The problems with DIY planning
Colin Ley is an asset protection attorney and the co-founder of LayRoots (along with with partner in life & business – Shreya Ley)
Let’s talk about your asset protection strategy: book a free initial consult at livemorecarefree.com
Transcript:
– Hello and welcome to
– The Lawyer Human Daily-ish.
– I am Colin.
– I’m Shreya.
– And we’re throwing out a little live video today and to save some time Shreya said, “Don’t write any notes down.”
– Well you already…
– But they’re all on my phone
– You’ve already written them down. You were gonna write them down again and I was like, maybe don’t do that. ‘Cause it’s the long weekend. I wanna go for a run.
– Get outta here. All right. Go on, get outta here. So we were gonna talk about DIY estate planning again.
– Again.
– Well the reason
– It comes up a lot.
– It does come up a lot. I had a friend tease me by sending a screenshot of doing some free estate planning on an app.
– Yeah
– And I thought it was funny because it was like… You’re doing a cheap estate plan on a $1200 cell phone.
– Yeah
– You know, priorities. So we were chatting about it and the problems and limitations of DIY planning
– Well and in full transparency, we have on several occasions tried to figure out if we could automate our process. And every time we figure out that we can’t
– Right, well we could possibly. And I think this is one of the issues, is that you have to limit what you do with the planning
– Oh, right. But the way in which we do estate planning, we couldn’t automate that.
– ‘Cause it’s amazing?
– Because we ask too many questions We account for people’s individual goals.
– Right that’s the thing, it’s like we only figure out a lot of those things through conversations
– Yeah
– And then it’s like You know people are like, “Oh I didn’t know you could do that”.
– Right.
– It’s like if you do this then do you want this to happen? And then what about that? And whenever we built that into some sort of automated interview, or worksheet It’s just too complicated or it’s just it was too difficult
– long.
– Yeah.
– So that’s the issue with a lot of those plans is that the interview is just really simple and they just don’t give you the options that are available and
– Yeah.
– Like for example, I know I reviewed someone’s plan and they had been working to build a business, basically. Like these investment properties that would produce income every month for them, and then for their kids so they were making moves
– Yeah, money moves.
– Yeah. Money moves to be able to set their kids up for the rest of their lives. But they did this basic estate plan and the estate plan read that all of the assets were to be liquidated and then, you know, given to the kids. So what would have been and asset that produced income the whole lifetime of the children just
– And they just didn’t get a choice.
– Poof. Gone.
– Sometimes the kids are involved in helping build these investments up and something like that would be really annoying for them if they like helped their whole adult life helping their parents build up these investments or different things and then upon death all of a sudden they have to liquidate it
– Yeah.
– What?
– I was trying to remember to smile. And that brings up another issue, is that a lot of times with these plans you don’t realize there is a problem with them until it’s too late to change them. So that family I was talking about, they didn’t realize the mistake in their estate plan until one of their parent’s was incapacitated. And by then it was gonna be a much bigger challenge to change because they also wanted to cut somebody out who hadn’t been cut out before so getting that person to agree to be cut out was gonna be an expensive proposition to pay him off. Yes.
– I actually told someone today, I was trying to explain to them, because they were trying to decide if they wanna invest in some legal planning now or wait. I was like, in general, the longer you wait, the more expensive it gets. because things get more complicated.
– Yeah, could be. Yeah. Another big issue I’ve seen in these DIY plans is grandkids being disinherited accidentally. The way the interview process went it just ended up cutting out a generation if certain things happened. And that was not the intent of the person creating the plan. And again its one of those things that if you don’t catch the problem… Fortunately, I was there to catch the problem but, you know… I got it before it was too late. And the last thing, a lot of people we work with are concerned with asset protection.
– Yeah most people that come to us are.
– Yeah In fact one person was like, “Why do you even ask this question?” “Am I interested in protecting my kids inheritance?” Like, of course. But you know not all people are.
– Yeah, we’ve encountered some people who don’t care.
– But most people we work with are concerned about that and if you’re doing a DIY estate plan on your phone, or a free plan, a $39 trust Guaranty, there’s not going to be asset protection built into that plan. Or at least not convenient. Great asset protection. So that is some of the things with DIY estate planning. Oh the other big thing, and hence the title, a lot of the DIY estate planning lacks D.I.
– Oh yeah, that is the biggest one.
– You don’t do it.
– That’s actually the number one issue we see with people.
– You just don’t do it. But they’re like
– You keep putting it off I’m gonna do it on my own and then I see them like two years later and I’m like, “So how’s it going?” and I’m not even asking about their estate plan and they’re like, “I haven’t done anything yet.” “I’m so sorry.”
– Yeah. Yeah even that person who was giving me a hard time about the free estate plan they were doing, they ended up not doing it because of some excuse they came up with. Another year goes by that they don’t have their estate plan in place Womp, womp.
– Womp, womp.
– All right, let’s let you go home, Shreya.
– Thank you. You know I was looking forward
– Thanks for watching. To a sunny, beautiful weekend of activities but now I’m just gonna have to look forward to a gloomy weekend of activities.
– Yeah. And maybe on this gloomy weekend, you are thinking about getting a plan in place for your family.
– Oh yeah, if so respond, like?
– No! Go to livemorecarefree.com
– Yeah
– You can schedule some time for us to chat about your goals and what, I don’t know, an estate plan could do for you. So go on over there
– I’m still learning calls to action
– Yep, livemorecarefree.com Go ahead and type it down there in the comments, Jack. We’d appreciate that. and same thing, like and share
– Yeah.
– Smash the button, you can say that.
– Yeah, smash the button.
– All right where’s my mouse? See ya later.
– Peace.
– End…
