In an engaging session, Michael shares his personal and professional experiences to highlight the importance of balancing family expectations with effective estate planning. From understanding the nuances between trusts and wills to appreciating the diversity of family dynamics, this episode provides valuable guidance on how to prepare a comprehensive estate plan. Michael’s anecdotes bring clarity to the language of law, empowering you to make informed decisions for your future.
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 :
Good afternoon. Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. So we can do something besides just leave your family alone. Phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. That is the line for the KLZ studios because you’re listening to KLZ 560 AM, possibly 100.7 FM or on the KLZ 560 radio app. Again, the phone number to talk to me on the air is 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. And once again, that’s 720-394-6887. So as we go about estate planning, we’re trying to figure out how to get your assets from you to whomever you want once you pass away. But I got a call from someone this morning who said, well, gee, I was talking with my neighbors and I just want to make sure that this, this, this, this, and this. Because apparently their neighbors are now experts on estate planning. And their neighbors know everything there is to know about estate planning. And anything that the neighbors say should in fact be run by me as the attorney to see if I believe or I think that their neighbors have things right. Or that they should be doing something different based on what their neighbors told them. Now, most of the time I’m a-okay with that. And I’m like, okay, we can answer that. But then they’ll be like, oh, but my neighbor said we need to do this and this. And how come we didn’t do this? And I’m like, because your situations are different or because there’s not just one approach that does everything. And I think sometimes people forget that not everything is the same for everybody. And not everybody who has an opinion is somebody that we necessarily need to listen to. And I’m not saying don’t listen to your neighbors. I’m not saying don’t have discussions with your neighbors. But I’m saying that not everything is exactly the same. Sometimes I have my clients who will ask me, like, oh, what would you do in this situation? I said, well, I really need to, you know. My situations are like, well, what have you done? I’m like, well, I put together a trust to hold my house and my RV campsites that I own in Idaho. I have minor children, so it makes sense for me to do a trust, so that’s why I did that. And they’re like, well, what would you do if you were us? And I’m like, I would do what you choose. Sometimes people want to try to, you know, almost if they want me to decide for them. And I’m not big on deciding for people. I’m big on giving people options and letting them decide for themselves. But it’s kind of… Everybody seems to have an opinion on what they should, what should or should not be done. And a lot of times their opinion is based on whatever their attorney has told them to do. So, you know, some attorneys that I know, I mean, I know plenty of attorneys who believe that everybody should have a trust because, you know, then the trust doesn’t have to go through the, then when somebody dies, trust does not need to go through probate because it’s a trust. And trusts don’t have to go through probate for the most part. If there’s a dispute over a trust, it’s heard in probate court. There are also attorneys who believe that everybody should have a will and that nobody should or needs to have a trust. Well, neither extreme is necessarily the way that it needs to be. But, you know, so sometimes when people are like, oh, you know, you have to have a trust because of this, this, this, and this. I’m like, okay, cool. And, you know, sometimes some of the trust planning that was done however many years ago, you know, becomes different than what it needs to be. I had somebody who came in the other day and they were worried about their trust and did they need to update it and whatever. They wanted to change the distribution pattern, and as I read through the trust, I’m like, okay. So this trust was probably set up, what, mid to late 90s? They’re like, well, how do you know that? They hadn’t given me the date on it. I said, well, it’s what we call an AB trust or a marital deduction trust planning. And so that was kind of the type of estate planning that was the – very popular and in vogue and you know worked really well when the estate tax limits were very different from what they are now and so you look at it go okay well you know that makes sense for that the tax rules are very different now so you know the in their 60 page trust 15 pages were dedicated to the to planning for the tax stuff and i said well you know we don’t necessarily need these we can do something different And they’re like, okay, cool. Most people get all excited when you can do something simple and simpler and simplify things. And so there’s just less there. Now, you still want to do the correct amount of simple or complex things. And so sometimes people are, I mean, I’ll have clients be like, oh, well, you know, this section is very confusing to a non-lawyer. Why don’t you rewrite it so that it’s, you know, it can be understood by a non-lawyer? And I’m like, well, see, part of the reason that we… write it that way is because those are the words and that’s the phraseology that we’re supposed to use and that we know will work for the courts. And the Supreme Court has approved that language and told us that that’s the favored way to do it. And people are like, well, but you need to do this because that’s what I want. And this is always a fun one. If you were a good attorney, then you would be able to do this. I’m like, okay, we’re going to pause for just a moment there. Part of the reason that I do things and I practice law is because I sometimes maintain that I speak English, I speak law, and I speak Russian. And English and