Hey you guys, welcome to Protect Your Nest. I’m attorney Brandon Lawrence, and we’re going to be talking about estate planning, the reasons why you should estate plan, and one reason in particular. We’re going to go through a few reasons and we’ll start out with, you need to look at this as a competition.
Keep the Court out of Your Business
This is you versus the court. It’s what you want to happen with your hard earned sweat equity that you’ve put into your work, your life and your hopes and dreams while you were living and what you want to happen to your property and the things that you’ve accomplished, the physical things and the monetary things that you’ve accomplished. Where do you want them to go after you’re gone?
You worked your life and you’ve accumulated a lot of things. You’ve got a 401(k), your retirement, things like that. You’ve gotten married, maybe you’ve had children. Possibly you’ve got some family that you may want to leave some things to, and you want to make sure that your wishes are carried out with your work product, that you’ve gone through your whole life and you don’t want the court to get in the way of that.
Minimize and Avoid Unnecessary Delays
What happens when you do not estate plan number one, there’s a delay. The court takes its time. We probably all had some type of interaction with court one way or the other. Even if it’s just going to a traffic court or something or any government entity. We know it takes a whole lot of time. You are waiting for the mail to come with your license plate, your license, things like that. It takes a whole lot of time. It wastes a lot of your time.
So when you estate plan, you can make things go quicker and you can feel comfortable before you pass. Knowing that these things have been put in place with a competent attorney and they’re going to go according to your wishes.
Make Sure Your Wishes Are Carried Out
Most of the time, everybody knows what’s going to happen before you’re gone with the things that you’ve accumulated over your lifetime. These are your exact wishes, what you’ve set in place and what you want to happen. So there’s no guesswork in it. But when you do not estate plan and these things go to what they call probate, which is a drawn out process through the court. It’s dictated by laws that have already been put in place for individuals that did not estate plan. And there’s nothing that you can do about it. You don’t have any say so while you’re living over what happens to your things.
And nobody wants that. I mean, nobody wants that. When you’re living, you’ve lived your life according to how you want to live it, and you’ve pretty much dictated your life. So why take a chance and leave with a chance after you’re gone for somebody that you don’t even know to say what happens to your things and who can get what in your family or friends or whatever social organization that you’re involved with and want to leave something to. Perhaps you want to be able to guide and dictate that because you put a whole lot of work into your life. So there’s no reason for you to leave anything the chance.
In addition, we’ve all got some family stuff so we know what happens. We know what happens when families get together, when it’s good times like Thanksgiving or Christmas. You’ve got an argument at the dinner table when people eating turkey and stuffing and cornbread pudding or whatever you eat.
You have an argument when it’s the best of times or the best of circumstances. So when something comes up with money or who’s going to get grandma’s fine china, somebody’s always had their eye on it. You know that if it comes down to dispersing or distributing some type of property or money or anything like that, nobody’s going to be in 100% agreement.
Minimize Family Drama and Arguments
So if you estate plan, you might still have an argument, but you take the possibility that something’s not going to happen, that you’ve already put in place. You got it in writing, you documented it and you preserved it the right way. So there’s no guesswork about that. And if somebody’s upset, then they’re upset. That’s the way it is. If you do it right, there’s not a whole lot that anybody can do to go against what you’ve already planned. That’s another reason to estate plan, to take the guesswork out of it and to minimize. You’re not going to probably eliminate the arguments, but minimize the arguments. It’s less stress for everybody. There’s a definite roadmap to what’s going to happen, and that’s another reason to get with someone, someone competent to lay out what you want to happen.
Plan for Tax Implications
Another reason is taxes; the dreaded taxes. People want to pay the least amount of taxes when they’re living. You definitely don’t want to have any taxes. You don’t want to burden anyone with any taxes or tax responsibility once you’re gone because they get your house, or a car, or money, or property or whatever because that’s what happens.
