In this episode, Michael Bailey takes us on a journey through historic Boston, connecting past revolutions to modern estate planning. As he walks through buildings from the 1700s and witnesses the reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, Michael ponders the permanence of legacy and the intricacies of passing down property through generations. Whether it’s a historic monument or a family cabin, what remains and what transforms over time is a reminder of the importance of thoughtful estate planning.
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 :
All right, 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. And again, that’s 303-477-5600. And that phone number rings the telephone lines of the KLZ 560 AM studios. Or it could ring the lines of the KLZ 100.7 FM studios. I don’t know that the KLZ 560 radio app has its own studio. So if you are listening on the app, I’m probably not live. And that means it might be not super helpful to try to call in on that number. But you are listening to either 560 AM, 100.7 FM, or the KLZ 560 radio app. And my direct line, if you want to call me to talk about your situation, is 720-394-6887. And once again, 720-394-6887. So this past weekend, I spent the weekend in Boston, Massachusetts. Mostly I spent the time inside of a convention center watching volleyball. And, you know, we all agree that the convention center was probably relying on some outdoor natural lighting more than the indoor lighting because it was kind of dark and a little bit dingy inside of the convention. And that might also have been the location of the courts we were on. Some of them in the middle had better lighting and things like that. But since we were in Boston, Massachusetts, and sometimes, so a couple of months ago when I was in Minneapolis, we’d walk from the hotel to the convention center and we stayed inside the little sky bridges that they had because it was snowy and cold and, you know, a high of three degrees. And I’m like, yeah, maybe we’ll stay inside when we walk. We don’t need to brave the cold to walk. Well, we were about mile, mile and a half from our hotel to the convention center. So we, most of the time, we’d send the kids, they’d take a taxi or an Uber over so they could be ready, and then we would walk over. And walking to the convention center was kind of fun because, you know, you’re in Boston, Massachusetts. There’s some buildings from the 1700s there, from the 1800s. And we did, the last day we were there, we walked from our hotel. My wife and I, our daughter was tired after playing seven volleyball matches in three days, which is understandable. You can be exhausted after that. So we walked from our hotel and we walked up to the Old North Church. And if you’re familiar with the Old North Church, it is where the lanterns were hung, one if by land, two if by sea, to tell Paul Revere how the British were coming. So if we Remember the Walt Whitman poem, come now children and gather here and I’ll tell you the tale of Paul Revere. And I’m not entirely sure how famous Paul Revere’s ride would have been had it not been immortalized in a Walt Whitman poem. But we did walk down, and we saw the Old North Church, and we took a picture of it and things like that. And as we had walked back and forth to the Convention Center, there was a museum there, and they had a couple of replica ships. And as we were walking by one, they threw three boxes of tea into the harbor, and everyone went, yay! And so they were reenacting the Boston Tea Party. I think these tea boxes were made out of some sort of styrofoam, so they were floating, so it wasn’t necessarily another Boston Tea Party where we were dumping tea into the harbor. But it was interesting to be in a place that had such historic significance and where so many events of the revolution happened. as we were walking around where our hotel was in the financial district so we’d walk by these you know 40 50 60 story tall skyscrapers with cool architecture and you know glass on the outside and tinted glass and all these things and so you’d be walking and then the next building would be this you know building that clearly had been there for 200 250 years and There were lots of repurposed buildings that we went to dinner as a team in a building that had been, I don’t think it was an Italian restaurant the first time it was built. But there was also, some of the people went to the oldest restaurant continuously operating restaurant in America that is there in Boston. And they said it had this and that and whatever. And they’re like, and it was kind of cool, but it smelled old. And I was like, that’s an interesting concept of it smelling old. And I’m like, I’m not entirely sure what the person meant by it smells old. But I’m pretty sure I understand what old smells like. There’s different types of old. If you get in a new car, there’s a new car smell. You get in an old car, and you’re like, this is an old car. If you’ve got freshly laundered clothes, they smell new. If they’ve got old… Clothes that have been sitting in a hamper for two weeks, they smell old. If you go to a skilled nursing facility, depending on the level of antiseptic that’s used and how recently it’s been cleaned, you can have an old smell or you could have a chemical-y smell where they’re trying to clean up things. It’s kind of like going to a hospital. A hospital has almost an antiseptic type of smell where you’re like, I’m smelling some sort of cleaning product or rubbing alcohol here. I can see how that’s the smell. But just the connection between a new, cool, high-rise modern building and an old building that has been saved was an interesting one. And it was interesting to be at the Old North Church. And we’re like, okay, they sell tickets so you can go on a tour on the inside. We were like, hey, we’ve seen the outside. We don’t necessarily need to go inside the church. But you think about the Old North Church, one if by land, two if by sea. And this is, what, 250 years ago that this is