SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

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 : 0:56

All right, welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. So we can do something besides just leave your family alone. You are listening to KLZ 560 AM, also heard on 100.7 FM or the KLZ 560 radio app. Phone number to talk to me on the air, 303-477-5600. And again, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. And again, 720-394-6887. And that’s the phone that rings all the time, and it always seems to ring, kind of Murphy’s Law of Phones, just as I’m starting to talk to someone, you know, sit down for a client meeting, and It’s one of those things where you sit down to start a meeting with somebody and the phone rings. And I’m like, okay, well, I’ll get back to you in an hour when I’m done talking to the initial person. And then that doesn’t work out. And so we’re unable to… You know, so then I’ll call somebody back or they’ll call when I’m on the phone with somebody else or I’m always a little bit interested to see why people call me at 5.16 or 5.30 p.m. after business hours. I mean, I don’t know if they… are hoping that I’ll just still be at the office and working, or if they are just, you know, that’s when they’ve gotten off work and they’re like, oh, I’ll call now. Or, you know, the people who call are… So it’s just one of those things where when people call, it’s kind of a craziness type of thing. And we’re trying to get things taken care of, trying to answer the phone, trying to help everybody that I can. But in trying to help everybody that I can, it doesn’t always seem to go the way that we would want to. And sometimes in setting up an estate plan, it doesn’t always go the way that a client or a potential client would hope to. I have many people who will call and they will… They will want to be, they’re like, oh, well, we need to meet. We need to talk about estate planning. I’m like, okay, cool. So what’s your desired timeframe? They’re like, oh, you know, what can you do later this week? And I say, well, later this week’s going to be really tough because I’m booked out until May. And, you know, some people… Some people are able to wait until May. Some people don’t want to wait until May. But I at least try to be up front with people and say, hey… So I’m happy to help. I’m happy to do what I can. And I’m really excited to help as many people as I can, including you. But there’s the time constraints that come in. I had a client who, or I had a potential client who called me yesterday. And they said, oh, well, you know, my uncle is in the hospital. And since my uncle’s in the hospital, you know, he needs to redo his… Will, an estate plan, can you come sometime the next three days? And I called back and said, no, unfortunately, I don’t have availability the next three days. And she got a little bit miffed. She’s like, oh, well, I guess you just don’t actually do mobile estate planning then, huh? And I’m like, no, I visit people all the time and go where they are. I just can’t do emergency mobile estate planning because, I mean… I just don’t have the ability to… I don’t have the ability to just have instant availability when I’ve got people to help. And I did tell the nice lady, I was like, hey, you know, I do not have, you know, I’m not trying to avoid you. I’m willing and able to help just in the time frame. So… As I’m trying to help people, it’s within the confines of what we can do. And sometimes that happens with the estate planning stuff itself. I find this a lot with powers of attorney. So people want a power of attorney, and so I’ll write them a power of attorney. And the power of attorney is so that if they’re incapacitated, then somebody else can make decisions for them. And so we write a power of attorney and then we got that. And so, but then suddenly people have this kind of concept that a power of attorney is like a magical document that suddenly will make everything and everything and all problems go away. And I’ll get a call from someone who’s like, oh, well, you know, I took my power of attorney to the bank and they said that they need their own power of attorney. And, you know, how come this one doesn’t work? And I’m like, well… It’s supposed to work, but each bank has their own different policies. And sometimes banks… I mean, I was talking to a friend of mine who practices law in California. And in California, they tend to… They want to have a power of attorney that’s five years or younger. And there’s not really… you know, based in law anywhere. But, you know, that’s just kind of what they want. In Colorado, it’s kind of come to be where it’s, you know, 10 years or younger. And again, and so, you know, no real, there’s no, you know, like law that says, oh, it has to be 10 years or it has to be 10 years or younger. And, you know, part of the reason that we don’t have those laws is is because of the nature of powers of attorney. A powers of attorney is supposed to be somebody can make decisions for you if you’re incapacitated. Well, if someone’s incapacitated, and they’re incapacitated for 10 years or more, where that happens a decent amount with people who will have Alzheimer’s or dementia or memory loss, and they don’t So if somebody has Alzheimer’s or dementia or memory loss and they’ve had memory loss for 15 years, they can’t make a power of attorney that’s 10 years or younger. And so sometimes people will get, banks or financial institutions will be like, oh, we can’t accept this because it’s too old. And then you end up needing to go and you show them, you bring the power of attorney