Estate Planning Attorney Charles Weisinger is interviewed on the Radio Free Enterprise podcast about his book, Peace Through Planning.
Charlie explains each of his 8 Truths You Need to Know about Estate Planning:
- A good estate plan is one that you understand
- Like and trust your attorney or choose someone else
- You should name people you trust
- No one will care for your kids the way you do, but you can still make the best available choice
- Adults need wills
- Probate stinks
- Trusts are neither scary nor expensive
- Your lawyer should know your team
Click here to visit Charlie’s firm’s website
Click here to learn more about Charlie’s book on Amazon
This is a computer-generated transcription. Please excuse any typos.
My guest today is Charlie Weisinger, an estate planning attorney and recognized authority on the topic who has recently written a book called Peace Through Planning. How are you doing today, Charlie?
Doing great Frank, how about yourself?
Wonderful, I appreciate you joining me on the show today. You know this is a very important topic that really affects everyone. I have had the opportunity to read your book and will talk about your book a little bit later in the broadcast, but right now I just want to ask you just to lay the baseline.
What exactly is estate planning and why do I need it?
Well, frankly, estate planning is, putting a plan in place to take care of your family and loved ones in the case of your death or also just as important taking care of you in the case that you become incapacitated in the future.
It includes documents like powers of attorney, wills, and can include trust planning and those sorts of things there. And to answer why it’s important, well it’s important because if you don’t have a plan in place You can leave behind chaos and what I’ve spent my career trying to work with people is helping them create a legacy of peace rather than leaving behind a bunch of chaos.
Well, I can appreciate that and I can understand why a piece is preferred over chaos. Let me ask you this now it you know you just mention number of things, wills, powers of attorney and so forth.
It sounds like there’s a lot of moving parts, and I can, you know, as I was reading your book and I’m thinking about myself and I don’t currently have an estate plan put together, so I’m thinking now why don’t I if it’s so important. It’s one of the reasons because there’s just so many moving parts. It sounds so complex I’m not sure I can handle it.
I think that’s a big part of it I think. Obviously nobody you know if you read the back cover of the book it says I said I realized that no one wants to talk about death. Well, well, almost no one. I I’ve been doing a state planning for long enough that it’s become part of my daily vocabulary and in such that even when my wife, when we were pregnant with our first child.
I brought up the, you know, within 24 hours for telling me that we were pregnant. I said hey we need to update our state plan.
She was not nearly as excited about that, and so it’s just a topic that people don’t want to talk about and don’t want to think about, but they, but it weighs them down because they know they have to that they need to put something in place at some point and so. But then it does become overwhelming. I’ve known I’ve had lots of clients over the years that have said.
You know we put we we bought software we we tried to put the forms together ourselves and we just never signed them. We never did anything with them. We we met with an attorney.
You know 10 years ago and we left we, we we left that console. You know that consultation in tears and and with fighting, and we decided we, you know it’s been 10 years since we’ve decided to finally come back. I’ve had other clients say it’s just so confusing. Everybody’s made it so confusing to them. And so my.
My goal with writing this book in my goal in my practice in general has always been to help make this something that people can understand.
That it’s easy for them to understand. They can get through it and and they can get it done quickly and then they can walk out without that weight on their shoulders. I’ve called myself in the past a professional weightlifter because coming coming back and forth from when their shoulders and when they leave our office, they’re walking. You know they’re standing straight up without that weight on their shoulders.
I could picture my mind’s eye, the person standing up with the weight coming off their shoulders. Would you say their overriding emotional reaction is relief?
I I think so. I I had a client, another client situation a few years ago where husband had to basically drag his wife into the opinion. He had decided this was important for their family to do something and she just did not want to talk about it. She did not want to come in the appointment, she didn’t know they were a fairly young couple, they thought.
She said, why are we having this conversation? I don’t. We don’t need to be here and through throughout the meeting we we kind of we kind of uncovered that it.
Really just uncomfortable for her to talk about it by the end of the meeting, she laughed and she as she was leaving. She said she looked at her husband and said thank you so much for bringing me to this appointment and she looked at me and said thank you for making it easy to understand and I feel so much better knowing that we’ve put that. We’re putting a plan together.
