Join Michael Bailey as he delves deep into essential estate planning strategies. This episode highlights the significance of saying ‘no’ in planning and the potential pitfalls of neglecting this critical step. Discover why the phrase is so integral to maintaining control and ensuring your wishes are upheld in this critical legal process.
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.
Michael Bailey (Host) :
All right, good afternoon. Welcome to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM, 100.7 FM, the KLZ 560 radio app, or any other way that you may be able to listen that I just don’t know about. I think… We may have some secret methodologies back there, but, you know, we’d have to run that by our good friend behind the glass because, you know, Luke would know about the secret methodologies, and he’s not allowed to tell us because they’re secret. It’s kind of like how he works for the kind of the men in black version of the IRS. You are the men in black version of the IRS, aren’t you? I can neither confirm nor deny. There you go. Well played. All right, so phone number to talk to us on the air is 303-477-5600. And again, that’s 303-477-5600. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. Once again, that’s 720-394-6887. So I was thinking about what I should talk about today and just kind of the concept of no came to mind. And how does no work in estate planning? Because in law, people a lot of times think of the law as saying what you can’t do. No speeding, no lying, no stealing, no… You know, taking your neighbor’s stuff. No killing. No. There’s a lot of no’s. The law has a lot of restrictions on what you can’t do and saying, no, you can’t do that. You know, law saying, you know, that you want to walk around just flailing your arms and hitting people randomly. They’re like, the law says, no, you shouldn’t do that. So in estate planning, there are some no’s, but there’s a lot of yeses. But there are some no’s. So one of the things that comes into it is, no, there’s not just one right way to do it. No, you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to give your estate plan to a certain set of people. And no, you’re not bound by the default rules that exist. So the default rules are we’re going to give money to your closest living relatives. Okay. Know that you’re not stuck with that unless you die without any sort of estate plan. And then you kind of are. Um, I’ve, I’ve had that happen to clients where they come to do an estate plan and I’ve met with one guy on a Thursday. I wrote it up on Friday, emailed it out. The guy died on a Saturday. It’s like, oh, well, everything you wrote should work, right? I’m like, no, it doesn’t actually. It needs to be signed, witnessed and notarized. And I’m always amazed at how many times or how many clients I have that we meet. They pay me half of my fee. I draft everything. I send it off to them. And then despite my best efforts to try to get a hold of them and get it signed, they never get back to me. I mean, I have some that are going on like 10 years. They won’t get back to me. And I’m like, come on, guys. We’ve got to get this signed, witnessed, and notarized so that it’s finished. And they’re like, oh, no, we already have an estate plan. We talked to you. Everything’s good. And I’m like, no, it’s not. It’s really not. You do have to finish it, and you can’t just ignore it and leave it out there. Now, I don’t know if I would imagine some of the people who have been seven, eight, nine, ten years that they haven’t finished it. Hopefully, they’ve moved on to somebody else, and they just decided they didn’t. Want to complete working with me, which is fine. You know, as long as you get your estate plan done, I’m happy. But no, just because we met doesn’t mean that I have that everything’s set. You know, we have to we have to actually finish it. We have to get it done. And, you know, lots of my potential clients will ask me that. Well, now that we’ve talked to you, everything’s set, right? No, it’s not. Because it has to be finished. It has to be completed. It has to be done the right way. I’m just not that powerful. If you tell me what you want, I’m not like, ha-ha, and now I have this secret attorney handshake and this secret attorney code where I can go implement everything that you’ve done that’s the way that you want it so that it’s all good. I mean, that’s part of why I send out drafts. I mean, I’ve had it happen a couple of times in the last couple of weeks where I sent out a draft and people were like, oh, well, we wanted this. I’m like, well… apparently I misunderstood what you were telling me, or I misunderstood what we were trying to say, or somehow we didn’t quite get it right on our first try. So that’s why I sent out a draft, and so we can get it fixed. So no, the draft copies are not take it or leave it, and it has to be this way. Otherwise, there’s nothing else you can do. Instead, they’re draft copies that we can get right so that we can sign them and get them all finished off. No, I’m not nearly as powerful as people want to make me. I mean, it would be kind of cool if I were that powerful. I’m like, yes, if you tell me what you want, then I will be able to just have everything work exactly like it’s supposed to, and everything will be perfect, and it’ll be the greatest thing ever, and go us. well, that’s not quite how it works. You know, go us is not really, there’s that no word again. Go us is not really a great legal strategy. So we have to, once we start with something, we got to finish it. And, you know, the starting part of the process is where we talk about what you want to have happen and what you don’t want to have happen. Because no, you don’t have to do things in a certain way. And no, you don’t have to leave all of your stuff to your family or