happening? Like, that’s a long time. But then you think of all of the other, we’re just kind of talking about and thinking about all of the other buildings, like, well, what else was here? Probably not this building, probably not that building. That one’s been torn down, this one’s been torn down. And you think about the Old North Church, and it survived. Possibly it survived because of a Walt Whitman poem. But what if the Old North Church, 20 years after the Midnight Riot of Paul Revere, had fallen into disrepair? What if people had stopped going to church there? What if it had been abandoned? So the bricks and the and the windows were broken and things were falling apart and the church had been torn down and something else had been built there. Well, we wouldn’t have a historical site now, would we? Nope, we would not. So I think of my house is built on land that there may or may not have been some sort of other settler there prior to the building of my house. My house was built there in 2001. Well, you know, now that’s 25 years later and I’m not the original owner of the house. But, you know, what was there prior to building the house? And I’m like, I believe it was a farm of some sort, just a field. And then it got developed into be a house. Cool. You know, if we go downtown Denver and we see some of the taller buildings, you know, whether it’s the what’s now the. I guess the Lumen building as opposed to the Quest building and what’s now the Century League Tower as opposed to the Quest Tower, the cash register building that we all know is the cash register building, which is the Wells Fargo building. But, you know, what was there before them? Were there, was it just, oh, hey, we’re going to leave this spot open. So in case we have something called a skyscraper that we don’t know what a skyscraper is, we can build something. No, there were probably other buildings there that were torn down, and that’s how that goes. Same way that Ball Arena, there used to be other things there. And where the current Empower Field is, there used to be parking lots. And where there used to be Mile High Stadium, there are now parking lots and apartment buildings. Things change. They cycle through. And as much as we’d like to hold on to everything that we’ve ever had and hold it all dear, it doesn’t always work that way. 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 in 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 when people are looking at trying to set up their estate plans, and I find this happens a decent amount with people who have like a cabin that they’ve They’ve bought a cabin up in the mountains, whether it’s in Evergreen or Clear Creek or Estes Park or Aspen or Vail or something like that. They’ve got their family cabin. It’s like, okay, that’s cool. So they’ll go up to their family cabin on weekends and spend the weekend up there. I can understand the fun of a family cabin. My family does not have a family cabin, but my dad worked for Hewlett-Packard. And Hewlett Packard had purchased a whole, you know, thousands of acres of land right outside of Estes Park that they called Hermit Park. You know, Hewlett Packard, Hermit Park. And the Hermit Park contains some cabins. There were, I think there were originally like four or five. And then, you know, they expanded and eventually ended up with like 10 or 15 of cabins in Hermit Park. And these cabins were available for everybody who worked for HP to go spend weekends in or weekdays. So you could go kind of camping in the cabin. And we went a couple of times. We went a lot as a family to Hermit Park. But there were a couple of times where we’d go and it was like… in winter and so you’d go and we’d you could take our sleds and you go sledding down the hill and yes you’d be but then you could sleep in a warm I think the cabins are now propane heated but back then there were only wood burning stoves that you could have but you know we were sheltered from the wind and the snow and everything and you know it’s one of my favorite but silly memories of we were sledding and we had the dogs in the sled with us and one of the dogs jumped up the front of the sled and the sled ran over the dog and we’re like, oh no, but we looked back and the dog just kind of popped up out of the snow and came running because there was a couple of feet of snow there so we could be sledding so i can understand the fun of being in a cabin and if you have a family cabin then you stay in the family cabin and you do all those type of things and it’s really an awesome time well um when people come to the end of their life and they’re like oh i want to pass the family cabin on we say okay let’s try to pass the family cabin on and So the parents will be like, oh, we’re going to pass the family cabin on to our three kids. Makes perfect sense. Do all three kids live here? Well, one lives here in Denver, one lives in Fort Collins, and one got a job in Alabama. I’m like, well, how does the one who lives in Alabama feel about owning part of a family cabin that they’ll never use? Sure, you could drive out from Alabama and go to a family cabin here in Colorado, but that might be a long way. Are they going to feel like they’re getting hosed in this whole deal because they get part of a family cabin, but they don’t get the money? Would they want to sell out to their siblings? Would the siblings actually want to buy it? These are the kind of questions that we end up asking about things like a family cabin. Because a family cabin, while a really cool asset, might not be the easiest one to split up. And that’s kind of how life works. Many people who live in one area, they get their, they will end up, especially if they go to school and college, in the same area then they might end up where they are um in a different you know so they can get a job so if you if you grew up in denver and you go to school at university of denver or university of colorado or colorado state university and you get recruited to a job locally then you’re going to stay