never actually going to put it up, so that got to go away.” And so we were in the process of purging all of this stuff, and our stopping point was sort of we needed to go pick up our daughter from work, because my car is currently being fixed, and so we only have two cars, so we dropped off work, and we need to go pick her up. So that was our stopping point was, “Hey, we need to leave at 715 to go take, go pick her up at work, so that’s why we stopped tossing stuff.” Because you just kind of accumulate stuff. I mean, I remember even like as a college student, pack everything that I owned into my car and drive off to college, and keep it all there, and that I’d come home from college, and I’m like, “How do I have more stuff?” I’m like, “Well, somewhere along the lines, I might have bought a new shirt or a new pair of jeans, or my suitcase broken, you need a new suitcase, you just all those type of things, or one laptop versus the other, all of those type of things that you accumulate, and you’re like, “Huh, now what do I do with all this stuff?” And so we’ve experienced that, just recently, of getting rid of stuff. So you’re the same two mobile estate planning with Michael Bailey. Here on 560KLZAM, also heard on 100.7 FM. 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. So we have all this stuff, which was very important to us, and it was something that we needed to have and wanted to have when we purchased it, or some of the things we have, or other people were giving them away, and it seemed like a really good idea to have that particular dollhouse for our children when they were much younger, but now the 18-year-old is going off to college, so she doesn’t need her dollhouse nearly as much as she did when she was four or five and played with it all the time. I mean the dollhouse is usually to get played with dolls. My kids had their little OSPET shop, so they’re like tiny little dogs and cats and raccoons and foxes and rabbits and stuff, so they’d play with those. That’s fine, if the animal has a house, that’s cool too. We’re good with that. But all of this stuff, when you accumulate it, it’s good to have, and then suddenly it loses its usefulness, gets put away, and we all kind of put stuff away, and then you’re like, “Hey, well I’ll come back to that and get it,” and then you know how many years it is until you do. Now there’s, I mean there are people who I’ve been to their houses and they don’t seem to have any extra stuff, either they get rid of it, or I just don’t go down to the basement where it’s all scrolled away. I mean maybe there are people who are much better organized than I am, but I do see a lot of people where they’ve got a lot of stuff and it doesn’t seem to always, and so you know even, so here we are, you know it’s my wife and I, we’re both middle aged, yeah we’re not old, we’re not young, we’re right in the middle. We’ve accumulated this stuff, and it’s things like, “Oh well, you know we we bought that table and we used that table for a while,” and then we were done with the table, but we didn’t just like give it away or throw it away or something, so the table ended up like a craft table in the basement, and that’s great, except for you don’t need more than one craft table, or maybe you do, who knows, but if you have too many craft tables, then you walk up on the top of tables instead of walking on the floor, and then you don’t know what’s underneath the tables, you know, are there, is there some sort of carpet down there, is there a choice down there, is there a whole new ecosystem of unknown life forms, it’s like a, you know, the men in black, there’s a whole, you know, group of aliens who live inside of a locker, well, you know, what’s living in, yeah it’s hard to know, so you don’t want to have too many tables otherwise, you know, it eliminate, you know, part of your house that you’re living in, and you know, the longer, I think the longer you’re in a certain house, the worse that problem can be, you know, people who move frequently, they move every two or three years, I’m like, “You guys are nuts.” I mean, you know, good for you for moving, but, man, I, I mean, the best part about moving for me is what doesn’t have to come with you, because you pull everything out, you’re like, “Yep, that doesn’t need to come.” Nope, don’t need that, don’t need that, don’t need that, so you can get rid of all of it, but as you’re, you know, the, I mean, we’ve been in our current house a little over 12 years, like 12 and a half years, and, you know, just stuff gets put somewhere, because, or, you know, you’re like, “Oh well, you know, next time we need to do a large item pickup, we’ll throw that away.” For right now, we’ll just stash it in the basement, right, until it’s all stashed in the basement, and nothing works, or there’s, it’s all in the way. So there’s only so much that we can do with that. And so, at some point, you know, you have to deal with your stuff, whether you do it yourself, or then you end up with a situation like my parents or my grandparents. Now, my dad is still alive, my mom is still alive, so they have lots of stuff that they’ve accumulated, being their house for 40 years. My dad’s hobby is to buy and fix broken sound equipment, so like, you know, old vintage stuff, he’ll clean up and fix and then sell on eBay, or something like that. And he’s always had a lot of sound equipment. Well, now, since he retired a few years ago, he’s taken on the project of selling all of that off, you know, cleaning it up, fixing it and selling it off. And I truly appreciate that, because although I do sound stuff as well, and, you know, having worked with him and, you know, being a family of DJs and live sound and reinforcement guys, I’ve