One of the biggest misconceptions about estate planning is that a trust and a will are the same things and that if you have one, you don’t need the other.
This is not true.
In this episode, Zacc Call and Laura Hadley invite estate planning attorneys Courtney and Gregory Lyle onto the podcast to discuss some of the biggest misconceptions about trusts and wills and how you can use them to best organize your estate for your family.
Greg and Courtney discuss:
[00:00:00] Welcome to The Financial Call. We are financial advisors on a mission to guide you through the financial planning everyone should have, whether you're doing it yourself or working with a financial advisor. These episodes will help you break down complicated financial topics into practical, actionable steps. Our mission is to guide motivated people to become financially successful. Welcome back to The Financial Call. We are in season five, Estate Planning. And this is episode two and we have two special guests with us here today. Greg and Courtney Lyle. They are the estate attorney experts here in our office next door, and they're actually married and they're both estate planning attorneys, so we're really excited to have them on with us. First time I've ever heard of that, first time I've ever heard of both husband and wife getting into estate planning. Yeah, no, it's awesome. I think it's fantastic. Did you guys meet each other in school? I can't remember your background of how you met and. Both went into estate planning. We actually met in undergrad
[00:01:00] and we ended up going to law school together. So we've done what, five years of school? About being together. So you decided Courtney signed up and you're like, oh, I'll do it too. That sounds great. Kind of the other way around. Other way around. Got it. Got it. Well, we're really excited to have them here with us today. They both went on radio shows, so they're the experts really at this whole Oh, don't set us up like that. No, no, no. Period. Craig's done it in Spanish. That's, yeah. That's only has, right? I can do the rest in Spanish. Do you want me to do that? I'll try. Please. No, please, no. All right. But yet, today we want to cover a deeper dive into wills and trusts. Last episode, we talked about more of an intro into estate planning and the estate plan that everyone should have. And we're going to go into more complex planning later and naming beneficiaries and things like that. But this episode is really all, when I say naming beneficiaries, I mean on particular accounts. We are gonna talk about beneficiaries as it relates to trusts today, but the other episodes will be some of the, the nuances or pitfalls around
[00:02:00] like IRA beneficiaries and things like that. But anyway, today is all about wills and trusts. First of all, Greg is an estate planner that works in our office. And Courtney, I believe you're in the office now sometimes too, right? As your kids get older, you're phasing more and more into getting away from talking to small children and getting to talk to adults again. Yes. Is what we talked about earlier, right? Talking to people who actually care and listen. Right? That's debatable to be honest. Okay, so the thing to know about Greggie has a really good way of explaining wheels and Trusts through the Simpsons, right? That's a presentation we do regularly together. Yep. Yep. I love that. We probably don't have time for the entire Simpson's layout of Wheels and Trusts, but we'll give you some examples as we go. So what if we just ask you guys some questions and then maybe Laura and I can give a little bit of perspective as we see it from the financial advisor side and Courtney and Greg. You guys can give us the perspective of how it really works and how it works with real life people building out their will and trust. So first difference between will
[00:03:00] and trust, I don't care either of you go. What is the difference between a will and a trust? I'll take it. The will is gonna come into effect after you pass away. While the trust is gonna become effective immediately. So as soon as you sign it, your trust is ready to go. Your wishes are known, and that's something you can plan on and use during your life, while the will will only come into effect after you pass away. Yeah, and the simplest definition I have for a will is a set of instructions to a court in probate. Right. A lot of people don't get that. Today I actually had a client that I met with, they're well to do, you know, over a couple million dollars and they said, we don't know if we really need trust. We just want to do a will. And I'm like, okay, well do you know what that means? And it means you're going to court, right? So that's the big difference. Court or no court. And not just court. It's open, it's public for everyone to see Where a trust will keep your information private and all your assets. The court, it's out there for everyone to see and anyone to contest. That's a good point. The contest part is a huge deal. Let's say someone doesn't