local well If you go working for somebody like Ball Corporation or now BAE Systems or Hewlett Packard or an accounting firm like Arthur Anderson. Not like Arthur Anderson. They’ve disappeared. Yeah. but like Deloitte or KPMG or something like that where they have nationwide offices. So let’s say that you get recruited by KPMG and you’re like, okay, I’m an accountant. I’m going to work for KPMG. And you work for five or six years here and it becomes apparent that you’re going to be kind of stuck because nobody above you is moving away. But they say, well, hey, we’d like to promote you, but we need you to move to Houston, Texas. And then you can take your promotion. And you go, well… It’s going to be a promotion. It’s going to be double the money. Maybe I’ll move to Houston, Texas. This is the way that life works. It’s not a, oh, well, I can’t go any further than 20 miles away, so I have to buy my own farm. Maybe that’s what it was like in the 1700s and 1800s in Boston. But here we are looking at things and saying, okay, how do we do this? So if you take a family cabin, you split it up amongst three people, that makes sense. Well, let’s say that those three people each have three children of their own. So you’re like, okay, well, we’re going to pass the family cabin from mom and dad to kids and then kids to grandkids. And now we’ve got… nine grandkids well nine grandkids can be a little bit tricky you know who gets to use the cabin when and do all nine grandkids live here or some moved away let’s say those nine grandkids now have three kids of their own and now we have 27 great grandkids okay those 27 great caring kids have three kids kids of their own each so now we’re at Uh, 81 great, great grandkids. So we’re only like three generations removed and now a family cabin that has 81 kids, 81 great grandkids. We’re like, okay, do we need to have 81 people who own one family cabin? How are we going to split that up exactly? There’s only 52 weeks in the year. Like, well, so everybody gets to pick their half week that they want and they can go use it. And it becomes unwieldy. It becomes difficult. It becomes very hard to have that last for forever. And, you know, partially because it’s one family cabin. And yes, you’d like to pass it on to somebody and keep it in your family as much as you can. But there’s a practical aspect of that. The dream of we’re going to have a family cabin that will last forever and ever is great and is wonderful until it doesn’t work as well as you want it to. And I mean, there are families who have properties that stick around for a long time. Well, think of, say, the Rockefellers. You remember John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, richest guy in the world along the way. When the federal governments came in and said, oh, well, you’re a monopoly. We’re going to break you up. John Rockefeller said, cool, I’ll make a whole lot more money selling everything else off. We’re good. But, you know, the Rockefeller Trust continues to own billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of assets. And because they have billions and trillions of dollars worth of assets, they can support all of the descendants of the Rockefellers and they can have, you know, really cool, you know, real estate, you know, where the original Rockefeller mansion is still owned by them and so on and so forth and pass down the line. But then you see someone like, well, the last time I was in New York, I went to the Henry Frick Museum. Does anybody remember who Henry Frick was? Are you aware of who Henry Frick was there?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, no, I can’t say that I’m familiar.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, so he was like the factory owner and worked along with Andrew Carnegie and Carnegie Steel. Do you know who Andrew Carnegie was? Nope, not a clue. Not a clue? Okay. So Carnegie Steel was one of the big trust things. But Henry Frick was worth something like a ridiculous amount, like $300 million during the Industrial Revolution. And he liked to buy paintings, like original paintings from the Renaissance and stuff like that. So his house in New York is now the Henry Frick Museum, where you can go and see all the cool paintings. And when I was there, I went. I’m like, hey, that’s kind of fun. But the Frick family is not around, at least not the same way that the Rockefellers are. So there’s very few families that have enough money to continue perpetuating all of this for forever. Which isn’t to say you don’t want to pass what you have along to the people that are there. But it also means the dream of having a family cabin that stays in the family for generations upon generations upon generations may not be quite how it goes. There is a family in Adams County called the Carlsons. And at one point, they owned a significant portion of Adams County. I mean, they still own parts of Adams County, but back before Adams County was starting to be developed, a few generations back, they owned a whole bunch of the farmland and they’ve been selling it off to the developers. So probably my house at one point was owned by the Carlsons and I think it was the great-grandpa, so three generations back, if he were still alive and he still owned all the land, he’d have billions of dollars worth of land. But instead, they have a whole real estate development, real estate holding companies, and so that’s what they do for their family businesses. They You know, when I’m up there, I’m driving by like, oh, you know, this is this part of piece of land is offered by the Carlsons. I’m like, cool. And, you know, it’s just there’s so there are very few families and very few people are rich enough to be able to create this generational legacy that’s going to last for forever and ever. You know, those who have good for them. Whether you’re a Rockefeller or you’re a Bush, you know, George Hubert Walker and George W. Bush, you know, all that, that whole family that has lots of money. Or the Kennedys, you know, just