Stephanie Payne - Your Legacy is Your Choice (K1417)

Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. Their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exit coachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. Welcome back. We have another guest and I'm sure glad you stayed with us to listen to Stephanie Payne from HD Specialties. We're gonna talk about um. Something very important about about life and so I want you to stay with us for the next 20 minutes. Sandy is, excuse me, Stephanie is joining us from uh HD Specialties LLC. We're going to talk about something called the Sandbox Wars, and she's joining us from Gresham, Oregon. Um, Stephanie, welcome to the show. Well, Bill, it's really great to be on the show with you. It's my pleasure to have you, and you know, I'm really glad you joined us today, and we're going to talk about why end of life decisions are the most important gift to your family, and I want you to listen to this information carefully, listeners, because you know there's a lot of things that are very difficult to talk about, and Stephanie's going to help us think about some very important things, especially with the holidays coming up as families get together. So Stephanie, before you get into that, tell us a little bit about you and your background. Bill, I'm a registered nurse. I've been a registered nurse for 31 years now, and And you know, enjoyed doing home care and hospice, so I've met probably over 10,000 people in my career, so I have a pretty good insight into how human beings behave until my mother got ready to die and she had all of her documents ready, but my siblings decided to come in and take us to court and we were in litigation for 2.5 years and my parents had a trust which was really Oh yeah, I know. And so I decided first I cried a lot and you know, stomped my feet and it well to make the story really short is that my mom got sick. They hadn't talked to my mom in 10 to 15 years, but I was the nice kid. I'm the youngest of 4 and said decided to call them up and said, Mom's not well. 48 hours later I had to buy a plane ticket, fly to the west coast. And hire an attorney and meet them in court in 48 hours and to stop them from doing what they tried to do and 2.5 years later I decided that's when I started writing the book and started realizing that pretty much everybody has a problem at end of life because they don't get all their documents done. Wow, that's, that's an awful story. I'm sorry for your loss and it's, it's not, you know, the, the horrible part about this that people don't realize is how much information needs to be dealt with at a time when you really don't want to deal with information. Well, that's why it's so important to have all the documents done and tell somebody where the documents are. There's lots of little, little hints here because if you have, if you have your stuff done, all your papers done, and you have the designated fiduciaries and such, your end of life will be much more peaceful. And, and there won't be any complications like litigation, for instance, in the, in the city that I was living in in in Saint Louis there were let's say 10,000 deaths per year in the metro St. Louis area, a couple million people, 10,000 deaths. There were over 15,000 active probates going on, which means it takes longer than 1 year to get a probate done, so there's a lot of overlap. So you end up in litigation for a year to a year and a half. That's really hard to swallow when you maybe need to pay a bill. You need to, you know, you've got travel problems, and then you've got all these other issues that haven't been decided. So that's why Walk us through that a little bit, Stephanie. When you say you're in probate for that period of time, is everything frozen? As far as I'm I remember I'm not an attorney. I've just been learning a lot and I always say you always see an attorney, you know, with legal problems like this, but it probably takes a year and a year and a half, and I believe most of the time the, the funds are, are frozen. If you have a trust and all those other documents you can literally start distributing money within a few months oftentimes unless there's other complications, but. There's a huge difference and for instance, it costs anywhere from 5 to 10 times more to probate in a state than it does to right a trust. That's the one thing that people are are afraid of. They think that trusts are prohibitively expensive and they're really not. It's like 5 to 1. You know, for instance, if you have a $100,000 estate, it costs you maybe $2000 for a trust, but 1000 to $15,000 to probate that $100,000. You know that it's you know it's it's like a no brainer it's like a no brainer. Yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's buying, it's, it's prepaying for something at a much lower rate, but a lot of people just think, well, yeah, but it won't be my problem. But what does that do to a family uh when when you know, we always tell people, you know, wouldn't you rather be remembered for your planning than for your lack of planning when it comes right down to it. The way I look at the little subtitle of my book is that when you get all of your documents done, this is the most important gift you can give your family because not only are you getting all your, you know, all your documents done and your papers together, you're actually allowing your family one to grieve properly. And 2, to not have to worry all about, you know, a year and a half of probate, and you're giving them a gift of having the family continue the legacy, I call it legacy because if you destroy your family, which mine is pretty much destroyed. If you destroy your family, what does that say about, like you just said at the beginning, what does that say about you? Like, did you leave a mess or did you leave a, a nice clean little tidy