Join Michael Bailey as he navigates through the complexities and personal nature of estate planning. From ensuring your wishes are honored through clear documentation to understanding the significance of personal preferences, this episode delves deep into how individuals can tailor their estate plans to match their unique family dynamics and life choices. Michael provides anecdotes about clients and personal experiences that highlight the importance of customization in estate planning, making this a must-listen for anyone looking to secure their legacy and peace of mind.
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 here on 560 KLZ AM so we can do something besides just leave your family alone. Also heard on 100.7 FM, the KLZ 560 radio app. And, you know, just if you happen to be sitting, I don’t see anybody sitting in the studio with me. Fortunately, across the glass, we’ve got… our good friend Luke, who’s making sure all of you can hear this. Because if Luke doesn’t do his job, then I’m just talking into the air doing absolutely nothing. So Luke is really, he’s the important linchpin of all of this. Otherwise, none of it works. So we appreciate Luke and always remember to appreciate Luke. So phone number to talk to us on the air is 303-477-5600. And again, that’s 303-477-5600. If you want to talk to me on the air, you can call that number. If you want to just talk to Luke while I’m talking, you can also call that number. He’ll answer it. And my direct line is 720-394-6887. Once again, that’s 720-394-6887. I was just on Al Smith’s show, who was on right before this, and we were talking about mistakes that people make in their estate planning and leaving a legacy and things like that. So it got me thinking about what are some of the mistakes that people make. And the biggest mistake people make is not having an estate plan. Depending on which study you believe, and there’s lots of different studies out there and lots of different numbers, Somewhere between 60 and 80% of people in the United States do not have estate plans, don’t have any sort of estate plan set up. And what that means is they have an estate plan, it’s just in the form of the intestate statute of the state where the person lives. And an intestate statute is what happens to your assets after you die if you do not have a will or a trust or anything that describes what happens to your money when you go. So the Colorado Intestate Estate Plan, last time I printed it out, which I did for… illustrative purposes when I was giving a talk at a networking group. It was 87 pages long. So I printed it out and I started to go through all of the pages. I was kind of going through and reading through and people were like, what in the world? This is ridiculous. Why can’t they just write it so we can all understand it? I’m like, because it is a statute. And statutes are written in such a way to be broad and generally applicable. And so they can be somewhat confusing. Now, you know, there are, you know, for those of us who do estate planning, we can take and kind of boil things down to what the distribution pattern and who’s supposed to get what and who’s the hierarchy of who will get everything. And, you know, usually it’s to your spouse or to your children or to your closest family members. But you can get some weird formulas in there of… If you’re, you know, for someone who’s married to just their spouse and all of their kids are from that one marriage, like, okay, that can be pretty straightforward. It can go all to the spouse and then to the kids. Well, for people who are on their second marriage and not married to, and not all of the children came from the second marriage, or so you’ve got, if you have a couple of different spouses and you have children from different then there’s a certain flat amount that goes to a spouse, and then a certain percentage that goes to kids from different marriages. And then if you have multiple spouses and multiple marriages, it can very easily get very confusing. And so some people are like, oh, well, we have to know what all the default rules are, and if they’re okay, then we’ll just use the default rules. And I usually say something along the lines of, Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if you just had your own wishes and what you wanted laid out? I have a client who passed away earlier this week. And her husband, her surviving spouse, called me today. Asking to re-verify that he was supposed to get everything and he wanted 100% assurance that her children who were disinherited will not be able to challenge anything. I said, well, they can challenge things. we’ve set it up so that they’re very very unlikely to win that challenge but if they want to spend their time and money you know on attorneys to challenge something that says yep we know you’re there nope we’re not leaving you anything that uh they’re you know she can spend you know the children can spend their time and money doing that but in her case where she’d had a strained and kind of uh non-relationship with her children over the course of however many years they’d become estranged. That’s why we set up the estate plan to say, no, your children aren’t going to be able to come and claim something because we’ve got the estate plan set up that says, no, we don’t want to give it to this person. We don’t want to give it to the children. We want to give it to somebody else. Now, it sounds a little bit weird to be like, oh, how come you’re not giving things to people in the context of children or a spouse? But