Fantastic, that was a great illustration. Now for people like me and maybe a lot of other people watching right now who haven’t had the opportunity to sit down and experience that feeling of relief.
Maybe one of the things on our mind that’s keeping us from coming to the table, and maybe that young wife as well is, you know, we don’t want to confront our own mortality. We don’t want to think about death. We don’t want to think about our own death, and we don’t want to think about things happening after we’re gone. Is that something that you’ve seen people experience? And how can you help them get over that?
And I I think I think we all understand that at some point we’re not going to be here anymore, you know, and and so it’s not want to to focus on. And I I often you know, I’ll ask class what took you so long? Why are you know? Why are you not here? And I said, well, I, I’m for years or or sometimes they’re almost embarrassed that they are.
That you know that they’re that they’ve put it off for so long, and I would laugh, and I said, well, it’s not too late until it’s too late. But you know, the reality is I think they just.
I think some of it is fear. Some of it is fear of how expensive is this going to be, how much that you know? How much time is this going to take and and we’ve got a whole lot of really important and urgent things going on in our life that we sometimes put off things that we can. You know, it’s easy to just show that a sign and forget about it, but it’s it’s important.
You know, I, I believe it’s one of the most important things. One of the most important gifts you can give to your family. Having a plan that gives them some peace.
So what do you tell people when they ask? How long is it going to take and how much is it going to cost? I would imagine the costs vary from case to case basis and the length of time as well, but can you give us any sort of ideas how you answer those questions?
We typically answer that question by saying.
We don’t know exactly what it’s going to cost until we’ve sat down and figured out what you need, we base our state plans on the need of the clients in, in and everybody’s a little bit different. It’s it’s kind of like asking me to build a house and and saying how much is the house going to cost? Well, it depends how many bedrooms do you have?
How many are living in the house? What what you know? Where is the house? What what are?
You know, and so within the state plan. It’s the same thing. It’s figuring out how many beneficiaries do you want to benefit. Is this your only marriage? Is this, you know? Do you have children from previous relationships? Do you want who do you want to benefit? How and and kind of what are your goals? And so we sit down in our office, we’ve always offered a free consultation where we’ll spend an hour to an hour and a half with a client.
And just really get to understand their needs and then from there we can. We can work with them on on building out the plan for them.
The typical time frame we want to make it really easy in our office and so are our typical clients. They come in, we have that first meeting that first consultation and we usually have them back for a second appointment within 2.
To three weeks.
Where at that time we can. At that time we can have documents ready for them to review and possibly sign it.
At the same time, it just and B and have them have something that they thought was going to take so long and be so tedious and and be done with it.
That’s great. That sounds like a great approach. You know.
One thing I’ve heard people say about estate planning or why they’re not going to engage with it, so estate planning is only for the wealthy. What would your response be to statement like that?
My my statement is, you know, just based on experience, the state planning is not just for the wealthy, is for everyone and the main one of the main reasons you know if a very wealthiest state can afford thousands of dollars in litigation fees to pay attorneys if they if they didn’t put a plan in place.
And you know, there’s there’s more to go around. If you’ve got a smaller state and you don’t have a plan in place, if you can, you have to go through litigating it can be very, very expensive in, you know, in in in that money instead of going to your beneficiaries can get eaten up really quickly. You know we have we.
I’ve had a a client story. She had two children and but that she had recently adopted and then she passed away and the children were still teenagers and.
We had to set up guardianship for both of those children and go through and in what we call intestate probate, which means the probate process when somebody dies without a will, and by the time we’re done with that, we’ve spent many, many months and thousands of dollars on a very small a state where there could have been some money left for these children.
We’ve got, you know it’s it’s cost them so much by the time you pay multiple attorneys to go through the process that it could have been very simple had she had a, uh, even this as just a simple estate plan in place.
Yeah, that’s an interesting. It’s a sad story, but a good case study of why each of us should take the time and invest the time and money to get this done. Now, like you say before, it’s too late.
What about if someone feels there too young to worry about estate planning? What would be your reaction to that?
You know we do a state plans at different levels for different people. You know some people that.
At the moment the child turns 18, they are no longer a child and what what that means to their parents is their parents no longer have the ability to make decisions for them that they no longer have the ability to make financial, actual or medical. And so we have a lot of people who start at the day they turn 18. They come in and they knew.
