Estate Planning Series Pt 3: Funding & Maintaining your Revocable Trust

Foreign. Welcome everyone to the Main Street Business Podcast with Matt Sorenson and Mark Kohler. We're delighted to be with you on the final episode. This is the final episode. You've waited to see how this thing's going to end of the estate planning series.

I love it. And you've got to, we got to applaud those that have trudged through this.

Uh, now they're loving it.

Yeah, no, this is good stuff. I mean, I've already had some, a number of comments via email and social media people grateful for the, grateful for the info and keeping it simple and to the point. And these will be also placed on our website under our estate planning page. So you may be watching it here A couple years after we did the podcast. We've tried to make these evergreen so that they really are a one stop shop to understand the beginning, middle and end of a trust.

So, yeah, just like your favorite Netflix series, you want to go back a couple years and watch it again, you know, because it was so great. That's what we're trying to replicate here.

Yeah, Breaking Bad is timeless. It just really is. So now today's topic is funding and maintaining your trust. So once you set up your trust, what do you have to really do? I literally had this phone call on a call this morning. We were working on a charitable trust with the client and they asked about the revocable trust. They're like, well, how much does it cost to maintain? So I'm just going to get that out the gate first. First and foremost, I said nothing. There's no cost. There's no state fee, federal fee, IRS fee, no tax return, no fee. To us, the only cost may be doing an amendment once in a while. Once a kid pisses you off and you want to cut them out, you got to do an amendment, maybe 2, 3, 400 bucks.

So yeah, yeah. And I think the nice thing about the trust, you signed it. That's what we're talking about here. You sign this thing, it's done. It doesn't get filed, it doesn't get recorded. It's an internal document you're just going to keep. All right? It's going to be in your safe or in a special place in your home. Make sure people know where it is, right? Your loved ones, whoever's the trustee, you know, upon your passing, or your spouse's, if you have one, they know where it's at. We save an electronic copy at our office, but you're signed. And now there are some steps you do need to do, though. We got to fund.

Yes. And I'm trying to find the analogy,

the fun in funding though, here. So, yeah, I'm trying to figure out

like if a good analogy like this is a new, you know, washing machine. If you buy it, you plug it in and it's all ready to go, but you don't put anything in it. It's, it's, it's not going to get, it's not worth it. You know, it's like there's. And the trust to really do its job and keep your clothes clean or whatever, you've got it, you got to, you got to fund it. You got to put assets in the trust. So we call that funding the trust. I guess if you wanted to talk about maintaining your trust, it's. Whenever you buy something, let your trust buy it rather than you. Now, sometimes there could be lending and banking issues and that. This point that I'm making, we'll flush this out as we talk about transfer. But yeah, but the point is maintaining your trust is about keeping it funded. It's not just funding at once. You're going to buy something six months from now, you might set up a new LLC six months from now. So maintaining it also means keeping it funded.

Yeah. The only thing I'll say on maintaining before we get into funding, which is really the big topic, but the only thing I'd say I'm maintaining is if you have a significant life event or change in your life or your family or those that could be trustee or heirs, beneficiaries, you wanted to, that's, that's a maintenance thing. You got to change some stuff up. You know, you have a divorce, you have a kid, you know, that's changed their life situation. That could affect whether you want to give them something or not. A trustee, you know, relationship doesn't co great. I don't know, something changes.

Yeah. So change, change happens. So got to be on it. Think of the trust as a pseudo you, a pseudonym. It's, it's the alter ego of you and that's okay. We want that trust to really own everything. Now we're going to talk about bank accounts and checking here a little later too, so. But let's start with the big two or three. Matt, you wanted to start with real estate, I think, right?

Yeah, let's start with real estate because most people at least have a home and that's the first asset we want to make sure goes to the trust. And your home is a little unique for those of you that are real estate investors. Got other real Estate, you know, you may have LLCs, we're going to talk about those separately. But just your home, your personal residence that's going to be owned directly in the trust. You're going to have a deed going from you, your name over to your trust's name. That's going to be asset number one. You should be thinking about. Now, when you're working with our office, we do it, we do 50% off on our deed transfers. So there's some discounted there if you're doing it within, I think 90 days of when you get your trust done. So but make sure you do this funding part. So many people do a trust or they do it online and they kind of do it themselves and they don't finish it and fund it here. So step one, real estate deed.

