Expectations When Creating an Estate Plan

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Protect Your Nest podcast with me, Brandon Lawrence. It’s good to be back with you. And here we’re here today to talk about a few more things maybe that we hadn’t talked about before and just give a brief overview of how this estate planning goes for you and what you can expect if you come in and talk to me. Well, basically, I was talking to a church group maybe about a week or two ago and they had a few questions for me and well of course, and I was giving them some information and they seemed to receive it pretty well. And I’m here today to give you the same type of information what you can expect from estate planning.

The First Step

Now, say you have an estate worth these days, 2026 is not hard, $2 million. But even if you have something around $200,000, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really make a difference with take it for an even number. Okay, you got in a state of $2 million and you’re coming in to see me. We’ll get a hypothetical couple, Joe and Catherine, okay? Joe and Catherine come in to see me and they’ve got in the state worth about $2 million and they’ve got four children. So the first thing I’ll do, the first thing before they come in to see me, they’ll call me, somebody will refer them to me, something like that. And what I’ll do is I send them out an intake and then they fill out the intake, they give the information to me and that’ll give me an idea of what they want to do. Because a lot of people call and they say, Hey Brandon, I want to have a Will or I want to have a trust. And I say, well, what do you want to put in?

If it’s a trust, what do you want to put in the trust? They say, I want to put my house in the trust. Do you own your house? And then it might be a pause or they might pause and say, yeah, I do own my house. I said, okay, well what do you want? There are a few different techniques or tools that you can use as far as trusts go. And we’ve talked about this before, revocable, irrevocable trust, right? But say they fill out the intake, I talk to them, and then they either come in or we do a Zoom call, which is effective these days, the Zoom call or you come in either or is fine with me. But when they come in, well, the first thing that I get from them is what’s most important to you?

Family First

What do you want to do? And what’s most important to you? Do you want to make sure that you leave something to your spouse, your husband or your wife? If you’ve got minor children, do you want to leave it for your minor children? Do you want to make sure that you leave something for your adult children? And then of course, every family in every situation is unique. So, there’s nearly no cookie cutter type of thing that you do because every situation has its own unique take on it. Even within your family, you have your unique situations. So I ask them, what’s most important to them?

Then I say, do you want to make things easier for each other? Do you want to avoid probate? Do you want to leave something for your children a certain kind of way? Do you have things in place to make sure that your children are taken care of? And then also most people say, Hey, I want to make sure if we’ve got $2 million, I’ve got my million and my wife has her million. I want to make sure that my wife gets, or my husband gets their million from me, free or unobstructed. And that’s fine, we can do that, alright?

But now like I said, you have certain situations. Say if you’ve got your minor children, right, and your wife is 30, 40 years old and something happens to you or something happens to them and you get remarried, then you got a different set of circumstances. Do you want to protect your million from going to, I mean, let’s just be blunt, your wife’s new husband or if it’s your husband, your husband’s new wife, do you want to make sure that your children are protected and that they get at least get your million? You can do that, that you could put in a trust.

Those are things that you can do. And who do you want to make the trustee of that trust? Those types of issues that come up. And those are scenarios that you have to go through with people because a lot of people don’t consider them. They just think, Hey, I’m going to die and I want to leave this to my wife and everything’s going to take care of itself. And it very well could. But we all know things change while we’re living and things change, especially after we die.

Planning for the Living

But also another thing, you want to look at is say for instance, if your death is not instantaneous. Say for instance, if you have some health problems, right? You’re incapacitated and you’re not able to make financial decisions, you’re not able to make medical decisions. Who do you want to make those medical decisions?

Of course we’ve got medical directives. You got power of attorneys and guardianships and things like that. But who do you want to handle your business affairs and your bank account, things like that. When you’re incapacitated, you can’t sign your name, you don’t know what’s going on, but you want to make sure that at least while you’re here that you’re comfortable, you have enough money and you’ve got the right type of care to be comfortable before you leave us or leave this earth.

So those are Living Will types of things, medical directives that you have to take into consideration because frankly, everybody’s not going to get in a car accident and then die right away. Some people, it might be a slow death. It might be a long-term illness that happens and you’ll still need care.

You’re still going to need money and you still want to receive the best of care and have a quality of life while you’re still here. And at that point preserve some money if you can. And that goes into, if you’re going to have to need long-term care, going to a long-term care health facility. Then that may bring up a situation where we’ve got to a plan to get you qualified perhaps for Medicaid in order to assist in paying for that long-term care, in order for you to keep the most amount of money that you can and pass it on to your spouse or pass it on to your children, whether they’re minor children or adult children.

These are all things that you want to take into consideration when you’re talking to me. And these are things that I’ve planned for with other people and I’ve got experience planning for with other people. And then with that experience, I could pass that on to you to give you different scenarios and perhaps put something in your head that you hadn’t thought about before you came in to talk to me. That’s what the purpose of sitting down with a professional and going through these things. So of course, you got a lot of different vehicles to help you attain whatever goal that you’d like to reach.