[00:04:00] have trust and they just have a will. This example, this $2 million roughly household, they don't trust. They have a will. And you've gone through this process now quite a few times with people. How cumbersome is the process for actually taking them through probate? Yeah. You know, it depends on the state. So I think Courtney Ute quoted me the other day, California, like the average cost is, what was it? Like $22,000 to make it through a probate at least. Oh really? You're talking about a basic entry. Yeah. And over a year and a half, I thought for the average Utah, it's not that bad, but Utah, you know, it's a couple thousand dollars. Few thousand dollars and it's gonna be. At least 6, 7, 8 months, you know, to a year plus if it's not contested. And then you have to keep in mind, this couple had property in Idaho, they had property in Utah. You're talking about two probates, right? So not fun. And there's notice requirements like three months notice to creditors in Utah. There's other things that are not fun. And the other thing is people come outta the woodwork. And that's
[00:05:00] really the unknown is who's gonna say, oh, your parents owed me money. You know? It's like, oh, we've never heard of you. You know? Yeah. Not a fun thing to go through. That's really interesting. And I think it helps give that perspective. Some people think, well, I, I don't have enough money to build a trust, or I don't, I. I don't wanna pay for it, it can be expensive, I've heard, or I don't wanna take the time to do it. But in reality, if you just have the will and you don't have that trust, you're going to have to go through that probate process, which is going to be, well, a tricky party, probably more expensive. They won't go through it. Right? Yeah, true. Right, true. If you care about your beneficiaries and your kids, they're gonna have to go through it. It's funny cuz we meet with a lot of people and they're. They've just gone through the process of their parents' estate and their parents did not have the trust, and so they come to us, please help. I don't want my kids to have to go through this, or they did have a good experience and they're saying, yeah, I wanna set it up, have it be easy for my kids as well, so probably cheaper to get the will and trust done. Then go through the probate process and save time. So we see the word revocable all the time. We're gonna get
[00:06:00] into some specifics around the basics of a trust, but we see that's probably one of the most common words you see in the normal trust that most of us end up with. The person who's a complete newbie to this. What does that mean as it applies to trusts? Revocable just means that you can change it. It's not set in stone. So if you have an irrevocable trust, it is done. You can't touch it, you can't do anything to make it revocable. You can go back in, you can make changes, you can cancel it, you can get rid of it, it can be revoked, in essence. Yeah. And there's no separate identity to a revocable trust. Right. It's looked at as you, you don't have to get a new tax ID number. So it's just you also, that's what most people need, right? Your standard person, which I'm one of you, you know, is gonna need a revocable trust. Seems like most of us end up with a revocable trust and we have irrevocable trusts and more complex trusts. In a later episode to give you an idea, some of the things that will push you into that category are. You're trying to send money through without as much as state tax,
[00:07:00] which you're talking about people with 20, 25 million plus that are really worried about that, or you are trying to set up something permanent for someone whose special needs or other scenarios like that. That's where more of these irrevocable trusts pop up during life. But most of the time, however, when both spouses die, a revocable trust gets set in concrete at that time, right? That's correct. So it then converts to an irrevocable trust, and that's by design. Right? Or else all your wishes would not be followed. Right. That's a good point. That's a good point, yep. So we are talking about these basic trusts. For the average person, what do you guys say are the top three things people should know about basic trust? I think one thing is that the trust avoids that probate we were talking about. You don't wanna have to do that and have everything public and get messy, where if you put it in the trust, you can control it and have the controller in your life when the first spouse dies, and then it makes it easier on your children later and you can set them up as trustees and they can know ahead of time.