A financial power of attorney and a medical power of attorney just so they can name.
So that mom and dad or or whoever they’ve chosen, can continue to make those decisions because you don’t want to have a situation where your child is in and is injured or in an accident or something else, and you can’t decide on where they you know how they are taken care of and where they go, and so there’s really no no age that’s too.
I mean, once you once you’ve turned 18, it’s important to have.
Something of a plan in place, and especially as you get married and and and have children. Those things are obviously it becomes more and more important.
At that time.
I’ve also heard people say, well, I’m married and you know, if I were to die suddenly, my wife or my husband or my spouse partner would get everything anyway, so I don’t need to invest the time and money in this. I understand from reading your book that that’s not the case. Could you speak to that?
Yeah, that’s that’s actually one of the biggest myths that we that we face in one of the biggest challenges that we face. I I regularly teach a state planning course to Realtors in San Antonio and I and these are people who who know real estate and they have gone through at least some study of.
You know in Texas, we’re a Community property state, which means you know once we if you’re married, you own the the property. You have a 50% interest in all the property of your you know you and your spouse that you that you’ve gained during that marriage and so on. But I’ll lay out a scenario and I’ll ask them, OK?
Husband and wife are married. They’ve been married 20 years. Husband has a child from a previous relationship. He passes away. What happens to the Community property and.
Without fail, there will be 15 different answers coming from the room, and I’ve had a couple of classes recently where nobody in the room got the answer correctly because they all assume that like there are many people assume, well, it all goes to spouse because it’s her Community property they bought this house together, and in that scenario, the.
The answer is no. It goes to husbands chill, his half goes to his children, not not his spouse. And now I see a lot of I I have to help a lot of people pick their job off the floor when they realize that it is.
That’s what I said, and sometimes they don’t believe me and I have to explain to him. Now you know the different scenarios and so the reality is what you think is going to happen with your state may not be what really happens is the only way to ensure that what you want to happen happens is to put it in writing. Put a plan together.
That’s great advice, Charlie and I think that’s an excellent question. The way you put it to people, and I bet there are a lot of jaws that hit the floor. I mean, I sort of chuckled at that, but I bet it wasn’t too darn funny for those people.
So another good reason why I plan ahead now.
I wanted to move to talk about your book piece through planning, and the subtitle is the 8 truths you need to know about estate planning. We don’t have time to go through all eight, but I did want to touch on three of them. The first one I want to speak to is your truth number one, which is.
A good plan is one that you understand.
It’s pretty straightforward, but what are you trying to tell us there?
In my career, I’ve been doing this a little over 10 years now, and I’ve I’ve met with clients who have who I’m not their first attorney. They come in with a within a state plan that was done in many, you know, done several years ago. Sometimes the plan is hundreds of pages long and we look at the documents and for four hours before I’ll look at any documents, I’ll ask him.
What does this plan do? What, what? What do you have here? What, what? What is the plan for it? And then they say, I I don’t know I don’t remember I I don’t understand it in some allow say, well, have you?
Round and I’ll open the document and I’ll start reading it and I’ll understand very quickly that it’s going to take me awhile to figure it out because it’s complex and and sometimes unnecessarily so. Now there’s there are obviously times when it’s really important to have a complex plan, but if you don’t understand what you’ve created and what you signed.
Then it’s then it doesn’t really do you don’t know that it’s doing what you want it to.
I I tell the story in the book of A of a client who.
Who came in? And I and I notice some red flags pretty fast and I said, OK, you’ve got a plan done recently. Why are you here in as she said, well, this is the plan. My daughter’s attorney created for me. Oh boy, what do you? What do you mean? Your daughters attorney? You know this your estate plan is for you and she said, well, they they told me that this that I needed a plan. And so I assigned this one and I.
And as well, do you understand what it says or what it does? No, not really.
OK, well then we need to start over and you need to. You need. It’s most important that you have that plan that that all the documents that you’re signing that you really understand it. And if you don’t you need somebody that can explain it to you. And if the person that the attorney that you’re sitting with can’t explain it to you in a way that you understand, then run there somewhere else.
Well then, that brings us to truth #2, which is like and trust your attorney or choose someone else. So I heard.
