Why Everyone Needs an Estate Plan -- Especially Today...

Join Jeff Roediger and Guest Host La'Mont Baxter, Financial Adviser and Government Employee Advocate, as we discuss this important and often overlooked area of Financial Planning. 

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Estate Planning For Everyone

Transcript

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Hello, everybody and welcome back to another episode in our series dedicated to government employees and helping you make good educated decisions before retirement. And today is a very important subject, your host, Jeff rediger. And you can find us on numerous channels out there, our podcast network, replacing Wall Street with Main Street and have a special guest Lamont Baxter joining me today. Thanks Lamont for taking the time to answer some questions on an important topic. My pleasure, thanks for having me. So the the topic today we're, I think maybe the pain Demick. And, and just people wanting to get organized. The importance of getting your, your financial house in order when it comes to your state plan, getting your beneficiaries updated, making sure they're coordinated with your wills and trusts. Some of you out there listening probably don't even have a well, and we're here to let you know, that's okay, majority people don't we're here to help. And the moss firm can do that directly and indirectly. So I always start with this, but especially when it's the state topic. Why is it so important in my in your firm in what you do to make sure that beneficiaries and employees wills updated before they retire? Great question. So let's just start from the very beginning of what I believe the anatomy of a great financial plan looks like. And it's really simple. The three domains that have to be paid attention to protection, savings, growth. That's it. Everything is inside of protection, savings, and growth. And so when I looked at the protection domain, which in most financial plans, is the most overlooked component of a financial plan. What are we talking about? Well, we're talking about protecting your income and your assets, when we're talking about protecting your health. And we're also talking about estate planning. You know, you spend your entire life working, and building. So if you have a stream of income, and you own a single asset, you have an estate, and people spend decades, acquiring and building, and they're working so hard to save and so hard to grow by investing, but they overlook the protection component of what it is that they're saving, and what they are growing. And so this estate plan is a key component to having the ability to avoid financial failure within your financial plan. But with that being said, Why do you think you No, because the studies have we we've done in responses with the public sector, specifically over 80% of those we've surveyed haven't taken care of this. Why do you think that is, I think it's the misunderstanding of what estate planning is about and who it's for, I think most people I talk to, will tell me that, you know, they don't have enough, quote, wealth, close quote, to do an estate plan. But again, that's just not true. Again, income and a single asset, you have an estate. And the reality is if you don't put a plan together, then the government we'll put one together for you. And as we all know, whenever the government gets involved in your life, it normally takes a long time to turn the ship around if it's going in the wrong direction. And it costs a lot of money out of your pocket to make it happen. And it's probably not going to do exactly what you intended to do. So you have to create your own plan. Another reason is cost. People think that in order to do this, it's going to cost them a lot of money. And that does not have to be the truth of the matter. There are several different ways to get these things done. So what's included them in a basic estate plan that you would help facilitate. We'll get into that in a second. But what is what's what's included in a basic package that the listeners should be looking at and including in their little trust package? Sure. Here's the here are the four must haves, if you will. And again, it doesn't matter what your level of income or assets look like. You have to have a durable power of attorney you have to have. In the end, the power of attorney is going to speak to two things one is going to speak to who can make decisions for you. If you become incapacitated, medically, who can make medical decisions for you. The second thing is a financial power of attorney for the same reason who can make financial decisions for you, if you find yourself incapacitated. Right, so those are two things that go into the four. The other one is, is a last will and testament, right? Because you want to answer the question, if you pass away, where's your money going to go, and who's going to manage it, who's gonna take care of my kids, if they're minors. And then the last thing is a revocable living trust that that you should investigate a little deeper. But what I find is most people are very satisfied when they put together this revocable living trust, because they have total control over it while they're while they're alive. And they can change as life happens, and keep things you know, make sure that they are not disinheriting anyone, or making sure that everything goes where it needs to go. Now, one reason I like talking to you on these podcasts is you're very holistic, your firm's very holistic. And you also focus on the government employee, because they have unique needs as a as a pertains to retirement. And I think that's important. listeners may want to go back in upload or research in our library, the five important decisions government employees need to make when choosing an advisor, and one of them is make sure that they focus on you and Lamont sperm does. So with that being said, when it comes to the estate planning part, how do you help facilitate this