[00:08:00] Yeah. I think too that it's important to understand that the trust only governs what is in the trust, right? So it needs to be funded. That's something a lot of people don't understand, right? I think of it like a company, right? I don't care what your company does or says if this asset is not in that company, if it's not in that little entity, it's not governed by it. So really important to understand that if you want it to be governed by the trust, it better be in the trust. You better fund it into the trust. And it seems like people spend so much time with their estate planning attorney. They do all the work and they fret over these little decisions of, oh, do they get the money at 25 or 27? Or they kind of nitpick all of these things and then the attorney does all this extra work, creates this beautiful binder. And like if you're Greg, he looked at mine and he was like, Zack, why didn't you put these in the right tabs? So he grabbed my binder cuz Greg did my estate plan and then separated 'em and put them in like two minutes. Put all of the dox under the right tabs for me. Anyway, you do all this
[00:09:00] work and then people will then just stop right there and they don't then take the documents to the financial institutions or go to the county and change their house to be owned by the trust and then they end up in probate anyway. Yeah, no. It's like equivalent to a builder building a house and then you know, just not putting on the front door. You know, no windows in this house, right? It's like, oh, well, not a lot of protection, not a lot of help. And that's the other aspect of it is it's creating a plan during life, right? Like that's why you're doing this. You want this plan in place. You want peace of mind. You want it to go where you want it to go. There's a reason you're doing this. So we talked a little bit about the difference between will and trust. Could we dive deeper? Let's first start with the will. Dive deeper into an actual will. What are some of the main, they call? I want to use terms that people understand, but I was gonna say provisions, like what are the main things that people write or that you write for people in the will? And I'd love to hear that. And then maybe the second question is
[00:10:00] around what are some of the common requests from your clients to add to their will? So maybe start with a standard and then what people add to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So really it's important to understand there's two different kinds of wills, right? It depends on what kind of estate plan you have, and I think this is the biggest misconception and the easiest way I could explain it would be to explain the way we used to do things versus the way we do things today, right? So the way we used to do things, the way everybody did things, is you'd just do a will. The will would set forth your wishes. You could do that by hand. A lawyer could do it, you know, however you wanted to do it. As long as it was legal and then you would own stuff in your own individual name. That was the old way that people would do things. That's probably how your great-grandparents did stuff. And then they'd die and it would go to court. And as I said, a will is a set of instructions to a court and probate. Well, there's your will, right? And it's going to court, and the court's gonna allow you to disperse it. You know, your family will disperse it according to your wishes. So that's the old school will. But when we do a trust for you,
[00:11:00] We're not doing that. We're doing. The trust is doing all that heavy lifting. It doesn't need to go to court. Your trust is gonna handle everything and the will is a fail safe, right? It's what happens if you've messed up, haven't funded it, haven't put on the front door, as we were saying. And then all of a sudden, you know, stuff goes to court. Well, there's your court document again, and we call it a pour over will, which means it just goes to the trust, right? Funnels it into the trust. And instead of being 7, 8, 9 months to a year, you're talking more like weeks, four or five weeks, that kind of thing. Six weeks for the court to give you permission to disperse it to those beneficiaries in the trust. One really important thing that I think is in every will is anyone with minor children, you can appoint a guardianship who you would want your kids to go to if anything were to happen to you. And that one reaches like it touches close to home for me cuz when I was young, my parents lost a baby when I was about five years old. And so it brought a lot of questions to my mind. Even as a five year old, I was questioning what would happen to me.
[00:12:00] And they had done their will and they told me, this is who you would go to. And I knew, and in my mind it brought me a lot of peace. So even though we talk about just doing a trust, make sure you do a trust, there is that pour over will, which is a combination they work in hand really in tandem together. And as you appoint the guardians, it is something that then can work with that trust. And the trust will allocate how you would want your children to be raised. But the will is where you're gonna appoint your guardians, and that's a really important aspect if you have minor children. So if you have a will, a pour over will in this case, and you have a trust working in tandem, then this is where I get a little bit lost because I, I haven't brought it on Zacc. I haven't been through the process myself. So I have the will, a poorer will, and a trust. A judge is still looking at the will. So I kind of feel like I'm still going through probate, but I'm not. Right, because supposedly we're not. But we are cause we're sitting in front of a judge, like, and you mentioned the time difference. It's weeks instead of months, which is great,
[00:13:00] but what is, is it still called probate? The process of handing my pour over will to the judge and, well not mine, but let's say it was my parents handing my parents pour over will to the judge and saying like, Hey, can't you see all this pours into the trust? And then we're gonna take it from there. Yeah, I mean, it's still, we have a probate court in Utah, like a particular court. We all know who the judge is, right? Like it's the same judge that has been for a bunch of years. And so it's gonna go to that judge, and that judge is gonna say, okay, well these parents died, and so now we need to establish guardianship. It's what we call a consent calendar. So it's very quick, right? Like if you show up to court like we did for a neighbor of ours who died in her. Kinda late forties. Didn't really leave a will, actually. It was, anyways, let's pretend she did. Right? And had the guardians. We'd go to court and we'd say, your honor, here's who we want to be. The guardians and the court's not looking at her assets. That's not on the table in this case, right? Where it's guardianship, it's just guardians and nobody objects to what you're asking for. Great. We grant it.