always appreciated it, and it’s been a fun thing that we could do together as a father and a son, but since his quadruple bypass surgery several, you know, decade and a half ago, and since I have my own family, we don’t do it as often, and we just don’t do it as much. So now, we’re here on the, you know, we don’t need the as much equipment. And a lot of the equipment, vintage type of equipment, you know, it can be valuable, you know, some things are not valuable, most of it’s probably not, but he knows what to look for and what might be valuable. So that’s always exciting, because, you know, I, I’m like, well, if it’s cool, but I don’t have the knowledge of what is, you know, what’s just old and what’s vintage and valuable, because just because something’s old doesn’t make it valuable and just makes it old. But in this, in this particular case, you know, he has knowledge there. So he’s been going through and, you know, divesting himself of this equipment, and everyone’s going to be like, oh, do you need some more equipment? I’m like, no, I really don’t, I just don’t do it as much myself. So he’s divesting himself of all of this equipment, and he’s selling it off or getting it cleaned up and all of those type of things. So that later on down the road, we don’t have to, because all of that stuff that is in the garage or in the basement, if he were to die and my mom, maybe okay, if he were to die, my mom would probably just get a big dumpster and just throw it all away, which is fine, but she would want us to carry it for her, because she is also getting older. And so I’m sure that my brothers and I would probably take it and go to the nearest pawn shop that we know of and sell it for, you know, two or three cents on the dollar, of what it’s actually worth, because we have no clue. So it’s nice that he’s going through and cleaning stuff out. And at this point, he’s capable and able to do that, which may change at some point in the future. You know, when someone is unable to stay in their own house or it’s just not safe for them to stay in their own house, then if they move to either live with a relative or to an independent living or an assisted living type of community, then if you move from, say, you know, my house of a four bedroom single family home, and if we were to move out and need to go live in a one bedroom independent or assisted living place, there’s going to be one tenth of the space, which means all of the cool things that we’ve accumulated over the course of our lives, they can’t come. You know, my Christmas decorations, my Christmas lights that are out there, they’re just, they don’t need to come to assisted living, you know, they take up most of my yard in the front of my house when I put them up, and they’re stored inside the garage, you know, we have a two and a half car garage, so we park our two cars and then, you know, put the Christmas decorations all around. But yes, there’s a lot of stuff out there, and I enjoy putting it up, I enjoy having it up, I enjoy, I suppose I enjoy taking it down, but it’s not as much fun to take down, that means it’s January or early February and Christmas is over and all those type of things, but that stuff is not going to come with me if I move somewhere. Now, I’m at the point now where there’s things die, I don’t necessarily need to replace them, I’m like, oh, that particular snowman no longer turns on, we will not use it anymore, but when, so whether you’re trying to give away stuff when you die or you’re moving down the aging process into a different road, there’s just, you know, what do we do with this stuff? And all the stuff that was so valuable and so important to us when we accumulated it or purchased it, just doesn’t seem to quite have the same value. You know, there’s, I suppose there are exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, you buy something, it wears out or it just gets older and it’s not as valuable. It’s still valuable to you, or it’s still important to you, but it’s not nearly as valuable or as important in trying to sell to somebody. So you’re listening to Mobile State Planning with Michael Bailey here on KLZ 560 AM or on 100.7 FM. 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 720-394-6887. And once again, that’s 720-394-6887. So and then there’s matter of personal preference. There’s always things that people like, you know, so my mom has a bunch of fairies and lighthouses that she has in her backyard. It’s just how she’s decorated it. And she really likes them. It’s not my style, it’s not my wife’s style. So she would have passed away and we had a whole bunch of fairies, fairie statues and lighthouses. I wouldn’t want them in my backyard, just not my style. And I don’t know that any of my siblings would want those. It’s not their style either. So if my mom and dad were to pass away and we were to be selling off fairies statues and lighthouses, whoever likes fairies statues and lighthouses would get a screaming deal and they would be so happy they came by and we would be so happy to be rid of them. It would be awesome. But you also run the danger of when I was in 8th grade my grandfather passed away. And my grandmother had a series of strokes and so she was paralyzed on her right side. She couldn’t live by herself. So she moved out of the house into an assisted living and memory care type of place. And my dad and I went to the there we flew out to California to Palo Alto where they lived. And we began about the task, went about the task of cleaning out the house. Now there was lots of stuff in the house and we’re cleaning out the garage and we pulled out my grandfather’s old set of golf clubs which became my first set of golf clubs because I kind of rescued them and