law use the same words, but sometimes they’re as different as English and Russian. I feel like that sometimes when I’m talking to my brother-in-law, who’s a doctor, and he’ll be describing a case, and he kind of gets into all the medical things that were going on, and I’m like, okay, I understand what you’re saying, and that probably makes perfect sense to you, but that’s not a place where I play all the time. So, you know, if someone, you know, so, I mean, we could probably do this with Luke. Luke, if someone said to you, I had a myocardial infarction, what would you think? Do you know what happened? No. Are you sure? Maybe. Yeah. Do you want to take a guess? Will I look like an idiot if I get it wrong? No. Most people don’t know what a myocardial infarction is. I’m going to guess that it’s a disease. It’s a heart attack. Okay. More or less. I mean, I wasn’t too wrong. No, no. You weren’t that far off. But, you know, that’s one that, you know, there’s a scene in, like, Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home, where they’re trying to get in the hospital and… You know, they’re running through the hospital and there’s a lady on a gurney and she’s moaning. And, you know, there’s two police officers like, I don’t know, we need to get in there. It’s like, we can’t let you in there. Like, my goodness, man, don’t you know? And he lists off, it’s like 40 different medical words. You know, she has an acute case of, you know, whatever. I can’t even repeat it. And the police officers look at her like, okay, let her in. And they go through the door and Captain Kirk looks at Bones and says, what did you tell her she has? And he says, cramps. So, you know, it’s a whole different language. And as an attorney, I’m not trying to make things more complicated. But I’m also probably not, if you’re going to get mad at me for using the language that attorneys are given and the language that the Supreme Court tells us to use, that seems like a silly thing to be upset with me about. And no, I didn’t expect you to necessarily know what that one was, unless like your grandmother or your relative had had a heart attack, Mr… That’s all right. My ignorance helped prove your point better. That’s all I was trying to do was say, you know, it’s a different language. It is. I mean, I didn’t know it. I mean, so here’s a fun one. So in English, it’s the myocardial infarction. Do you know what the Russian word for it is?
SPEAKER 01 :
No.
SPEAKER 02 :
Infarction. It’s the same word. All right, well. So now you know how to say heart attack in Russian. Woo-hoo! Not that it matters, but silliness. Fun party trick, I suppose. Fun fact, yeah. I learned it when I was there. I was like, huh, interesting. Despite the fact that we’re talking about random things, this is Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ, 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, part of what I was taught and what we talked about in law school was was how there’s a very big move to writing more and more things in plain English instead of in kind of law language. And we do the best we can, and we try to do that. But sometimes in the seeking of simplicity, we can lose a little bit of doing things the right way too. Because I would love to have everything. I mean, my favorite will that I’ve ever heard, It comes from the movie Secondhand Lions, where there’s the plot of Secondhand Lions. There’s two uncles who end up raising their nephew, and they’ve had all sorts of adventures and do all sorts of things. But at the end, the two uncles die, and the sheriff’s like, well, I found their will. And it reads, and I quote, the kid gets everything. Just plant us in the damn garden next to the stupid lion. That’s the entirety of the will. I’m like, that would be great. I would love to write something like that. But I don’t know that that would quite be what we want. Now, if you only have one kid, you can say, hey, the kid gets everything. Which kid? Well, your kid. Are you sure about that? Or is it Billy the Kid? Or Kid Rock? Or, I don’t know, some other kid that’s out there. Maybe you had a favorite goat that’s a kid. There’s any number of, I mean, we’d probably interpret it as being your kid. But it might be a little bit better to say, when I die, my children die. Caitlin Bailey, Alison Bailey, and Carter Bailey will split everything equally, one-third to each. Now, there are people who will be like, oh, the equally and one-third to each is redundant. You don’t need to do that. I’m like, eh, see, the law is a little bit understanding of redundancies and builds those redundancies in because we don’t want to have to redo everything every time something might change. Now, I mean, when, just because it’s the first one that came to mind, When Kobe Bryant died, Kobe Bryant had a whole trust, and his widow, Vanessa, had to go to the probate court in California and request that his youngest daughter be added to the trust to receive an equal portion to her other siblings. Because of all the things that had happened, he had not updated his trust. Well, in many of the trusts that I write for people who have younger children and are still in kind of the childbearing ages, I say, okay, without telling you how many members of your family you should have or without telling you you should or should not have children, if you have one child who’s two and another one that is a newborn, Are you thinking about or is there a possibility you will have more? People say, well, you know, I might have more. Okay, cool. Then when we write a will, we’ll write it so that it says we’ll have the additional, we’ll say, okay, it’ll be, you know, assets will go to the two kids and to any future born children. So now we’re anticipating that they might have future-born children. And so if they might have future-born children, that they’ll be covered under the will and trust so that we’re not saying, oh my goodness, what are we possibly going to do? How could we possibly, you know, it accounts for there might be future-born children so that every time you have a child, you don’t necessarily need to update a will or a