10 Reasons why it’s important to get your estate plan in place:
1 Rock Solid Law & Title has a different outlook on the subject of estate planning than a lot of other lawyers. We make it client-focused. Estate planning is about passing on to the Next Generation. It is about maintaining what you earned. It is about taxes, but really what it's about you. It's about your heroic life story and writing the ultimate chapters of the rest of your life; for you and for those you love. This subject is for native Floridians and new Floridians and everyone in between.
The most important thing about the process of Estate Planning is that the mental aspect of it is it's about how you want to be treated as you age can go to the rest of your life. The primary purpose is to make sure that you make the choices of how you will be treated, and those choices can really eliminate a lot of bad things happening in your life. It's about writing the ultimate chapters of your life story.
We feel very strongly that the family is the center of our culture. And we think one of the best things that we can do in our practice is to help strengthen families because we think strong families make a better country. We’ve practiced long enough to see that sometimes when families don't plan, they fall apart and it's better to have a great plan in place.
2 Estate planning is about you deciding whether you going to pay only mandatory taxes that are due or whether you're going to choose to pay some voluntary taxes as well. It's about maximizing your Prosperity during your life how to hold on to what you have made and yes, it's about who you will share your love with, who you treasure, when you want to share with them, and how you want to share with them. It is very important to take into account the expenses of probate.
Whether you're a new resident in Florida or a 40+ year veteran like me, it's good to know that Florida has some different laws compared to other states. For instance, when we're talking about a Will in Florida, we have a personal representative rather than an executor.
3 A really important thing in Florida is our Homestead. So those of you that are homeowners, congratulations we have the strongest homestead law in the world in Florida. It is the greatest asset protection device available. For an estate planning lawyer, rule #1 is to make sure that nothing is done to compromise the homestead as an asset protection device. The homestead protection can be lost, if not planned properly.
Why do we have such a great Homestead in Florida? In Florida, before air conditioning when Florida was a mosquito and alligator-ridden swamp, Florida wanted to attract people to come and settle here. This is actually predating our being a state and then was codified in our constitution in order to attract people to move here. So, Florida basically made our homes judgment-proof, unless you give somebody a lien on it. That’s, for instance, like a mortgage.
4 For people that are newly moving into Florida, our signing requirements on how to execute the estate planning documents are different from many other states right. An instance is a will from New York. It would have been a very simple matter to just do an affidavit during a person’s lifetime to make that viable in Florida. Unfortunately, her adult child brought it to me after she was gone, and the will was not able to be probated in Florida without a really expensive process. That kind of expense is one of the big things that we like to avoid during the process.
At Rock Solid law, we think that estate planning is celebrating your legacy. It is telling your story and it's based on your values. We just sit down with you and talk about what your values are. What do you care about? Do you just have this one child who needs the attention and we're going to focus on that? Every plan is perfectly crafted given your values.
5 If you hear the name “Groucho Marx”, you think of the guy with the mustache and the big cigar and the funny glasses, and he was a clown, right? He made everybody laugh during his life. He was also a huge, huge star Hollywood star and Groucho became very wealthy. Groucho also outlived his ability to take care of himself. And like so many other celebrities that we read about all the time, one thing that he didn't do in his life was to take care of putting an estate plan together. I will talk a little bit more in the future about why probate is a difficult process. But one thing that is worse than probate, at least you're dead if there's a probate, is having to live through your own probate. And that is what happened to Groucho Marx. He was unable to care for himself anymore. There was a guardianship procedure to see who will take care of this old man. And everybody came out of the woodwork, and everybody wanted to take care of Groucho. They didn’t really want to take care of Groucho. They wanted to be in charge of his fortune.
There's a picture of Groucho Marx, that funny guy that we all imagined, sitting in a wheelchair in the courtroom with a blanket over his legs, and a tear running down his face as he watched people fight for control of him and his fortune because he knew it wasn't for the love of him that they were fighting. Had he taken the opportunity to simply do an estate plan, with a lawyer who would have taken care of him, it would have been a very simple matter, and entirely avoided the trauma of that situation. Everybody thinks Estate Planning is about taking care of Who You Love. It is really first and foremost about taking care of yourself.
6 Second estate planning is taking care of who you love, your kids, or your grandkids. Whoever you want or whatever you want. It even can be a charity.
I have a colleague in another state. This was a true-life story in her family. Her mother is still living today. When the mother was a little girl, she was the younger of two daughters being raised by a single mom. Then one night the mom went out and left them with a babysitter or Nanny. And the mom never came home.
I've never known the detail. She died that night. But the first thing that happened when the police came in was, they sent the babysitter home because she had no legal right to take care of those kids, and there was no document saying who that mom wanted to take care of those minor children, so they became Wards of the state. Because they were of different ages, they were split up right away. Eventually family came in and the two girls were United and raised together, but the damage was done.