Now, in particular in Kentucky, there is no estate tax in Kentucky, however, there is an inheritance tax. But most people, when your estate plan, most people don’t have to really worry about an inheritance. The majority of people probably don’t have to worry about inheritance tax because that’s about now most currently, you get an exemption up to about $14 million. It’s about $13.9 million that you’re going to get. That’s double that for a married couple. So you really don’t have to concern yourself with that.
But to avoid or minimize any type of tax implications, you want to sit down with a qualified person to plan your estate, make plans for your estate after you’ve passed away. So to deal with that tax potential, tax implication problem, and make sure that the government doesn’t take any bigger chunk of money that they’re already going to take.
Create a Financial Legacy
So of course, that leads me into my last point. That’s more money for your family or whoever you’re going to leave the product of your estate to. And that’s kind of when you think about it, that’s what people say that they’re kind of living for. I mean, you want to leave, I would say ideally, most importantly, you want to leave something, you could say a legacy. Some people would say some wealth, generational wealth, if you want to use that particular term. You want to be remembered by your favorite nephew or whatever that hey, my uncle or my dad, my husband, my wife, my aunt left me, the grandmother, grandfather left me thought enough about me to leave something to me to keep our family going, to help our family once they were gone. To keep our family name going for us, not have to worry about any bills when they’re gone. And that’s ultimately what it’s about. You don’t want to leave a burden for your family. You want to kind of leave a legacy and put your money to use way beyond your lifetime because you constantly hear stories about individuals. Those are the people that people talk about.
You talk about people that leave something after they’re gone, people that actually take the thought and the responsibility to do that, to help the family out, to keep the name going, to keep the things that they work so hard for, to put those to good use and put your family in the most advantageous position to be the best and live the best that they possibly can. At least potentially put them in a position to do that. What they do with it, of course, is what they’re going to do with it. But you did your part and you want to be able to have that comfort while you are living to say, “Hey, I did my part,” that’s if you’re thinking along those lines. And that’s what this podcast is for people to think along those lines and get into that line of thinking.
Summary
So to break it down, it’s you versus the court. You don’t want the government in your business estate plan. If you want your wishes carried out, make an estate plan. If you want to minimize your family arguments, and again, keep the government out of your business and take the least amount of money from them as possible because they’ve gotten a bunch during your lifetime when you are working, they’ve gotten enough. So if you’re going to leave it to anyone, leave it to somebody that you know and that you want that could benefit from it. The government has enough money. Well, they say they don’t, but the government has enough money and your family, they’re always going to need some money because you never know what’s going to come down the road and it’s going to be something that’s going to come down the road.
So, you ideally want to be able to contribute to helping your family out and pushing their legacy and your legacy forward as well. So maybe they’ll write a book about you sing a song about you or something because you left them a couple bucks or you left them a car or that plot of land or a house or something like that. But you want to have your wishes carried out while you’re living into the future. And that’s one. And those are a couple reasons to estate plan.
Conclusion
And in the future, we’re going to be getting more about, we’re going to be getting more specific, having some guests, some experts come in and talk about these topics, to flesh them out, to break ’em down for you and show you why it is extremely beneficial for you to estate plan. It’s not complicated. We’ll break it down.
It’s easy to do. You sit down with the professional, somebody that you trust and get to know that’s there to help you navigate and plan out a roadmap for your family’s future and your legacy before you leave this earth. And to know that you’ve left something for them, for the benefit of them, and it makes you feel good before you pass away. So those are things that we’re going to be talking about and we’re going to make it fun and as exciting as possible. We’re going to make it easy for you to do. And we’re going to make you be able envision why you should do it and what you can do to accomplish these things.
We appreciate you listening to this episode. We’ll see you on the next one. Make sure you make it back and tell somebody else to bring somebody else next time with you when you’re listening and watching. Thank you very much. This is Brandon Lawrence, the Lawyer For The City, and you’ve been listening to Protect Your Nest.