[00:14:00] Now, if there's an asset we left out, like you're mentioning, okay, well that's gonna go to that probate court, but just that asset. Right. And then really the court doesn't really want it, right? So if there's a document saying, give it to my trust, they're more than happy to, Hey, everything's above board. Here's a court order saying that you can now deal with that asset. And I assume that they're so conservative in the court process, the judge in particular, that he would prefer to not have to make the decision. So the fact that the poor over will define that, it just goes to the trust. And then he can be confident that the trust has. Specific language that's even better for him. So he's gonna pass that through quickly, right? Oh yeah. That's every lawyer and every judge. Like we don't wanna make the hard decision if we don't have to. Right. We don't want ambiguity. If it's right there in writing, it's like done off my docket, outta my courtroom. So in the will, I remember working through a few things where. Okay, so guardianship sa, an important thing to add. It also seems like there are specific items that you can list out sometimes, like you can have a little addendum to the
[00:15:00] will, right? And say, my wedding ring goes to this person. That seems like that's a typical one for people to articulate, right? Yeah. What else do people put on their will? Have you seen it? Oh man. An airplane. That's the biggest one I've seen on the will. Why not put that in the trust? Yeah. Yeah. So depending on how your lawyer does it, you can say these things go to these people, right? And you can list that in the will or trust, depending on what state you're in and, and everything. So, You know, I've had somebody say, well, I wanna leave the airplane to this kid. And he wanted to hand write it on that memorandum you're talking about. And I said, you know what? That's a pretty big deal. Let's put that in the trust. So yes, we did. But those are the kind of, usually it's small little items, you know, wedding rings, personal items, sentimental items. I could cause a fight. The rule of thumb I have is if it's insured something you insure separately, let's mention it in the trust. So like a car that will typically go in the trust. Yeah. Yeah. If you wanna leave a car to a certain person, that's wise to put that in the trust. Cuz that's a big asset. You don't want somebody coming in and
[00:16:00] scratching that out and saying, no, actually it goes to my other kid, you know? Yeah. Okay. In practice, that one is one I rarely ever see. Like what is your opinion of that? Because I'm thinking like I don't want to go sit at the DMV to tell 'em to. Name my vehicle as part of the Call Family Trust, like. Where does the rubber hit the road on that one? How do we make that real? Yeah. Yeah. So you just do an assignment of your personal property to the trust, one page blanket statement. I give all my personal items to the trust. Right. And the state allows that. So it's really easy. You don't need to go in, in detail every little thing cuz you're gonna change cars, right? You're gonna get a new car. We drive the same car by the way. And Greg and I both have a charcoal gray Honda pilot. Yeah. From 2000, like 15 ish age. Right. Are they both in your trust? That's the question. Oh, no, they don't. Were you listening, Laura? No, they don't need to be. I'm asking for a friend. Sorry. Of course, of course. No, that was my, that's exactly my question because I'm asking for a friend here that
[00:17:00] my Honda pilot is not in my trust. Wait, so you're saying cause right now if I get my registration in the mail, which they are emailing now, I think. But anyway, you get that card and it says it's owned by my name and my wife's name. It's not like the state or whatever a government body does it, if it's UDOT or whatever. They don't see my trust's name on that. And you're saying that's okay, I can just have a separate document, which I think you did, which assigns my personal property over to the trust. Yes, exactly. Okay. Yeah, that makes it easier. I was easily worried about having to go like, I don't want to go and wait in those lines. Maybe I'm just way too impatient. Nobody wants to wait in those lines. No, nothing wrong with that, Zacc. No. Okay. You're human. Okay, so that's Will's. So to summarize, when you have trust, generally for most people we talk to, they should have trust. If they have any piece of real estate, primary residents, most of the time they should have a trust and then they should also have a pour over will that works in tandem with that trust. And if I can summarize that before
[00:18:00] we move on to trusts, it sounds like the poor over will does a really good job of pouring over the assets into the trust. And if they have young children helping specify guardianship and if they have personal possessions, especially those of high sentimental value, but maybe not high monetary value, then they should be listed out potentially there in the will to avoid family issues. Is there anything we've missed in the will itself? Man, you're hired. That was, that was perfect. So trust me. This is where I feel like it could go any direction here, because trusts are so specific to the family. Right. How would you describe the basic function of a trust? So trust is gonna become effective immediately. So as soon as you meet with your attorney and sign it and walk out the door, it's effective. And that's where we were talking about the funding. You want to make sure it's funded so there's actually something in the trust. If anything were to happen to you. And