your children. And no, it doesn’t have to be left in exactly equal portions. And no, I can’t prevent everybody from getting their feelings hurt. And no, I can’t predict that everybody is going to be like, oh, Well, this is exactly what mom and dad wanted. We’ll just jump on board. That’s not realistic in life in general. It’s not realistic in estate planning. Now, there are ways to minimize how upset your kids might be. I come from a family of four. And, you know, there’s four, sorry, four kids, family six. But, you know, there’s four of us kids. And when my parents pass away, we’ll each get one quarter or 25% of whatever’s left over. Now, I think in my family, we’ll be okay with that. But, you know, my kids, I only have three. When my wife and I die, there will be one-third for each of the kids. Okay, cool. You know, when other people who, you know, and so we’re split up, you know, equally according to the number of kids. Not everybody does that. I had one client who didn’t want to leave anything to their oldest two, so very minimal. They ended up leaving like 5% to the oldest two kids and 90% to the youngest kids. And in that case, the oldest two were very successful. One was a doctor, one was a financial planner. They were both multimillionaires. And their younger sister was a third grade teacher, which, as we all know, third grade teachers aren’t exactly the highest compensated profession on the planet. When you list the world’s billionaires, there’s not a whole lot of third grade teachers on that list. Maybe there is. I don’t know. There might be one. I really couldn’t tell you because I don’t know the whole list. But that made perfect sense. The parents were trying to get more of what they had to the youngest child because the youngest child had not fared as well financially. The youngest child wasn’t like… upset about their life choices or anything like that but they split it up that way now others are less you know I’ve met with plenty of clients who are like oh yeah you know I don’t have a relationship with this child or that child or this child has decided that they need to go live in the jungles of Guatemala and they don’t want to have any material possessions so they’re going to live off the land and I don’t want to leave them anything because they wouldn’t take it anyway I’m like okay that makes perfect sense too so So, no, it doesn’t have to be a perfectly equal distribution between your kids. But if you decide to have an unequal distributions, no, you can’t prevent them from getting their feelings hurt because there’s no accounting for people. 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, that’s 720-394-6887. So in keeping the theme of, no, I’m not that powerful, um, People, the last client I met with was like, well, if we ever need to change anything, then we can just send you the changes and you’ll make them and it’ll be all fine, right? I said, again, no, I can’t quite do that. I can’t quite say, once you’ve hired me and once I’ve prepared an estate plan, I can’t just go changing it without you being involved. And to me, that makes perfect sense. Some people are like, well, why not? Like, well, let’s think about it. If you set up your estate plan and you had and then your attorney could make any changes without needing to involve you, don’t you think we’d hear a story at least once a year of an attorney who practiced law for decades? 30 or 40 years. Then, you know, the attorney was like, oh, you know, I’m kind of falling on a little bit of hard times. And so, well, but I can kind of update these estate plans so that, you know, over the course of 40 years, I’ve accumulated, you know, 10,000 clients. Maybe I’ll just make all 10,000 of those clients so that all of their stuff goes to my kids, right? So now my kids will be, you know, multi multi millionaires, if not billionaires. Cool. That sounds great. Well, if attorneys had the ability to make those type of changes without the client’s consent or the client’s signature on the changes or the client’s. acknowledging that the changes had been made according to what the client needed, it’s just rife for corruption and problems and things like that. And I would like to say that all attorneys are 100% ethical and 100% honest. I’d like to say that all attorneys work to do the right things all the time. I would like to say that all of the attorneys that I know have never made a mistake and they’re completely infallible, so they’re going to do everything the right way. And I would like to say that the profession of attorneys is known for its honesty and integrity. And you can always trust them all the time. But I think all of those things would be incorrect and somewhat lying if I claim to believe all of those things. I think most attorneys are trying to do the right thing. I think most attorneys are trying to do everything they can. But it doesn’t always work that way. So the law assumes that we’re all out to hose one another. And hose is a word I can say on the air. There are other words that are synonyms for hosing someone that are not allowable on this station or the FCC would get mad. Does that sound correct, Luke? Correct. Yes. So, you know, if we’re talking about a hose, you know, like I’m going to push the limits here, you know, a tube or a straw. You’re walking the edge. I know. You’re getting dangerous. I know. And do you know how dangerous I can be? How dangerous? I can describe what’s on my tie. No. It’s a turkey, so it’s foul. Disgusting. I know. It’s crazy. Not family-friendly content. It does say Happy Thanksgiving, and there’s a turkey on it. So my turkey tie that I was wearing yesterday, the manager at one of our office locations, she took a picture of it and sent out and said, hey, look at this turkey. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Ty, what were you thinking? So, you know, and I’m like, yeah, that sounds about right because you and I both know that I can be a turkey, don’t we, Luke? I can be, you know, it’s just how it goes. you know there’s turkeys involved and you know a week from tomorrow we will eat turkeys unless you’re not into eating turkeys and then you can eat a tofurkey is that a thing still i don’t know it’s a tofu turkey a tofurkey doesn’t sound very good well to vegetarians it might be you know my my oldest daughter’s vegetarian she likes tofu so she might eat a tofurkey i can never get into tofu not my thing Yeah. Well, for someone who doesn’t eat meat and needs the protein, it works well for her. Makes sense. Yeah. I am not a vegetarian. I’m happy to eat a turkey. I don’t eat too much turkey. Sometimes a sliced turkey on a turkey sandwich, but to just have a roasted turkey, it’s usually a Thanksgiving type of thing. But no, I don’t always eat turkeys. And no, I’m not always a turkey, but sometimes I have been known to be a turkey. And so usually not to clients and not in when I’m performing legal work, but still we don’t, the law assumes we’re all trying to, you know, take advantage of one another. So setting a law up that would allow attorneys kind of free reign to do something that would be obviously wrong to take the assets of somebody who, you know, I mean, I have, I have lots of clients and, It would obviously be wrong for me to take their assets and just reapportion them to myself or even to my children when I pass away. It’s stealing. It’s just not good. And so I don’t want to do it, but I also don’t want the law to say, hey, well, you can if you do it this way. And so… The law that says, no, I can’t make changes without the client’s consent and signing off on it. And signing off on it is usually signed, notarized, sometimes witnessed as being witnesses required. That’s absolutely 100% on purpose so that it’s not the easiest way ever to make change, but rather it has to be thought about, it has to be considered, and it has to be properly done. I mean, I have lots of people who are like, oh, well, can’t I just sign this electronically? Okay. No, you can’t. I mean, there are lots of things that can be done electronically. And for my friends who are in the real estate business, a lot of things, a lot of preliminary things need to be done. They can be signed and are done electronically through like a DocuSign type of thing. Even a lot of things that I do for like my car insurance or my homeowner’s insurance can be DocuSigned. But for our… Um, for our, uh, for signing estate planning documents, they need to be signed, you know, in person, wet signatures type of thing. Um, And that’s, you know, to make sure that it was them that signed it and that they were the ones that voluntarily and willingly signed it. And no, I don’t trust DocuSign to work like that. Now, if there are a way that somehow you could biometrically prove it was you that was signing, sure, we could do that. And, you know, for those who work in the AI or the tech industry and can figure something like that out where, We could have somebody sign something remotely where I happen to be sitting in my office and a person is sitting at home, and so they can electronically sign the document. They can sign electronically or over the internet or something, but we can reliably verify that it’s them. Then I’d be in favor of that. I would think that would be a wonderful thing that would make things more convenient for people. But because of the importance of what we’re doing with estate planning and if somebody were to pass away and we say, okay, well, you know, is this what they wanted? Well, yes, they signed it. Yes, but they signed it remotely. Well, yeah, but we’re pretty sure it was them. I’m like, pretty sure it’s not good. It’s not good enough. We want absolutely certain that it was them and they were mentally competent and that they knew what they were doing. Now, I mean, sometimes you can quibble over mental competence. Sometimes you can quibble over whether or not they were overly influenced by somebody or the other. But all of the safeguards are there to try to avoid that because undoing an issue with an estate plan is much more difficult than doing it the right way because you don’t want to put… If there is something that goes wrong or if there’s a problem, there are some ways to get your estate plan working. And there are some remedies if something goes wrong or if something was misunderstood or if there was a mistake or something like that. But you certainly don’t want to It’s much better to do it right the first time than to try to fix it on the back end. And I think we all know that. This goes back to the John Wooden quote of, if you don’t have time to do it right, when are you going to have time to do it again? So we try to do things right, but no, we don’t have to have… No, we don’t have to. We can’t just we can’t sacrifice doing it correctly for convenience because that’s just you got to do it the right way, even if it is less convenient. So you are listening to mobile estate planning with Michael Bailey. Here on 560 KLZ AM or 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, that’s 720-394-6887. Now, I understand that we want things to be more convenient. We still don’t want to have to go to a bank and give the banker our information and have them go and open the safe using the code and then pull open the safe and go in and grab a few coins or some bank notes and bring them out and give them to me so that I can have my money. Like we have much more convenient ways of doing things, whether we have a credit card or a debit card or we write a check or we have online banking. And all of those are much more convenient. But they also have to be secured because if we’re just online