and then you bring the diagnosis that shows that the person who, um, is, uh, you know, so the person, you know, what has been, um, properly, um, you know, that they were diagnosed with a memory loss, you know, 15 years ago. And it’s like, anyway, I kind of think it is, we have, you know, the proverbial doctor’s note that, you know, if you, you know, miss school because you were sick and you needed a doctor’s note, we needed the doctor’s note that says, um, oh, we’re going to have a, yeah, this person has been, these people who are, you can’t have somebody who’s incapacitated make a new power of attorney. So sometimes the five years or the 10 years is kind of a silly rule, but hey, we have to deal with the timing that we have. And we set up powers of attorney. I had someone just this morning who said, oh, well, you know, I’ve got this power of attorney. I sent it to my financial advisor. But, you know, every time that I want to talk about stuff, they still need my husband’s permission to be able to do this. How come that’s the way it is? And how come the power of attorney can’t fix this? And I say, well, that might not quite be what the power of attorney is for. 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, direct line 720-394-6887. so there are certain types of financial accounts and ownership of financial accounts and things like that where if it’s a joint account sometimes a banker a financial institution will want to have both joint owners a lot of times with those types of financial accounts you can have somebody who gives permission and says hey yes i know it’s a joint account But if one or both of us call, then you’re allowed to freely talk to the other one. It’s perfectly fine. We’ve done that on lots of different types of accounts, whether it’s an investment account or a cell phone account. I used to be the primary person on our cell phone account. And so I would call in and do whatever. And then over the course of time, especially it was my kids got their cell phones and my wife needed to talk to the cell phone people. She would call them and they’d be like, oh, we need to get Michael’s permission. So we ended up making her the primary. So now when I call in and talk to the cell phone people, I need her permission to be. And so we put it so that we can we can both have permission. And we can both talk to them. And most financial institutions that I know of also have a similar thing where they want to be able to, you can have two owners of an account, then they’re both authorized to talk and do things. But we’re trying to prevent the problem where someone who’s not authorized to act on behalf of somebody else ends up doing something that causes harm to somebody else. And we’d all like to say, oh, our spouse would never cause us any sort of harm. And our spouse would never do any sort of financial transaction that wouldn’t be for the best good of both spouses. But I think we all know that’s not necessarily true. You know, sometimes if you have one spouse who’s, you know, mad at the other spouse and they’re like, oh, I’m going to go take the money out of the bank account and I’m going to spend it on this or, you know, the couple has a fight and husband’s like, well, I’m going to take the money out and I’m not going to let her pay for groceries because then she has to be, you know, coming to me for money. Yeah. That might be even financially abusive, but that’s not what we’re trying to do. Or if you have a husband and wife who have a fight, and the wife says, oh, well, I’m going to go take the money out of our joint account, and I’m going to go shopping and buy myself something pretty. so that I can feel better. And the husband was like, but wait a minute, that’s not money. You know, that money was supposed to be for paying, you know, the mortgage or rent or something. And, you know, so, you know, you don’t want to have, those are silly examples, but, you know, I’ve seen it lots of times where people are, you know, they’re looking at, you know, ending a marriage and getting divorced. And so they can go and pull money out or do things that are not going to be helpful or beneficial to the other person and so yeah it’s and you know we you always think about identity theft and you know watch commercials and it’s some guy sitting in a basement at a computer you know stealing somebody’s identity and then buying i don’t know extra comic books or something like that and you’re like well yeah that’s that and that does happen too you know the Right before Christmas, my credit card got compromised, so as we went Christmas shopping, we had to buy Christmas presents using a different credit card than the one we normally do. But you can also have that type of financial abuse or financial things being done incorrectly from family members. whether it be a spouse or a child or an aunt or an uncle or a niece or a nephew or a grandparent, whatever it is, there’s all sorts of financial exploitation that happens. And yes, it’s illegal. Yes, it’s bad. But it does happen. So banks and other financial institutions, people like that, They don’t want to be giving money away to the wrong person or doing something that’s incorrect or unauthorized. So they are doing their best to keep you protected because if a bank gives money… to somebody who’s not authorized to receive it. And then the proper person comes and says, well, hey, I need my thousand dollars. Oh, we’ll give that thousand dollars to your wife, Annie. Well, my wife is Jenny. So who is this Annie person? Oh, well, you know, they came in and they said that they were, you know, they were connected