[00:19:00] Something that's cool about the trust versus a will is if there are any issues with incapacity, your trustee can still help you. Like normally, whoever establishes the trust is going to be the trustee. But if something happens to you, you could have your spouse or someone else, a child, or whoever you name when you are creating the trust, help you during that time of incapacity and they will already have access to your finances that they need that are already titled in the trust so they can help you if you needed to sell your home or whatever it might be during that time. That is a cool thing that has the trust in addition to protecting your home and passing your assets. So the trust is also gonna list your assets and how you want them to pass, who you want them to go to, kids, grandkids, down the line, and if there are minor children, if you wanna set up age ranges for when they can actually receive the money versus someone else helping them hold the money and help them through that time. Yeah, I love what you said. And it's, it's about control, right? And so often
[00:20:00] the conversation will be, you know, with a parent, we'll say, okay, well this account, are you okay with this? Let's say it's one kid. Are you okay with that kid just getting that money? Well, fine, just make 'em a beneficiary. But, if there's control involved, like we've got four little kids, you know, it's like, Well, I want somebody to control that. If I die and I wanna make sure they, maybe a lot of families that are real into education, they'll say they need to meet certain requirements to get that money. And we can talk more in depth about that. But yeah, it's, it's where control's involved and you wanna avoid court and. This is something that was really interesting. Greg helped with my trust as well. You don't have to give all the money to 'em all at once either. Maybe you don't want your 18 year old to have access to the money till they're 25, and maybe you don't want 'em to have everything at 25, so you can give them half at 25 and half at 30. What's the most typical situation that you see in regards to kids and when they get money? Do you like restrictions? Restrictions. Yeah. What did I say? Situation? I didn't know what the situation meant. Like restrictions? Yes. Like, no, no, you did great. I was just trying to understand myself. Like are
[00:21:00] are you talking about the most typical restrictions that people like to put on? Yeah. Yeah. So the most typical age I see is 25. I don't know why, but that tends to be, you know, it's, well, I guess I do know why it's an age where hopefully if the kids go into college, they have a degree at that point, or close to it. Also, you know, the brain fully develops depending on who you ask, like 27, 28, you know, around that age. The other thing you're balancing is, let's say I appoint, like I think we have Courtney's brother appointed as the backup guardian of our kids, and he would be the trustee if her parents aren't around. So if I say, well, age 45 or something, well now if I die and my kid's 15, I've just given him a 30 year job. You know what I mean? So you have to balance that as well. In terms of the restrictions, I've seen some crazy restrictions and I often will caution the person not to do anything too crazy. Like there's famous cases where we've read in law school back in the day where somebody would say, you need to marry somebody of this religion, or this thing or that, and it's like, oh gosh. Like you're really
[00:22:00] affecting that kid's life. Right, but drugs are the big reason why you're restricted. I know Zacc has some good stories about those that he's seen. Also, if they have any sort of special needs that would be another reason you'd want it managed or restricted. Well, I'd like to clarify that I do not have experience with drugs, but I do have experience with a client who had a niece who was experiencing this issue. Did I say that? Did I say it wrong? No, I'm just, I just, I just don't want anybody reading into this too far. Okay, so the situation was I was working with a client and his sister passed away. Now, before his sister passed away, her daughter was into drugs, and so she didn't, she didn't want that daughter to just have access at the time. The value of her accounts was about $800,000, and this has been over a decade ago, so it's been a while, but. I joined this relationship and helped her. Helped the beneficiary's uncle, right? Cuz he was the trustee with the assets and managing the assets and helping with distributions. She had to pass a series of drug tests every six months to get any money