Say for instance, if you’ve got minor children, okay, do you want your children to get all the money at once, even once they reach the age of majority, the age of adulthood? Do you want them to get all that money at once? Because we all know from experience and from stories that when you give young people money all at one time, they might not make the best decisions.

Now what you could do is if you put that type of money in a trust, we’re going back to the million dollar scenario with Joe and Catherine, you’ve got a million dollars, are you going to leave all your children $50,000 equally? Or if you put the $2 million together, $500,000 equally? How are you going to divide that up? You might want to do that.

Smart Distributions

You might want to set some goals or set some timelines with the money. They’ll get a certain amount of money when they’re 18, a certain amount of money, 21, 25. And then of course as your children grow older into adulthood, get their family scenarios, situations change as they advance on in life. They get married. They have children, those types of things. Do you want to make that divorce proof for them? There are vehicles that you could use in order to try to do that.

You can’t control every situation, but what you want to do is control as much as you can that’s within your control. Say for instance, I’ll give you an example. I talked with a family and they had 17-year-old child and they said, we want to make this money so that we want to make a contingent on this child going to college.

You can do that, but what if the child doesn’t want to go to college? What if they want to go to vocational school or what if they want to go and do hair and nails or something like that? Then that may be a problem. I would definitely warn against making the money contingent on the kid going to a certain college, because I mean that’s kind of just out of the question.

But these things come up and that’s why, again, that’s why you come to me because I can walk you through this process and give you a bigger picture and say, Hey, I might want to relinquish, pull back a little bit and not put so many barriers on it. But at the same time, you do probably want to set some type of boundaries as far as leaving because of course it is your money.

But all these things, they come up, they come up in a meeting, they might not come up and that’s why they’ll come up in a meeting eventually. And it might not be the first meeting, but really over the course of the time when I’m talking with you about estate planning, whether it’s planning for getting Medicaid-eligible or just a simple Will or some type of trust or another vehicle as far as a Living Will to assist you as you progress in life, it’s important to have a couple meetings because we’ve got to get to know each other and I’ve got to get to know what you want and the goals that you want to accomplish.

Tax and Legal Updates

And mainly what I do is give people advice in things about Kentucky because that’s while I am of course licensed in DC, but I’m mostly practicing in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Just a couple cleanup things. I think we told you this before, Kentucky has an inheritance tax, but which is usually about 4-16%. Alright? That goes to, it doesn’t apply to your close family like parents, spouses, your brothers and sisters, grandchildren, adopted children. They don’t pay any inheritance tax, but it does go down like the second, I guess that second tier of relation, like nephews, nieces, they’ve got an exemption. They’ve got a $1,000 exemption. Kentucky does not have an estate tax, alright? And that’s just some states do. Kentucky’s not one of them. They don’t have an estate tax, but they do have an inheritance tax and that may or may not affect you.

And just some other numbers. The federal, state and gift tax exemption, okay, it increased this year, 2026, it increased to $15 million per individual and $30 million per couple, courtesy of the one big beautiful bill. Alright? So people thought that it was going to go down to $7 million, a decrease, but it actually went up to $15 million and $30 million per couple.

And also just finally closing, these are important, obviously extremely important decisions in your life that you got to make. You don’t want to take them lightly. You want to have somebody that’s going to be there for you to assist you, to guide you, and to just give you some type of comfort because we all need a little bit of help.

And the more experience that a person has, the better that the situation can be. Because of course, like I said before, it’s your money and you want to do what you want with it. You want to have people that are there that are going to make sure that your wishes are followed. And that’s extremely important for everyone. And there’s no amount of money that’s too small to be able to plan for.

Like I said, because it’s not hard with these days with housing prices and retirement funds and things like that, it’s not hard between a couple to accumulate $2 million. That’s why these gift exemptions and tax exemptions and the state and inheritance exemptions are so high because believe it or not, there are people out here walking around with $15 million in assets and they’re finding a way to protect their money.

So, if you’ve got a couple million, which is a lot, you need to try to protect your money or whether it’s a couple hundred thousand like I said, or a few million, it is extremely important because as we know with the prices of things right now, they’re not getting any lower. And people that you leave behind, they’re going to need some help.

Conclusion

We’ve talked about a whole lot of things on previous episodes. You can check those out on my website, LawyerForTheCity.org. You can check them out on YouTube as well. And you can call me my number, (502) 424-3130. And you can contact me directly at Help@LawyerForTheCity.org. That’s my email address or just direct message me on the website through other social media outlets. What is it? Can I say it? Instagram and Facebook? Yeah. They’re already famous, so it doesn’t matter. But yeah, you can always access me. I’m always available. Of course, I’m the Lawyer for the City, Brandon Lawrence.

And this has been another episode of Protect Your Nest. Like I said, you can look back on other episodes and see about the things that we talked about because a lot of these things I’ve gone in a little bit more in depth. I tried to give you a little bit of overview today. But as usual, protect your nest. Let’s talk it over.