Yeah. And let's unpack this a little bit. So when you're going to deed your home to your trust, someone on my pod live broadcast yesterday on YouTube asked, how do I transfer my home into my trust? Well, it's typically going to be a warranty deed. We don't like the quitclaim deed because we want to warranty any rights you might have individually from your title policy or anything you may have had from the purchase originally. So use a warranty deed. In California, it would be called a grant deed. And keep in mind there's 3,500 counties around the country. So every county may have a different cover sheet or a little form or a filing fee. This is where we handle probably 85, 90% of those counties around the country with our, our deed staff. In some states, it's so cumbersome. It's better to just go to a title company in that state. Hawaii, Pennsylvania, a few of those. If you call our office, we'll, we'll give you the bad news. But you've, but you've got to use the right form, the right cover sheet. You're not going to ruin your loan with the bank. There's not going to be a due on sale clause. No one's going to care. Just get this thing deeded. And if you're using, if you're afraid of your homestead exemption or the tenancy by the entirety, which are asset protection strategy, as talk about my book, those are going to be protected as well by putting it into your trust. You want to make sure you use the right verbiage, but you're not going to ruin those if you do it right.

Yeah. Love it. All right, now let's talk about other real estate, not rentals. Let's talk, you've got a second home, you own some land, any, any real estate that you typically have in your personal name. And you think of our trifecta, you know, we've got our, our properties in LLC that are rentals typically on your right side, but you might have some. Not a resident. Maybe it's a second home, a cabin, some raw land. It's not in an llc, but those are the assets. Again, we're going to want to deed into the trust now. Real property in your name when you pass away must go to probate if it's not in the trust. So that's why we're, we're start on real estate. We're like, hey, your real estate that you own personally, get that into the trust. Because when you die, your family is going to have to go to court. Even if you have a will, you know, even if you have a trust and you didn't deed the property into it, they're still gonna have to go to court and say, hey, we're supposed to get this and the judge has to sign it. You're gonna have fees. You have to give notice to other people. It's a pain in the butt. So get it in the trust. That's what we're trying to avoid.

And if you have real estate that should be in an LLC or isn't an llc, we're going to come to that in a minute. We'll come to that in a minute. But this is just maybe you've got a acre of plot down the street from your own house or this little piece of land up in the mountains or something, and you want to have it not in your own name. Like Matt said, any asset, any property in any state will have to be probated in that state. So you want to think nationwide. What real estate do I have that's not in an LLC already? Let's transfer it to the trust. And I need to point out this privacy thing. We are really trying to figure out a loophole or strategy of trying to keep your name off as trustee on public record at these counties. When you record your trust, we don't want your name in the trust because there are other places where privacy could play out. We don't want your name in the trust, but you are the trustee. And counties across the country require the name of the trustee upon the recording of a trust and a company. Only a trust company validly chartered by the state can be the trustee. It's got to be a person. And just putting a random person, even one of us lawyers as your trustee for this recording can be very problematic. So you're going to generally be the name of your trust as trustee. Your name will be there as trustee even though your trust name might be different. So keep that in mind. We're there. We can use LLC to hide your personal residence or other real estate, but it's not going to happen. Right now through the trust itself, we were probably set up a holding company which we can do. We can create more privacy, more pieces, parts and cost at times. Yeah, yeah. All right. Okay.

LLCs, let's get to LLC which many of times are going to own real estate now here or maybe like Mark said, you've got some rentals that you got to get to the llc. Let's just get them in the llc. For those of you that already have llc, we're not changing the deed. Now the LLC owns the real estate. What we're changing now is ownership of the LLC which is a membership transfer. Much easier because nothing's recorded. It's an internal one page document. Generally want to update and amend and restate your operating agreement too. That's there's an additional fee if you want to do that. But we're just going to have a membership transfer that says, hey, Matt Sorensen doesn't own it. Matt Sorensen trust owns it now and it goes right over to my trust. Now my trust owns the llc. LLC owns the rental. When I pass away, trustee just goes and takes over, LLC owns it. They can sell it from the llc. They can take over control of the LLC as the owner. They can appoint themselves manager, you know, because now the trust owns it and they have full authority to do that. They can just run and take off and control everything. Of course, as you've outlined in your