package because it, it is a gift, you know, when you know somebody's going to take care of your healthcare decisions, somebody's going to take care of your financial decisions, you know where the money's going to go, and nobody can fight about it. What a gift that is to your family. Mhm. Yeah, absolutely. And so you talked, you touched on the health care directives and things like that. And as a nurse, you must have seen this several, many, many times. But how important, I mean, do people not realize how tied the medical profession is, how tied their hands are when they don't have the, the proper documents? Is that a surprise to a lot of people? I, I believe it really is. People want to hang on to life and they don't realize that if we're all going to die. I've taken care of over 10,000 people. I've done over a quarter of a million home care visits. Everybody dies, so it's time to get real about that and, and understand that at some point over 80 to 90% of us are going to need somebody to make decisions for us whether financial or healthcare or both. And so if you don't have the right person making those decisions, you know, some crazy uncle that comes in or You know, some neighbor that comes in and starts stealing things. I mean, there's just stories go on and on. You just are just can be creating a hornet's nest of problems that, you know, so it's really simple, you know, for my, my, my dad had a power of attorney, I mean, and a medical power of attorney, but my mother didn't know how to use it. This is another part of that story. So if you let's say you have your health care directive, it's really important to Tell that person that's going to be a health care corrective first of all, if they want to be that person to make those decisions and to tell them exactly what you want so there won't be any more concerns. I know we had 6 people trying to make health care decisions for my mother and boy was that complicated. You don't really want that to happen. And, and it can be so, and it can be so easy or it can be, you know, contentious and complicated and it doesn't have to be that, yeah. So tell, I mean, how often do you do you think people actually have all of their legacy paperwork done? Oh, probably about 1 in 10, because, and I've learned this, and I've done a little research on this, because even though a lot of people have started their, let's say their trust and got their The documents started. There's usually one or two things they haven't done. They didn't put the, let's say the piece of property into the trust or they didn't sign a durable power of attorney, you know, there's a lot of little things, you know, the paperwork is great, but there's still a lot of work to do after you go to the attorney and get your trust written, so it's a lot of people, most people, you know, don't get it all done, and that's, that's where they can really cause problems. And they just say, you know, I'll get to that, and they never do, and then something happens. So what's the worst and the best cases that you've you've seen in all of your visits? Well, I tell a story in my book. It's every time I tell the story I laugh and I cry is about a family who the husband was dying and I was the hospice nurse and that the wife pulled out a stack of papers. And literally flopped them on the table and she says, what documents did you need? And she pulled out, you know, the living well, the advance directive, and all the stuff and even to the point where this wife could actually sign her signature for her own husband who was dying in the back room and so this family had the most amazing death. I, I just get goosebumps thinking about it. I walked into the bedroom one day. And there were people like looking through photo albums and they were playing the the gentleman's favorite music and they were giving back rubs and throwing sandwiches across the room. Maybe that's not what everybody wants, but it was the most pleasant passing that I had ever witnessed in my life. And then of course the worst is these people like, you know, that that you end up in courts and Not speaking to each other for years or never, you know, you're fighting, you're spending, you know, the estate's money down and it, and then blowing up families that, that, for instance, my family, my parents spent, you know, 70 years developing a family and then it's gone in, in a year. So make a choice. Yeah, yeah, I get that. It's a I just wrote down it's either a celebration or a condemnation basically that you're setting yourself up for in your family and so and it's not how difficult is it to put all this stuff together? I mean how much time and effort and money and everything and where do people keep this type of information. Well, those are all great. So first of all you go see and I always recommend an estate planning attorney that these are ladies and gentlemen that they focus, they have special training in how to write the proper trust. Some people need. Really fancy trusts and some people need a simple trust and, and it's a you end up with a nice binder and always ask your attorney for all the paperwork to get ready for death, not just the trust. You want the will, the advanced directive, the living will, the power of attorneys, you know, there might be some more, but every state has different regulations, so you get all of them done and then the work begins. So you've got this little nice little binder, then you have to go home and the the attorney gives you letters and you have to fund the trust, which I, when I got my trust, I basically spent one day. Getting all my accounts and things changed, the only thing that's a little bit more complicated is that if you own property, you have to get that title transferred into the trust and that may cost a little bit more money, but that's really about it and then you just update it every