trust, but it’s put in there. Now, you might want to do things differently if you have more children, or you might want to split them up differently, or as your children get older, and maybe you helped one more pay for college, or you helped one more to buy a house, and so you say, well, I want to treat all the kids equally, but if I spent $100,000 on my child’s college education… And then for another child, I gave them $50,000 for a down payment on a house. Then maybe I want the child that got the $50,000 down payment on a house to get $50,000 more than the other sibling who got $100,000 for college. Because then it all evens itself out. You say, okay, we’ll give the first $50,000 here. And then the rest of it, we can split up evenly. Okay, well, that sounds like a plan. Sounds like a good thing to do. And so you could move ahead with doing that. And that may or may not be what you want. You may also say, hey, we’ve given our kids enough and we haven’t kept track. We haven’t kept a ledger of how much we spent on this kid versus that kid. So we’re just going to split things up evenly. We’re going to call it equal. We’ll call it even. We’re like, all right, that’ll be fine. That’s cool. And… I mean, because in my experience, it’s very difficult to keep track of the total amount of dollars spent on each kid for different things. Each of my children is involved in different activities. My oldest daughter, she played basketball and was involved with basketball and we did that. And then she hit high school. And when she hit high school, her freshman year was the COVID year. So she was doing classes remotely. And then when they went back, it was like, you know, two days remote, two days in school. And so there was only half as many kids in the school. And then eventually got to having everybody be at the school. And in high school, she got into doing Knowledge Bowl and Battle of the Books and things like that. And we support her in all of that. Well, my middle child is a volleyball player. And volleyball is a sport that is played at the high school level, but there’s also club volleyball, where you go and you play for club teams, and they do traveling tournaments. Not this weekend, but the previous weekend, I was in Spokane, Washington for a volleyball tournament. And everybody’s like, oh, Spokane, that’s eastern Washington. It’s so dry. It’s so this. I’m like, well, it rained all the days we were there, and it was really green and pretty. And we actually drove across the state border into Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and saw Lake Coeur d’Alene, and that was kind of cool. And when we got there, there was a little bit of a mist. So you had the lake and then the shores of the lake and then kind of the mountains, and then there was a mist in it. It looked really cool. People were always apologizing. They’re like, oh no, this seems like such a terrible, you know, we’re sorry for the horrible weather. It’s so much better. Other times we’re like, we kind of like it. It’s kind of neat. And as we were walking around Coeur d’Alene, you know, my wife and I had gone, my daughter had stayed to hang out with her volleyball friends, but we’d gone to Coeur d’Alene and we were there around dinnertime and it was fantastic. A little bit, it got a little bit cold and a little bit rainy. We’re like, you know what, this seems like, you know, some warm food weather. And we found a place where we could go that served us clam chowder in a bread bowl and some fish and chips and things like that. We were like, okay, yeah, we can live with that. That’s cool. We’re good. And, you know, had it been a… Hot July day, we might not have wanted clam chowder in a bread bowl. We would have opted for something else. In an odd coincidence, all of the ice cream shops were closed on a drizzly, rainy, kind of cold day in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. So we didn’t get any ice cream. Oh, well, that’s fine. But the club volleyball experience and paying for being involved in club volleyball and the travel and all of that is more expensive than my daughter, my oldest daughter going to a knowledge bowl tournament. and we’re not keeping track of, oh, well, we spent this many dollars on your club volleyball and we spent this many dollars on your Knowledge Bowl or Battle of the Books or Science Bowl. We’re not keeping track of all of that because we’re not trying to even it all out to make sure that we’re giving the exact same dollar amount to each child. That isn’t really how we do things, but we’ve made sure that all of our children have had their needs met to the best we can. Now, Some of the players on my daughter’s club volleyball team, they’re significantly richer than we are. You know, one up until recently had access to the corporate jet for the company he worked for. I’m like, well, that would be cool. I mean, apparently the. The way that we know he no longer has access to the corporate jet is the flights into Spokane where there weren’t a whole lot of them and there wasn’t a great, you know, they were a little expensive. Like this would have been the tournament to have him fly us all in. We could have all taken the corporate jet, but it didn’t work out and that’s fine. But you know, if you, if you have access to the corporate jet, that means you’re probably pretty high on the corporate food chain, so to speak. And you probably make more than well, what I do. And so, you know, we’re, we’re not necessarily rich. We’re not necessarily poor. We’re kind of in the middle, but you know, it’s kind of fun to go with some of these people who are much richer and see how. They live and are like, hey, well, we can kind of tag along, but we may not be quite as apt to buy all the things that everybody else does. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 AM KLZ, 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 we’re trying to treat our children equally. We’re trying to help them. But equally doesn’t mean everything’s exactly the same down to the dollar or the penny or whatever we want it to be. It’s just kind of… kind of one of those things that we say, okay, you know, we’ve, we took, uh, you know, the same way that my, when we’ve, we’ve gone on vacations more recently to Cabo San Lucas and to Hawaii. And, you know, those are the Cabo trip was cheaper than the Hawaii trip. You know, knowing going on a Hawaii trip, we know full well, it’s going to be more expensive because it’s Hawaii. Um, but yeah, And a couple of years ago, we took a cruise with my wife’s family. We all went on a Thanksgiving cruise. And so we all went on a Thanksgiving cruise when my son was like 10 or 11. Well, when my oldest daughter was 10 or 11, we didn’t quite have the money to just go on a cruise. I was still in the midst of… building a practice and you know always building a practice but it was a little bit smaller than it was it was smaller back then than it is right now and so you know my my youngest son has been on more kind of flying and cool vacations at a younger age than my oldest daughter has now my oldest daughter it’s not like she missed out on anything you know we’d go visit grandpa and grandma or things like that and We still do that as vacations, but it hasn’t been a 100% equal, we’ve done everything all the same all the time. Last year, after my daughter graduated from high school, we sent her on a European vacation with her uncle, so my sister’s brother and our sister-in-law. They had a daughter that graduated too, and They had booked a two-week vacation to go. They went to France, and they went to Spain, and they went to Italy, and they were on a cruise ship. They would travel overnight, and then they’d be in Florence, Italy for the day, or they’d be in Rome for the day, so they could go visit all the cool sights in Rome that my daughters wanted to see for her entire life, and so she was super excited about that. But when she got back from that vacation, two or three days later, we all went off to the sand dunes in St. Anthony, Idaho, where we frequently, at least usually on a yearly basis, meet up with my wife’s family and they do vacation there. While my daughter was like, you know, I just took two weeks off. I need to start, you know, I need to go back to work. I need to be… working to earn money for college and all those type of things. So that’s what she did. She stayed home from the family vacation to St. Anthony, Idaho so that she could work. And we’re like, okay, so not every single family vacation is going to work. And my 16-year-old, who was 15 at the time, she’s like, oh, I made the wrong choice. I should have gone. And we’re like, I think you were actually invited, kiddo. It wasn’t a, you know, oh, I didn’t want to go. It was like, no, this was a vacation for those who are graduating. It was like my, you know, the schools, however they set up their vacations. senior trips my daughter didn’t necessarily want to go on the senior trip with her senior class because although she’s friends with some of her senior class she’s like yeah most of it i don’t necessarily know don’t necessarily need or want to go on the senior trip so we sent her on her own senior trip with uh aunt and uncle and her two cousins uh not her two the Even there, the reason that she could go was because she had two younger cousins who were like 10 and 8, and they would have been very bored going to go see the historical sites like the Colosseum or the Circus Circus or any of the other, you know, something in Florence and, you know, Italy. It just wasn’t that appealed to my 18-year-old daughter who was super excited about all the architecture and all those type of things and seeing the, I think it’s SPQR or whatever the things were for the Roman Legion. And so she was super excited about all of that stuff and architecture. And the 10-year-old and the 8-year-old weren’t going to be super excited about the architecture. They would be the ones who were like, we’re hot, we’re thirsty, we’re hungry, we don’t want to be here, we want to go back on the boat, we want to go swimming, or we want to go on the water slide. And there’s nothing wrong with being on the boat and going swimming or going on a water slide or getting, you know, more of the soft serve ice cream that is always available on a cruise ship. My personal favorite was always getting like a, we had a drink package and we had the non-alcoholic drink package, but you get a little virgin strawberry daiquiri thing. And it’s like, we’ve got strawberry here. I get the ice cream put in there. Like, look, it’s like a strawberry, strawberry float, strawberry ice cream thing. Strawberry shake. It was pretty awesome. But there’s a place for that. But if you’re going to visit the architectural wonders of ancient Rome, the two kids weren’t… As we learned on the Thanksgiving cruise, when we wanted to go do things that weren’t the play in the water or go on a water slide, they were not super interested. And they were… They were definitely not silent about their, what they wanted to do. So it made sense to send the 18 year old on that type of trip and you know, she enjoyed it, but that’s not the exact same as what we did for the 16 year old. You know, this last fall we had a German exchange student come over and we hosted an exchange student for a couple of weeks. And then they’re supposed to go in July to go visit Germany. It doesn’t work out for my daughter’s schedule to go visit in July, but maybe next year we’ll figure out a time to get her over there so that she can go visit her friend in Germany and be in Germany. So we don’t have to treat everybody equally all the time down to the penny, but in an estate plan, if we want to true that up, we can, or you just say, Hey, we’ve treated everybody taking care of them the best we can. And now we’re just going to split everything up so that everybody’s happy and satisfied with an estate plan and we’re all good. So the music tells me that my time is up. So thank you so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. My phone number is 720-394-6887. And once again, that’s 720-394-6887. I will be back next week, but please stay tuned. John Rush and Rush Reasons are up next, and we’ll talk to you later. Thanks and bye.