to you. So they needed the money. So we gave it to them. And you say, well, wait a minute. No, you gave it to the wrong person. That wasn’t me. I need my $1,000. Well, the bank is going to have to give you the $1,000. So if the bank gives it to the wrong person, they’re still going to be on the hook for giving it to the right person. Well, banks tend not to want to give out just large or even small amounts of money to the wrong person and then give it to the right person. So they pay double. of what they have because if they did that for long enough they wouldn’t have any money left and they couldn’t be a bank and that would be bad and problematic so banks other financial institutions their goal is to keep you safe and to try and keep you doing everything that you want you know everything that you need and want to do And so because of that, you look at – so when a power of attorney can understand why – People don’t, why you, when you’re using a power of attorney, people can be a little bit suspect of it. And the power of attorney, just because you have a power of attorney doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody’s going to, you know, just fall all over themselves and be like, oh, we need help with this. You know, they’re going to take their time. They’re going to verify it. They’re going to want to make sure that it was done properly and properly executed. They want to make sure that it applies to all of the things that you’re wanting to do. And then you run into the problem of timing with the power of attorney. Many of the powers of attorney that I write as an estate planning attorney say that an A person will give the ability to make decisions to somebody else when the individual who creates the power of attorney, called the principal, is incapacitated or otherwise unable to make their own decisions. So if someone is incapable of making their own decisions, even if they’re not making decisions, Great decisions or right decisions, people are allowed to make their own decisions. And so because they’re allowed to make their own decisions, then they will, the people will, you don’t want to take away somebody’s power to make their own decisions. And I write powers of attorney sometimes that are effective immediately, right? And if the person is effective immediately and then the person who’s effective immediately doesn’t necessarily, so a person who’s capable of making their own decisions, but wants the power of attorney to be effective immediately, it becomes a little bit more tricky to write that. He’s saying, okay, well, if you’re able to make your own decisions, you can make your own decisions and you will, but If you want somebody else to make decisions for you under power of attorney, I give them the ability to make that decision right now too. So then you put in a bake in a spot where they’re like, oh, well, so I can listen to the principal, the individual person, but then I have the other person who I can also listen to. Well, what if they disagree with each other? Do I have to check with both of them? And oftentimes the computer systems or the name control systems that they have will – So the name control systems are just the way the banks are set up or a financial system is set up. If there’s a power of attorney, then they’re not going to be able to make a decision and they’re not going to be able to So they’ll put in a computer, oh, this person has a power of attorney, so you need to talk to this person. And then that cuts off the other person’s ability to make their own decisions. So now you’ve set up a document that can be confusing to a bank or a financial institution. Then they – because the power of attorney says – Talk to the agent, not to the principal, but you can talk to the principal, but you can also talk to the agent. And whatever is set up there and whatever’s on there can be crazy and can be very disconcerting to a bank of who are they supposed to be able to figure it out. And you don’t want to confuse banks because banks don’t want to be confused. And so there’s a kind of a trickiness there. And so oftentimes, if you’re talking to a bank or financial institution, it’s a lot easier to say, hey, we’ve got two authorized users. We don’t need to have, you know, is there a way that we can notate on the account that both can talk and it doesn’t have to be one or the other type of thing? And, you know, that tends to work out a whole lot better a lot of the times. Instead of saying, oh, well, your power of attorney needs to account for all of this. Well, power of attorney is supposed to be, especially in an estate planning context, is set up so that a person can make decisions if you become incapacitated. Not necessarily so that you don’t have to both tell a bank or financial institution that they can have a conversation with the other person. 