now and again every year or two it should be reviewed probably and then it's done then you can go to bed at night and not have to worry. I, so many people say I'm going to do it tomorrow. I'm going to do it next week, or and it never gets done. You know, the other area that's especially here in California we have a lot of situations change, divorces happen, things change, and when you have some of your things, of course the trust may have prepared for that, but other things like beneficiary designations on IRA accounts and life insurance policies and things like that really need to be reviewed regularly when that happens as well, right? Absolutely. Well, a joke that the uh financial planner that I work with in in Saint Louis, he said you don't want to be giving your, your, your crazy ex brother-in-law from some divorce, you know, 20% of your estate or something like that, and it happens if you don't go back and review your documents because they have a right if, if the documents haven't been updated. Yeah, yeah, and that, yeah, even if it's in a trust, it can still, you know, mess things up. So that's why some attorneys, you know, recommend every year, some maybe every 2 to 3 years, but certainly they need to be looked at every, every now and again when, when a when a major event happens you buy and sell, you buy and sell a piece of property, you somebody gets divorced, you know, just things like that that would trigger another update. Oh, in a family, somebody dies or becomes incapacitated or becomes just a bad apple. It can change a lot. Yeah, you can, uh, you know, you can actually give that that crazy, you know, child that doesn't behave very well. You can actually put their money into trust so they can't go out and spend it all in 30 days. Right, right, right, right. So is your book a compilation of stories about situations that you've seen? What tell us, walk us through it. Sure, the book is, I believe it's 16 short stories, some good, some not so good, about, about end of life issues. It covers a lot of different things, not just the importance of documentation. It covers reminiscing and reuniting families back. Together again, just there's lots of different things and so many people ask me questions and it always seems like in one way or another there's a story about it in my book, you know, and then maybe that their ending might be a little different than my story, but it is, it is has a lot of information in that I didn't realize I knew I had when I as I was writing it. It's funny. Oh yeah, I'll I'll bet this is uh I'll bet this is a great book for planning attorneys. To get into the hands of their clients as well so that they realize the importance of this not from a dry legal perspective but from a humanistic someone who's seen many people take their last breath, and you know, and seeing families in the aftermath of all of this, it's it's a different way to approach what can sometimes be a very difficult discussion topic. Exactly, I tell the attorneys if you have a client that comes in and says, oh well I'll do my trust next year, I, I tell them to give them a copy of my book and then call them and say, now why you're not going to get this done because these are the things that will happen to your family more likely than not with the, you know, there's over I think 2 or 3 million probates going on in America right now that's ridiculous. Well, you know, and, and listeners, I hear this a lot from attorneys and judges that I network with as well, and they say, you know, you have to realize there's been cutbacks in the federal government and the local governments, and a probate is not like a life threatening type of a legal procedure. And so there have certainly been cutbacks in the number of judges and administrators and clerks that Work in those departments and so that's why it takes so long to get through some of these things. It's not a big deal when you have, you know, murders and drive-by shootings going on in other parts of the of the judicial system. A probate is just like, you know what, you could have planned for this. So this is, it's unfortunate, but it's going to take a lot of time and unfortunately you're going to be not remembered well during that time, probably. I've never heard anybody just happy to come out of a probate court, and believe me, I've talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people about that, and it's, it's, it's extremely frustrating and besides time consuming because there's so much paperwork and it costs a lot of money and you're just spending the estate down, you know, as it goes and nobody's nobody's ever happy with probate. I've, I've never heard, I mean. Except maybe the attorneys and nothing wrong against attorneys. I have several good attorney friends and they make a lot of money, you know, doing probate because a lot of people don't get it done. Well, they, they, somebody has to do that work and somebody has to clear clear up things and a lot of people say, well, what, my husband or my my father or somebody died and they wanted me to have everything. What's the problem? Well, The problem is that's just not the way it works. There's they may, they may have made promises. There may be outstanding documents. There may be liens or maybe all kinds of other arrangements that were made, and the judicial system is in charge of clearing that that estate. So what are some tips you would give someone if they were saying, you know, I understand I need to do something, and I really appreciate the interview, but where do I start? What are the what are the first few things I should do? Well, first of all, talk with your partner, your spouse, whomever and decide and decide to make a decision and make it sooner than later and, and this Christmas season is a really great time to think about this. I, you know, we think death and dying