took them home with us. And there were some books that we kept. There were some other things. But for the most part, this was stuff that my grandparents accumulated over their lifetime. And I think it was probably nice that they weren’t there or my grandma wasn’t there to object to us taking this stuff and just throwing it away. But we had a grand old time. We took truckloads out to the dump and somebody had thrown away a portion of the toilet. So we thought it was our at least I thought it was great sport to throw all the trash that we had and see if I could break the toilet. Which I did manage to do when I threw an old radio at it and it shattered the toilet. I’m like, “Whoo!” Yeah, these are the exciting things too. In a year old, or who are we kidding, a 46 year old like I am now. You know, I’m like, “I’m not hurting anybody. It’s just there. It’s all being tossed. It’s all being thrown away so we can get that all thrown away and shattered and stuff like that.” But we spent the better part of probably two or three days like six, seven, eight hours a day moving stuff out and throwing it away and just trying to clean out the house so that it was not so cluttered and it could be sold off. Which, you know, we did eventually do. But I remember that experience from my, and you know, if my, if both grandparents and died and we like, “Oh well, now you can inherit all of this.” And we’re like, “But we don’t want it. We don’t need it. We already have our own stuff.” So, you know, we’re going to take all the stuff and drive it from Palo Alto, California to Fort Collins, Colorado. That’s a long drive with a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t want. Like, “Well, we can throw it away in California or we can throw it away in Colorado.” Either way, we’re good. But when you die, I mean, there are people who, I mean, I have clients who have really cool collections of sports memorabilia and, you know, like, autographed jerseys from John L.A. and Joe Sackick and things like that. I’m like, “Okay, that might be valuable. That might be worth something.” But for the most part, a lot of the stuff we’ve accumulated, it may have a lot of sentimental value and awesome value to us, but doesn’t necessarily have the same level of sentimentality or value to the people we’re leaving stuff to. Now, I have several clients who have seasoned tickets to the Broncos. And they’re seasoned tickets to the Broncos. They have to be very careful about which kid they leave those two or to whom they leave those tickets because there’s a long waiting list for seasoned tickets to the Broncos. And if someone dies, they’re allowed to pass them on to their kids. If they don’t, then it gets put back in hopper and then there’s 70,000 people who are on waiting lists who want it. And then the kid says, “Well, no, I want those back.” I’m like, “Well, you’ve already been sold. They’ve already been done.” So you have to get to the back of the line of the 70,000 people. Well, if you’re last in line of 70,000 people, what do you think Luke, do you think you’re going to make it to the front of the line by the time that you die? No, not anytime soon at least. Yes, because you would need another 70,000 people to die and not pass their things on to. And, you know, that’s just, so, you know, no season to, so people who have seasoned tickets, those are valuable. Those you have to be very careful about, who do you leave those two in your will and where do they go? Not so much with a, with other things like, my daughter has a friend, she’s a volleyball teammate and her dad has all sorts of ticket subs from all the concerts he went to, like through college and things like that. So, you know, the Eagles and Beach Boys and, you know, all of those type of bands. And I’m like, “Well, that’s really cool. That’s really awesome.” But when he dies, I don’t know that they’re going to be quite as sentimental value to people like his kids who weren’t there as they are to him. So you’re allowed to have your own stuff, you’re allowed to enjoy your own stuff, but kind of a realistic knowledge and understanding the expectation of what’s going to happen to that stuff is part of what we deal with in a state plan. Yes, we want to give stuff to the kids. Cool. But what if they don’t want it? What are we going to do with it? Do we sell it? Do we donate it? Something that can’t be sold or donated? Do we just throw it away? You know, there’s so many things there. And, you know, so we do the legal planning of who’s supposed to get what? And, you know, we, if it ends up being, the stuff gets sold off or just thrown away. I mean, there was something kind of fun. There was something kind of fun about going through all these old projects this week and being like, “Yep, we’re not going to do those, we don’t do those, we can throw those away.” And yes, we paid the fee to have them come picked up. But, and, you know, at some point we’ll probably need to get new patio furniture, probably off Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace because I don’t really want to pay a full price for it. Stuff can get expensive. But, you know, you got to worry about your stuff, what do you do with your stuff? And also realize that sometimes your stuff isn’t nearly as valuable to other people as it is to you. So, we count for all of that in the state plan, put the legal things in place, but then whoever’s left over to take care of things, that’s their job. So, thanks for listening to Mobile State Planning with Michael Bailey. I’ll be back next week and stay tuned for John Rush. Thanks and bye. Mobile State Planning with Michael Bailey will return to ATX next Wednesday at 230, here on KLC 560, AM 560, FM 100.7 and online at kelzradio.com.