What you’re saying right there, but what? Maybe what if somebody felt trapped like I’ve started down this path with this attorney, how can I choose someone else?
Yeah, it’s easy. You you open the door and you walk out and then you go and you find somebody else that that you trust. You know if you and I and I’m saying that somewhat facetiously, I understand the difficulty there, and I tell the story in the book of a related situation, but it was my grandma.
They’re going to a doctors office and in her first visit with this Doctor Who obviously had horrible bedside manner. You know, she. He was examining Aaron, he’s stated, Oh my, that’s a big belly and it embarrassed my grandmother to the to the fact that the next time that she became.
Bill said she did not want to go to the doctor, she she did not have a trust for him. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to be there. And and in.
And when my dad had to force her to go into to the hospital the next time or the doctor, when she became very, very ill and and it’s the same kind of thing with if you don’t like the attorney that you’re talking to, if you don’t, if you don’t have a trust for him. If you don’t have report, you’re not going to open up and tell him it.
Everything that you need to know. He needs to know about your finances. He needs to know about your your family dynamics. He needs to know a lot of.
Of very personal details that we don’t like sharing with anybody, and so if you’re immediately don’t don’t like him then then go somewhere else. And if you, and especially if you don’t have it, if you don’t trust them and so it’s important to do business with with, you know with an attorney that you like and trust.
The 4th or your truth #4 and the last one I’d like to touch on today is that you say no one will care for your kids the way you do, but you can still make the best available choice.
Tell us what you mean by that please.
So in all the reading that I’ve done in all the statistics that I’ve seen, the number one reason people don’t put in a state plan in place is they can’t decide on who’s going to take care of the children. Maybe it’s you know.
Husband has one idea and wife has another idea or or maybe it’s you know. Fortunately a lot of times I hear it’s we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings and so we think that that this person is probably the best. But we’re going to hurt my mom’s feelings if we don’t name her and we do so we just don’t name anything.
Anyone?
Well, the reality is that if you if you pass away without having a plan in place and and then then you’re leaving it up to the state to decide who’s going to raise your children and a lot of times they will choose the person who picks the children up first because it’s a whole lot easier for a court to kind of keep the status quo than it is to remove the children from one home and place it in another if they don’t have some.
Very compelling evidence to do that, and so.
Having a written plan helps you.
How helps you have that person that’s that knows that they are responsible for taking care of the child. The rest of the family can rally around your children. Everybody can and can provide.
You know somewhat of a peaceful environment for them to grieve and heal instead.
So instead of I just lost, they just lost their parents and now they’re being dragged through a court battle. And so there’s nobody. There’s nobody perfect out there that’s going to raise your children exactly the way you do, but it’s important to just find the person with the best with the values closest to what you have and then share with them.
What you, what your values are and what you want for your children.
And just get this, you know, make the decision because if you don’t make the decision somebody else is going to make it in your profits. Probably not the decision you would have made.
Probably not well. Charlie weissinger. You shared so much information with us today. If somebody wanted to get additional information about your practice or your book, what’s where is the best place for them to search?
They can. They can give us a call at our office here in San Antonio, TX 21030808 hundred, but they can also go online to piece through planning.com.
In peacethroughplanning.com will get them information directly too.
About about our firm and the book as well.
Anyone can benefit from your book piece through planning an I can tell you having read it myself, I really want to compliment you on sort of the plainspoken common sense language that you use. It’s not a lot of loeries you put a lot of great graphics in there that visually demonstrate how things work together.
And I appreciate all the time and the effort that you put into that. We’re just about out of time. Is there any last point question I haven’t asked you or something that’s come to mind that you’d like to share before we go?
I’d say is Sonic on the comment on the legalese. My as I was writing this book, my wife reminded me multiple times that nobody wanted to read a really long boring book on estate planning, and so I’ve made it my goal to make sure that I did tell stories in there, and then I kept it in simple terms so that it could be something that that was a.
It is a fairly quick read and it it it, but it’s enjoyable. You’ll have some some stories and and I think you will learn something and.
That you can that people can take away and so I appreciate your time and the opportunity to speak here with you.
Thank you so much for joining me today, Charlie.
Thanks again to Charlie Weisinger and thank you for joining us until next time. This is Frank Felker saying I’ll see you on the radio.