at Christmas, you know how horrible that is, but this is a time when families are going to get together and this is the time. To rekindle those relationships that you may have let kind of dwindle away. it's, for instance, if you're a child and your parents don't have their estate plan done and they're pushing 70 or 80, this is not the time to just walk them in and say, Mom, we're going to the the attorney tomorrow. You have to sign a rekindle that relationship and then make a plan, you know, talk to some estate planning attorneys. Most of them will give a consultation and start doing it because it's not going to get done by itself. And just know that you're doing the right thing because it's, I mean, so many people die, they think they're never going to die and well I just haven't seen that yet and and start the plan. the conversation. The thing is start the conversation and don't be afraid of the conversation. That's what I was going to ask you because I know you've been through this and I don't want to, you know, I don't want to dig up any, any bad emotions for you, but you know how a lot of people say, yeah, but how do I, is there a way, a good phrase, a good way to open up that conversation and say, Mom, dad, I know we haven't talked about this stuff very much, and I know this is a very private topic, but, but. Can you share, or I, I really need to, we need to know just in case anything happens. How do you, what would you suggest? Oh, that's a really loaded question, and that really depends on the type of relationship you have with your parent or parents because if you haven't had a relationship with them, I like I said, you really need to make sure that you have a, a trustful, trusting relationship that you're not looking like a vulture. And I know so many people you think are not going to be that way. They turn into that at this time of life, you know, like, oh, we've got to make sure mom and dad don't just give the money away to some charity or something, but so you have to really start gently start the conversation. You might want to start it out with, you know, if you have a healthcare directive. Um, have, you know, your, your at least a durable power of attorney and just start gently asking questions without being aggressive. You, I would think you'd never want to be aggressive with an elderly person. I know that most people that get that way usually get the door slammed in their face, and I know that I've seen that way too many times. No, that's a great point, and there might be hurtful feelings if you approach it the wrong way, and I like your idea of talking about maybe the fact that it's so important to have the proper permissions in place in case someone can't speak for themselves. Let's start with talking about your your healthcare directive and you know. Maybe it's something moving in that direction that that is a conversation opener, would you, would you agree? Absolutely it's absolutely a great way to start and then also the other thing, you know, is get yours done first. If they haven't done it and say hey mom, look what I did. I got my my will done. I got my living will done because my best friend died of a heart attack at 47 or you know, just start it in another way like that because that way it lets them know that this child is a a thinking child that's that's planning and oftentimes that can actually start a conversation that's a, a really great way. Like, you know, don't, don't just jump in and start dragging parents to the attorneys. That doesn't usually work that usually backfires on everybody. OK, and so, uh, how do our listeners contact you or find out or get your book? The book is available on Amazon.com. It's a, you know, soft copy, uh, and it's an e-book and an audiobook, so it's certainly available in all those ways and if they need to reach me, they can reach me through the sandbox wars. I do personal coaching for families that have little issues with getting the Getting the decisions made, I try to break it down for them. And so they don't have to start a fight either before or after because sometimes people don't understand how complicated it can be and I, you know, I work with some attorneys and help them. You know, with family mitigation and also I do a lot of public speaking, so I, you know, I love like I love to be on the radio. I get in front of groups all the time so you can follow me that way. It's great, so. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I think it's very interesting, um, that, that this is a new approach that people can take with help helping um. A bring up this topic, a very difficult topic, but a very important topic, and I really appreciate you joining us today, Stephanie. Thanks very much and to our listeners, get in touch with Stephanie and go to the sandboxwars.com and find out more about this. This could be a great Christmas gift for someone that could lead to something even more substantial and as Stephanie said, create a situation where they take care of their end of life decisions now. which could be the most important gift of all. Very good, thanks so much, Bill. It's been a pleasure speaking with you and your and your and your audience. Thank you very much. um, have a great holiday season and uh appreciate you joining us. Maybe you can touch base a little later and find out how the book's doing for you. Great, thank you so much. All right, well that's gonna do it for our show today we're gonna take a short break we're gonna be right back after this to wrap up so please stay tuned and uh we'll be right back. You're listening to Exit Coachradio.com, the information station for age 50 plus business owners, where we're interviewing top advisors for their best tips, ideas, and precautions so you can be well planned. We upload new one minute tips every day. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.