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. Once again, 720-394-6887. So… And I had someone this morning who’s like, oh, well, you know, if we go to power of attorney and because of my immigration status, if I get deported, would that allow her to make all the decisions for me? I’m like, well, let’s talk about that. First of all, I don’t do immigration law. So I’m really not going to be able to tell you all the ins and outs of immigration and all the ins and outs of what is or is not allowed. This is not going to. not really going to work particularly well simply because of how things go with having um yeah i just i don’t do immigration i don’t handle it it’s just not part of what i do and so we go okay well we gotta Got to do something different then, don’t we? Yes, yes, we do. And so, you know, many of the powers of attorney say, oh, well, you know, if I’m unavailable, whether I’m out of the country or whatever it is, but, you know, we also have cell phones so that, you know, it’s kind of shrunk the world so we can be talking to people in, or different countries or different cities and, you know, kind of have that instant communication. So it may not necessarily let everybody be able to make decisions for you in every situation because, you know, if it’s an immigration status thing where somebody got deported or, you know, there’s… Just because you have a power of attorney doesn’t mean that it automatically is going to apply to every single situation that might ever come up. And the powers of attorney that we write, they’re supposed to be effective and useful for all of the different situations. you know, all of the different assets and banks and financial institutions and all of the different things. So we’ve got, you know, you have a financial power of attorney. It’s supposed to allow somebody to access all of your bank accounts and all of your financial accounts and all of your retirement accounts and, you know, your crypto accounts and all those type of things. And that’s what it’s supposed to do. And it’s supposed to work that way. And under Colorado state law, it’s supposed to be valid. But there’s no accounting for people. So sometimes you’ll get a bank that’s like, oh, well, no, our policy is we have to only have our own power of attorney, our own form. You have to fill that out. Well, that’s something that you should at least ask of your bank to see if they have that policy or they have that procedure. And, you know, people are like, oh, well, do you keep track of all of that? I’m like, I really don’t because banks change their policies and their procedures all the time. And for some odd reason, I think it’s mostly because I don’t work for the banks and they don’t work for me. They don’t run all their policies and procedures by me. You know, it’s one of those things that, you know, seems, you know, fairly understandable and reasonable. But it doesn’t always work the way way that you might want because sometimes things get you know are a little bit crazy and sometimes things are a little bit strange and sometimes things um you know don’t necessarily work that way and there’s this concept that everything has a law attached to it and there’s all there’s always a rule in the law that would recover in every single situation and that’s not necessarily true Now, in estate planning, you’re putting yourself in the best position so that if you become incapacitated, then someone will be able to act on your behalf. Even my clients who are going into long-term care facilities, they’ll have a requirement. There’s a financial and a medical power of attorney, so they know who they can be talking to. to be able to make decisions if that person becomes incapacitated. You know, from a financial standpoint, they also want to know who they can talk to to make sure they get paid. You know, there’s a practical aspect to that. They want to get paid and make sense. But sometimes when you have multiple siblings and multiple kids, and the kids are trying to, you know, say mom or dad go into a long-term care facility, and there’s three or four kids, and three or four kids… may not agree with each other. They may not, you know, have a, you know, they may not see eye to eye. And so, you know, I’ve got one kid who’s telling, you know, somebody something, and then another kid who’s telling an executive director something, another kid who’s telling the CNA who’s there something different. Having the power of attorney, you know, can be say, okay, well, this is who you’re supposed to be talking to. And this is who is capable of doing those things. And this is so you’ve got the correct order laid out of who you’re supposed to be talking to. And powers of attorney are very important to have, very necessary. But simply because you have a power of attorney doesn’t necessarily fix everything. And not everybody is always going to understand that. I will have people who hire me to be their attorney for preparing their estate plan. And then they’ll have, oh, well, I was talking to my insurance agent and I said, oh, well, you need to talk to my attorney. So I’m just going to have them call you. I’m like, whoa, hold on just a minute. Just because I did one thing doesn’t mean I’m your attorney for absolutely everything. Now, there are people who are family attorneys and they’re generalists and they kind of will represent people in all sorts of different things. And I totally get that and I respect that. But that’s not necessary. Just because you hire an attorney to do one thing doesn’t mean that attorney then represents you for everything. And the same thing with a power of attorney. A power of attorney works for what it works for. But if you try to take it and put it out of context, the out of context thing that you wanted to do may or may not work. You still want to have powers of attorney in place because those are very important and vital if you became incapacitated. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ. My time is up. I hear that from the music. But stay tuned for John Rush and Rush Reason next. And if you want to give me a call, phone number is 720-394-6887. Thanks and have a great day. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER 01 : 28:20

Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey will return to ATX next Wednesday at 2.30 here on KLZ 560, AM 560, FM 100.7, and online at klzradio.com.