process? Because you're not an attorney? Obviously, and we're not giving opinions here. So what is your role in facilitating this? Yeah, so you know, if someone goes to an attorney, it's kind of a handoff for me. And so that's as far as I can go with the facilitation, I can sit in the meetings with them and provide the financial information that the attorney is going to want to build them, you know, the process that we utilize through our proprietary software is called, you know, what is called My legacy lot. You know, this software is tied to a slew of attorneys across the country, and allows us to capture the data that we normally captured doing financial planning. And in the conversations that we're having, as we're building the plan, you know, we get to address the estate plan. It's far more cost effective, much, much more cost effective. It's completely binding the legal documents, and this platform makes it so simple to walk through the process, it might take a good hour, maybe two, to get through this thing from start to finish. But the thing is, you'll have all the answers to your questions, you'll have everything exactly the way you wanted, and you have control over the document. If life changes, as it often does, you can go back into the system and make the necessary changes without having to go to an attorney and pay an additional fee. So that's how we facilitate that it's all part of the same conversation. And they're, more often than not, there's their savings for the consumer going through this platform, versus going to an attorney because your firm helps facilitate and get the information necessary to put into the dedicated portal where they can then download and execute documents. As we discussed previously, correct. Exactly. The fees like I live in the Washington, DC area, the fees here for this kind of service are somewhere between three, maybe as much as $6,000, depending on your level of assets, and how many of these documents you want to put in place in your estate plan. You know, the fee for us is a flat 995. There's no coming back and forth. So right off the top, you can see a huge savings, opportunity. And I think it's attractive, my clients are very attracted to this, not only because of the savings, but because of the control. Again, they can go in and out of this thing and do what they want to do sort of like TSP, when they go in and out of the TSP even though I asked them not to, and make changes get out. But same deal. They're in control. And that's what I think a lot of people, especially in the federal space, love, they love to make sure that they are in control of what it is that they're trying to implement. So if somebody somebody has additional questions that are like, you know, I even thought about this, but you know, maybe it's kind of registering that they should take a look at it. What's the best way for the audience to get ahold of you? Just Just call me directly. The number is triple 8545840 And I'm going to create digit 719. Again, that's triple 8545 8840, extension 719. You know, we can have a quick conversation about where you are, what it is that you want to have happen. And also we can get an idea of the outcome. And I'll tell you, yep, this is the system for you. That Matter of fact, because of this, if you, if you were introduced to me, through this particular podcast, once you reach out, we'll put you on a 30 day trial. So you'd have to pay to even get started. Because I want you to get in there and experience the software, I want you to experience the service, and the care that you're going to receive as you're putting this together, along with anything else that you may decide to do in the future. And that way, you'll know within what you'll know whether this is for you or not, and then no pressure. If you don't want it, then you just let the trial expire. If you do, then we move to the next step. All right. So as we wrap up, Lamont has agreed to come back and have a second session with us, which I appreciate. And we're going to get into the five key questions that each of you should be thinking about as you're putting together a will and trust package. So we're getting into more details. So this is just an overview of, hey, everybody needs to do this. And I think Lamar articulated that. The next session that we will drop will be pay, this doesn't need to be complicated or confusing. There's essentially five questions that you need to be thinking about as part of the implementation. So you're going to want to look for that session, to to help you, as you think through what you probably thought was complicated and confusing, but in reality, can be really simple. And it needs to be it needs to be done. We're in a we're in a sort of time in the world where you got to take care of these fundamental issues. And I appreciate you know, Lamont, you joining us for these sessions. It's it's a priority to us in our marketing, and we appreciate your your support and helping get this education out there. But Jeff, I appreciate you inviting me on to your platform, and having an opportunity to speak on this very important topic. And I also appreciate the fact that you care enough to bring this up, and make sure that people are getting these things done and getting things in order. If if we didn't learn anything over the last year or two with this COVID-19 coming out of nowhere and just wiping out. That's a huge portion of the population is that you know, waiting to get your house in order is not an option any longer. That's not an option. Let's get it done. It needs a manner the Yeah, and you and we're here to hold your hand. We're here to help any way we can. So absolutely. One thing before we wrap up, I want to make sure you're at the DC area but you doesn't matter where you're at, if you're anywhere in the 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico. Lamont is firm could help you that's what's beautiful about technology. So, okay, this wraps it up. Thank you very much. My pleasure.