[00:23:00] out of it, and then it was every five years. But over the course of. Two or three periods within like a six month window. And so it was like she couldn't just get a sober pass and get a bunch of money. She had, it was interesting to see how the deceased mom had really known her daughter apparently. Right. And so, but this daughter, she failed every five years and I was actually part of that. Relationship and helping that client on the last one. And at the very end, if she failed, then the assets just went to other entities entirely. And, and that's what ultimately ended up happening. But I think that the deceased mom, that's what she wanted cuz she knew very well that that money was going to immediately go to drugs. She would've rather given it to charities or other people. And so that was a restriction she put on the wealth. That if you just named the daughter as a beneficiary on the account, you can't spell that out, the brokerage firm or bank, they're not going to manage that for you. You have to lay all that out for you in a trust. Yeah. The thing people don't think about though, is who is doing that? Right? Like in that case, that was an uncle.
[00:24:00] Which can work at times. But if you're saying, okay, my older son is going to tell my younger son, you know, you have to do this and this and this. Oh my gosh, you can ruin that relationship so fast. Right? So I had a client who had multiple millions of dollars that he wanted to break out and skip his generation in with some of it and go to the next generation, which sounds great, right? And the problem was there were 20 grandchildren down there. And they're across four siblings. And the way he had his trust organized was that the oldest two children were trustees of the trust, and then the restrictions were that each grandkid could get the money out for things like school or obtaining a certain age or starting a business, or very specific criteria. Now, if you put all of that money together in one trust, There's somewhat of a run on the bank by the older grandchildren because they want to
[00:25:00] use it up right as much as they can. And the younger grandchildren that might be just barely born may not see a dime because it might all be spent. So one way to fix that is to break it apart into different accounts, which I really like. But then you just created 20 SubT trusts that you have to manage separately. And not only that, we have siblings at that middle generation level calling their brother and saying, Hey, My son is gonna go to college. Brother, can you send some money? Can we take some money out of the trust account? So then do you name the parents, the trustees of each of their own accounts? And anyway, you can see how, how that gets complicated. Now, if he took some of those restrictions off around age and certain achievements, then the money can actually flow directly and be done and doesn't have to stay in trust. Trust is what you need to maintain control, like what Greg was talking about earlier. But if there's not a need for control, they can distribute it to the beneficiaries and move on. And so, that gets pretty tricky. I think the thing, in summary, what I'm trying to
[00:26:00] says there was a moment in talking with this particular individual where I said, Okay. Just understand that putting that one restriction went from this trust dissolving at your death to this trust turning into 20 trusts for another 30 years. Are you sure that that one restriction is worth it to you? And, and he ultimately pulled back on some of his, some of the control that he wanted to maintain after he passed away. So anyway, it's the balance of complexity and control. Yeah. And getting someone to manage that for you right. Could be a full-time job. Yeah. Could be expensive for the trust. Yeah, too. Totally. Uh Huh, definitely. Can we talk a little bit about second marriages? I think this is something that we see super frequently and people have the fear that the second spouse is gonna take over all of the assets. And you know, maybe through the first marriage there were five kids and they're potentially gonna be. Written off of the whole inheritance because the new spouse inherits it all. So what's a typical process that you guys see with second marriages? What do people typically do to
[00:27:00] avoid that? Yeah, that's a hard one. That's a really hard one. So there's really three options in that case. I have a presentation I'll give to clients when they come in or send 'em a video I've recorded of these options. Option one is to treat it like a first marriage and just say, you know what? We've been married 35 years. They call her mom and me dad, and like, We'll take our chances. Right? And some people do that. Some people do that. I will caution 'em before and I will type it into my notes, and this is what you told me, you know, but that's one option. Really. Just treat it like a normal first marriage. And if it's been a long marriage, right? For longs, yeah. Yeah. Where you raise the kids together and things like that. Second option is kind of the same thing where you say, when I die, goes to that spouse, but it becomes irrevocable and it's an irrevocable trust. Some people don't love the reality of that because first of all, the survivor doesn't always respect it, and they don't always know what they have. So I've seen a lot of times where somebody comes in and they say, well, I have this trust and I wanna make this change and do that. And I look at it and I go, well,