if we think of it more broadly, if my parents die, they want to leave their money to their kids, to the four of us children. They don’t want to leave money to Luke or to Al Smith from earlier or to John Rush, who will be on next. And it’s not anything against Luke or Al Smith or John Rush. Luke, Al Smith, and John Rush are not children of my parents. So my parents, having a desire to take care of their children, want to give the money to us instead. To the exclusion of pretty much everybody else in the entire country and in the entire world. And, you know, I can see that. I can understand that. You know, somebody who wants to leave their money to the wild animal sanctuary up in Keensburg. They can do that to the exclusion of pretty much everybody else and every other organization in the world. And, you know, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just people are allowed to decide how they want to spend their money, and they’re allowed to decide how they want their money to go when they pass away. You know, I have friends who every car they have is a leased car, so they never have a car that’s more than three or four years old. They also never own their cars because they just lease them and then turn them back in. Well, and, you know, I also have friends who, I have a friend who he is, he likes Corvettes a lot. So he, when he got old enough, he bought himself a Corvette and he spends his time working on it and he’ll make sure to maintain it and do all the cool things like that. And, you know, that’s one of his hobbies and that’s great. I do not own a Corvette. It’s just not one of my hobbies. I’ve talked about on this show how I put up a lot of Christmas lights. So I have a lot of Christmas lights and I have to store the Christmas lights. You know, that’s one of my hobbies is to have Christmas lights. Other people don’t want to spend the time or the effort to put up Christmas lights or to take them down like I do, but I’m okay with it. It’s something that I enjoy, so I do it. And my friend who has a Corvette, that’s something he enjoys, so that’s what he does. And, you know, we all are allowed to have our different preferences, and that makes perfect sense. So you are listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey here on 560 KLZ AM, also heard on 100.7 FM, or the KLZ 560 radio app. 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. And once again, that’s 720-394-6887. And, you know, people get hung up on people having preferences of where their money goes or who should get what in an estate planning sense. But it’s one of those things that everybody has different preferences. And that’s why there’s so many different things in the world. Kind of like, you know, why do we have so many different restaurants in the world? You know, my kids, they, growing up, I never liked sushi. I never thought that sushi was something that I would have to, that I would enjoy or that I would eat or something that would be, anything that would be a taste that I would like at all. You know, like it’s seaweed and rice and raw fish. Why would I want any of that? Well, my kids enjoy going to a sushi restaurant, especially if it has a hibachi grill attached to it, so that they can have their hibachi grilled steak with their seafood. And maybe it’s, at least for my 12, almost 13-year-old, it’s all about the steak. But he’s now getting to the point where he’s hungry enough that he’ll eat anything. But, you know, you go to a sushi restaurant and, you know, order sushi and, you know, we tend to be more of the kind of California roll and temporary shrimp roll and not the eel and the octopus. You know, everybody’s got their preferences. But growing up, Japanese restaurant, sushi, not my thing. I was more of a, hey, let’s go get a hamburger, or possibly we could go to a Mexican restaurant and get a taco or a burrito or something like that. These were the kind of things, or my mom lived in India for a year, so when she was 16, her dad, my grandfather, was a plant pathologist and fought plant disease and Went to India for a year. I was teaching Indian farmers about how to plant in ways that they could avoid plant disease and things like that. So because of that, my mom learned how to cook Indian food. And so I grew up with lots of Indian food. And I’ve always liked Indian food. Well, I know there are people who don’t like Indian food. They don’t like the spice. They don’t like the… texture. They don’t like the offerings, you know, for my 19 year old who’s a vegetarian. She’s a big fan of Indian food because there’s a lot of vegetarian options. And, you know, in other contexts, you know, my son was at a shopping center the other day. My daughter was getting some clothes and he went off to the Nike outlet and he found some basketball shoes. So now, because the basketball shoes he’s worn for the last year and a half are kind of wearing out. So he found some new Nike basketball shoes. And so he wanted to… He wanted to buy them, and fortunately they were on clearance, so that’s even better because they’re less expensive. But the Nike basketball shoes fit his feet and feel better on his feet than, say, Reebok or Adidas or Converse or… Or Under Armour or any of the other clothing, you know, shoe manufacturers that are out there. And I can understand that. I had similar, you know, preferences for shoes, you know, when I was in high school and played basketball. The versions of basketball shoes that were available then in Nike tended to fit my feet better. And it’s not that I disliked.