and Anybody who’s viewing what I’m doing online is like, oh, hey, well, now I know what Michael’s bank account number is. I’ll just go take it. So there’s whole, as things become more convenient, they also need to be secure. And at least for right now, to have a secure understanding that a person’s wishes are correctly reflected in a state plan is It’s signed, witnessed, notarized. Notary is basically a kind of a super witness that says, yes, I checked their ID. It was really them. Yes, I made sure that they were mentally competent. Yes, I did all of those things. I’m good. You know, the person was good to do it. And I’ve had people are like, oh, well, you know, that’s not grandma’s signature. It doesn’t look anything like it. I’m like, well, you’re comparing grandma’s signature for when she was 40 or 45 to grandma’s signature when she was 95. Grandma at 95 did not have the same penmanship and the same control and the same ability to write something that she did as a 45-year-old. If I make it to 95, I would imagine my handwriting will probably be not quite as clear and a little bit shakier than it is right now as a 46-year-old. So, you know, this is and so people are like, oh, that’s not really grandma. I’m like, well, but it is because we can take, you know, notary or as a notary, we keep a notary book and we keep it. We have our clients sign the notary book and then we have them sign the documents. so that they’re all signed in very close proximity one to another. So we know what the current signature of a client is and the current signature of a person is, and we can compare that current signature to the signatures on the documents to show that, in fact, it was that person, that they were the one signing. And no, we don’t require every signature to be exactly the same. The important thing is that it’s them. And no, we don’t always have the ability to have everything look as perfect as we would like. On Saturday morning, I got a call at 544 a.m. I didn’t answer the call at 544 a.m. They left me a voicemail. And then the person called again at 935 on Saturday morning. And I happened to get the message about 1030 because Saturday morning I started putting Christmas lights on my house. So I didn’t even have my phone on me. Wasn’t paying attention to it. But these messages said that one of my clients had entered the ICU and was not expected to live through the rest of the day, or at least through the night. And they were giving this particular client some medicine to keep them alive and alert and keep their blood pressure up because otherwise their blood pressure had fallen dangerously low. So this person was very concerned that they had not signed the estate planning documents that I had drafted for them almost two months ago. So they wanted to know if I could come over and visit the ICU. So when I finally got the message, I did call them back. And because of the schedule that I had that day, I went to the ICU. I got there about four o’clock and we got everything. And the guy was able to, I mean, he was… In the hospital bed, he could kind of – he’d get his arm up so he could sign. Clearly, he was – you know, he’s fading. You know, he would – in between, we were signing different documents. So I’d, you know, I’d have him sign one document and then I’d flip to the next thing. And I’d kind of have to bop him like, hey, wake up. Because he was – But he knew what he was doing. He was laughing with us when I walked in like, do you know who I am? He’s like, yeah, you’re that attorney guy who’s going to come. You know, you’re not quite the Grim Reaper, but you’re almost the Angel of Death. I’m like, yeah, I don’t know that I’m that bad. You know, I may have a turkey on my tie, but that’s just because I’m a turkey. I am not, in fact, the Grim Reaper. but yeah. And, and, you know, getting things signed to the ICU, there’s always a little bit of a danger or a lot of a danger of question of, is the person mentally competent to be doing what they’re doing? Now that particular person was, you know, that client of mine was awake, you know, as we were walking by some of the other rooms, you could see the person or the people who were kind of more on ventilators or life support type of things. And, They were unconscious. And I’m like, well, if you’re unconscious and the machines are breathing for you, we’re probably pretty sure that you’re not going to be able to be mentally competent to sign an estate plan. So in this person’s case, he was mentally competent. As far as I know, I don’t think he made it through the night on Saturday, so he was gone before Sunday hit. So we signed his estate plan within seven to eight hours of his death. And that’s last minute. And that, you know, for him, it worked out that we could do it. Many people in the last seven or eight hours of their life, they just don’t have the ability to sign estate planning documents. And I usually don’t have the ability to get there to get them signed in the last seven or eight hours of life. simply because I have lots of clients and I have lots of people I’m helping. I also have, one of the things that I was doing on Saturday was I was attending my son’s basketball game and we had church responsibilities and things like that. So all of those things combined, I happened to be able to get out and help that person. But waiting until the last minute is not a good idea. No, I do not recommend it. You want to put your estate plan in place long before it’s the last few hours so that that’s not something that has to be on your mind that you’re concerned about. So that’s all I’ve got for today. Thank you so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. I will be back next week and we’ll talk to you later. Thanks and bye.
Announcer (Host) :
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.