[00:28:00] you can't change it. It's an irrevocable trust. And they're like, what do you mean and how does that work? And, then you never hear from 'em again. And they probably sold the property and they probably just, you know what I mean? So it's not always respected, but that can be a good option. There's ways around that, around the problems there. And then the third option is the best option if you have the money. And that would be to give some to the kids when you die and the rest to the spouse, right? So to the extent you have the money to say, okay, well this life insurance policy goes to my spouse, this 401k, or this big portion of it goes to my kids. And then you're not setting up a situation where they're gonna be at each other's throats. It's very clean, and if they wanna hang out, they can, but you're not setting up a negative situation. It gets weird too, because people are like, ah, I would love it if my stepparent just passed away so that we can have the house that is supposed to be ours, but she has the right to live in while she's alive. And it's just weird. Sets up weird. Yeah. Yeah. Weird feelings. If instead, if she had just been given that house
[00:29:00] and the kids were given more of the other assets, then they wouldn't have to feel quite. At odds with each other, which is just weird, but we see that regularly. Also, the middle one that you mentioned where they can't change the trust, oftentimes people will learn, well, I can't change the trust, but you're telling me I can just withdraw all the money. Right? Okay. I'll just go ahead and withdraw all the money and put it in a new trust. That's what I was gonna tell you is if we're really serious about it, right? If you set up that irrevocable trust, there ought to be another trustee on there with you, and it should be the decedent, meaning the dead person's kids, or a professional. You're right. Zack's hitting it right on. People look at it and go, oh, I'm the trustee. I'll just take the money out. It's like, oh, problem solved. You know? So it didn't really do what you thought it would do. So let's summarize up today, everything we, well, not everything, but the main points of what people need to know because this is meant to be an intro into wills and trusts. I love the way that you two have explained the will. I thought that was so great in the beginning. You guys did such a great job helping us understand it. Basics of you probably should have a pour over will. Do it
[00:30:00] the new way, do a trust, and then add a pour over will. If you have young kids, put guardianship language in there. If you have specific things you really care about assigning to a certain individual, put that in there. And then a trust is, what do we call it? An entity. It's not an entity yet. It's not. But we use that, we use that term phrase just to help people kind of picture it. Think of a separate little thing that you own and you manage. And it will carry out your wishes. You wanna make sure your trust has clear wishes and you've hinted at not overcomplicating it if you don't have to. Consider carefully the balance between controlling things after you die and the complexity and cost of management and stress of management after you pass away. And then the other big one was to make sure you fund it. Make sure you actually go through the process of putting on the front door and the windows. Right, Greg? Right, right. Yep. That was a great summary. That was a really good summary. Yeah, the most cordial couple ever. Thanks for
[00:31:00] joining us, you guys. Thanks guys. It was fun. Thanks. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for personal advice from Capita. This is not a recommendation offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Past performance is not. Indicative or for of future results, there can be no assurance that investment objectives will be achieved. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, including the loss of money invested, therefore, It should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, including the investments or investment strategies recommended or proposed by Capita will be
[00:32:00] profitable. Further Capita does not provide legal or. Tax advice. Please consult with your legal or tax professional for advice prior to implementing any strategies discussed during this podcast, certain of the information discussed during this podcast. Is based upon forward-looking statements, information and opinions, including descriptions of anti anticipated market changes and expectations of future activity, Capita beliefs that such statements, information and opinions are based upon reasonable estimate eight and assumptions. However, Forward-looking statements, information and opinion are inherently uncertain and actual events or
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