My friend, who's also a lawyer, tells me that her mom has lived her whole life almost as a shut-in. She's always been afraid that someone's going to come and take her away. And that whole sad psychology could have been avoided just by her mother sitting down and telling her life story and saying who she wanted to take care of those kids until they grow up.
7 Raising children does not stop when they reach 18 and become adults. I have one client who has done very well for themselves. Their primary goal in their plan is to make sure that their son isn't ruined by money. It is a great problem to have. But in their 20s, most people make decisions differently than they do in their 30s and 40s. This particular family has a really creative remedy and it's a committee. The first time their child would be able to get that money pretty easily to try whatever wild adventure he may want, and hopefully, it's wildly successful. If she fails, the next time she must take things like business classes and come up with a business plan and a budget and sit in front of the committee and convince them to award her the money.
8 The why of why I wanted to do estate planning. I really believe in family and unfortunately, in my chosen profession I get to see many families act badly. I see fights over almost nothing. I see fights over “mom always liked you better.” I see fights over “I wanted Grandma's cake pan”. In one family the cake pan ended up being broken.
9 If you allow your estate to go into probate that's a lawsuit. Lawsuits are where people fight and we've seen repeatedly where somebody's gloves come off, the claws come out and bad things happen. I'm going to tell you one instance I had to live through, and it is a fascinating one. I mean, it really was a turning point where I decided to be more dedicated to estate planning.
I had a client. He was so cool. He was an immigrant. He went and fought for the US in World War II. Through the GI Bill, he was able to go to college and after college graduate school. He went to Harvard, and he became a physicist. He was hired to a career job back in the era when people got one job and worked at it their whole lives. It's a career job with a company that you would immediately know the name of really well. He worked hard and gained a large degree of wealth during his life. He also traded stocks for himself; did his own trading, did really well in bars of silver and gold, and he also liked coin collecting. He said, “I want to do all of my ancillary documents.” That's a power of attorney and others. But he did not want to create a will, and certainly not a trust. So, he came in and we did all the other documents. He had an extremely valuable coin collection. He had no children of his own but had a sister who had two daughters. And one of those daughters had a little boy. And that little boy was who this guy really cared about, and he started giving him the coin collection. He would take him the penny books and then he’d take him the nickel books. Unfortunately, I got a phone call one day: "Mr. Miller”, “Yes, sir.” “I'm dying. And I ain't got no will.” He didn't speak like that. He's a Harvard-educated physicist. I said, “oh, I'll put that together for you right away.”
So, I called him back late in the day. And I said, “do you want to get together?” He said, “I'm tired.” I said, okay call you tomorrow, and we planned for me to come see him the next morning. The next morning, I drove over to Mayo hospice, a beautiful facility, go in and they show me into his room, and he is out cold. They've given morphine for pain, and he never made it back to consciousness. Now, this was the best day for the niece he intended to disinherit. She spent the next five years suing her sister and she even got a friend of a friend to claim that the whole coin collection was his. At one point even gained possession of it. And what ultimately happened is the mom of the little boy who he cared so much about having the uncle's coin collection be his, she ended up buying it from her sister, who also had drawn all the money from the uncle’s account.
I am haunted by that story regularly. Now, we do everything possible to stay ahead of the game.
10 Probate is a really awful system for the people that you love. Probate, in the best-case scenario, might take six months, and probate of an estate of any size is going to take a year or two years or 3 years. Your family must live through the loss of you every time they have to go to court instead of whatever else they’d rather be doing that day. Emotions are high. People get greedy. And families tend to fight during the process. It is an emotional time. It is a time when emotions are raw, and emotions get dragged through the coals at a time when I hope my clients are going to be celebrated when they're gone. We miss our dad, but he took care of the stuff so we don't have to worry about that second piece, which I think is less important than honestly than the emotional part. Just the fees of a probate, that are going to some lawyer from your money that you probably don't even know, is an unnecessary expense.
Every bit of that is less than your family is going to have for their lives that you worked hard on for them to have. The stats show between the taxes, and I consider probate a tax because you willingly choose to pay it, Estate taxes, capital gains taxes, all the taxes that are paid, and an estate typically shrinks 30 to 60%. If you leave a dollar, it might be $0.40 when to your heirs when they're done. There are all sorts of strategies and tools and things that can be used to prevent that.
The third thing about probate is it is public; at the courthouse and it's pretty much at the courthouse forever. Somebody can get to it all the dirty laundry.
All that information in your life is now sitting there at the courthouse for anybody who knows how to get to it to see. I would say that a big point of estate planning Is keeping as much as possible of what you have earned going to who you want when and how you want.