there’s lots of, you know, then you can pass everything on and generational and things like that. Well, you know, it’s not saying you can’t pass things on from generation to generation. When you’re planning your own estate plan, thinking three, four, five, six generations down the line might not quite be where you need to go. Say, okay, well, we’ll pass it on to the next generation. And then the next generation can decide what to do with it to pass it on to the next generation where it makes sense to do. I had a client who I was talking to right before I came on the air. She’s like, well, you know, if I pass it on to my kids and then the grandkids, you know, what happens when we do the great grandkids and the great, great grandkids? And I’m like, well, by that time, We hope that they’ve moved on from your trust and they’re no longer under the restrictions and the rules of your trust, but they can do their own thing. She had thought about it for me. She’s like, well, I think by then I would be dead for a long time and I wouldn’t care. I’m like, I think that’s probably true. It’s not that you don’t want good things for your kids or your grandkids, but I don’t have enough money to worry about it now. I’ve met people who, I’ve met a couple of billionaires in my life, and they plan to pass their money on to their kids. But even billionaires, I’m like, so you made all of your money in whatever business it was you did. That’s great. But that business, part of the reason you have the billions you do is because you either sold it off or you’re holding the stock from it. And will it continue to exist forever and ever? You know, there’s, we have some examples from recent news, something like the company Theranos. And Theranos was started by a lady who graduated from Stanford, or was at Stanford, and she came up with this new way to, you know, do a lot of blood tests with much less blood. And, you know, had billions of dollars of investors. And then it at least according to the court documents, it wasn’t, it didn’t quite do what she said it would do. So, you know, the blood tests they were doing were results of taking more blood, sending it off to different labs and coming back and their, their process didn’t quite work as well as, you know, she had said. So the entire company ended up collapsing, investors lost their billions. And at one point, she had been like the, you know, youngest, you know, self made billionaire, and now she is serving many years in prison and does not have billions left. That was just within the rise and fall in the last five to ten years. Well, a lot of companies have rise and fall. Think about the Sears and Roebuck. the Sears catalog, which was almost the Amazon of its time for, you know, rural America and, you know, 100 plus some odd years of Sears being this really cool, really awesome company that did all sorts of new things. Where do you find a Sears now? Well, you don’t because they’ve closed down, you know, and that was you’re like, oh, well, you know, they were around for 100 years. I’m like, that’s a long time. Like it is. But it’s also a short time. 100 years is, you know, a generation or two and then you’re done. So all of that wealth and all of that money that got transferred on is great, except for I don’t know that the Sears family still owned Sears by the time they disappeared. Really, the Sears family had sold out and they had gone public and made their money and gotten out of the Sears and Roebuck company business so that by the time Sears and Roebuck made the decisions that they did, when they were like, I remember hearing that Sears and Kmart were going to merge. I’m like, well, you know, that’s an interesting one. I don’t know that taking two failing companies and putting them together is going to make one strong company. But, you know, if it had worked, I’d be like, well, then I would have been wrong. But as you’re setting up your estate plan, some people get caught up a little bit on, oh, well, what about my kids and the grandkids and the great-grandkids? I’m like, cool. And I don’t have any problem with you worrying about the kids and the grandkids and the great-grandkids. That’s a perfectly valid and wonderful thing to do. But then you look and say, okay, well, how much control of that money are we going to be able to have? Can we give that money to the kids and then say, okay, well, you know, then they can handle it when they’re old enough and then they can make their own decisions with it of passing it on to their own kids or their own grandkids. Sometimes I have grandparents who want to skip over the kids and go straight to the grandkids because they’re like, well, our kids aren’t very good with money and so we need to give it to our grandkids because if we give it to our kids, we’re not sure there’s going to be anything left to give to grandkids. And that’s a perfectly fine thing. But when you get more than two or three generations away, it may become cumbersome and difficult. So as much as we would all like for an estate plan to account for everything between now and the end of time or the end of the world, probably not how it’s going to go. So your estate plan is your estate plan. Get it where you want it to go. but we have the practicality aspect of to whom is it going to go? What are they going to do with it? Do we want to put all sorts of restrictions on it? Or is that going to be far too much to put all the restrictions on it? And how do we get this all working so that your assets go where you want it to go? And then we give the next generation or the generation after freedom and flexibility to distribute their own assets to who they want to go to through their own estate plan. It’s all part of the plan, all part of what we need to think about. So thanks so much for listening to Mobile Estate Planning with Michael Bailey. I’ll be back next week, but right now, stay tuned for John Rush and Rush to Reason, and have a great day. Thanks and bye.
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