trust now this is going to be through what's called a membership transfer agreement and minutes allowing for that transfer. Now if you own the LLC already 100%, you easy schmeasy, our service could be under a couple hundred bucks to get the whole thing transferred or less, I can't remember but it's in that very affordable. Now let's talk some nuances. I've had clients to say, well I own a syndication or I own 2% of this LLC here or 32% of an LLC with my brother in law or whatever. Well, to transfer your share of that LLC to your trust, 99.9% of operating agreements are going to allow it. It's just getting the powers of the BE to do it. Yes, you have to reach you Got to reach out to the manager of that LLC and go, hey, I just set up a revocable living trust. I would really like to transfer my membership interest to my trust. Can we initiate a membership transfer agreement? They're going to sometimes say, well, there'll be a cost because we got to pay a lawyer to do it or this or that. And say, well, I'll, I'll pay the cost or I'll have my lawyer prep it. Can we just get it done simply. But the minutes to approve the transfer are going to have to be assigned by some people in that, that LLC because they want to know who you transferred to. So there could be a little bit of paperwork, a little, it could be a little cumbersome. But you have to remind these people this is in their best interest too. They don't want you to die in your name. They would love it to be in your trust because that makes their life easier when you die. So remind them that this is not a pain, a bad thing. It just takes some steps.

Yeah, most of those private funds are companies that have a brain and have like, you know, some lawyer or someone that thought this through or like, yes, please let me help you with that. You know, and they got a procedure for it, you know, if it's you and your brother in law and your, you know, college friend or whatever. I don't know, you threw together this thing, you know, and, and you didn't have lawyers involved in particular. It might be a little messy, but, but just get it done. It's still not hard. This could still be a one page assignment of the thing. You just might have to get approvals when there's other people involved in this company and you're not in control. So.

Well, we're at that important point in our show to give some time to our sponsor. That would be Rockstar. And so I need to make sure all of you know that you can be a Rockstar tax and legal aficionado yourself by being the captain of your own ship. So we want to applaud you for being here. So, Corey, could you grab me a cold Rock star from the fridge? I would really appreciate it. Right down the hall. I wish rock star had sent us

that case of Mark Thirsty so he does a plug for Rockstar to basically ask for a drink. I had to, you know, I see what you're doing.

You see my. Yeah, you saw the ploy. Yeah. That was all part of a master plan. And I wish Rockstar had sent me that can of drink that wonderful goodness for Free for the plug that I just gave them, but they did not. So that day will come. But to make thank you, Corey, and say what? Okay, yeah. So just make sure this is proper sponsorship. There we go.

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How's that feel? No carbonation, no sugar, electrolytes, B vitamins, and 160 grams of pure caffeine goodness. Okay. All right, I'm ready to move on. Are you okay? Yeah. All right. All right.

Now let's talk about your other companies too. If you're trifecta, we kind of hit your llc owning rental, real estate, or maybe you're investment stuff in a partnership or syndication thing or ppm, whatever. Now it's going to be left side too. You might have your S Corporation. Yes, we want to do a stock transfer on that similar process here. And as long as it's going to your revocable trust, it's fine. S corporations have to be owned by individuals. But our type of S trust qualifies under these types of structures. So you can have your S Corporation stock transferred to your trust.

Yeah, and you know, let's hit a couple nuances here. Let's talk about those people that have an S corporation that is registered with Doppel, which stands for the Department of Professional Licensing. It may vary in some states, but that's the gist.

You're like a doctor or a lawyer or a real estate agent or real

estate agent, very common. Cpa, engineer, architect. A licensed family marriage therapist. An LFMT LMFT license. Yeah, lmft. I nailed it. But their office can be some of the most difficult to work with because they don't want your trust in there. The Department of Professional Licensing, they want to know you, the licensee that took the chiropractic exam, your chiropractor exam. You're the ones that still owns this llc. They don't want to S Corporation. They don't want to see a trust in the mix. So our strategy here is when you're a licensed professional, set up your S corp with the freaking name and the way Department of Licensing wants. Send them the paperwork, kiss them goodbye, flip them off, walk out, whatever you want to do. Then we're going to do this transfer internally in your book. Because if something happens to you and you die, you want your trustee to come in and collect accounts receivable. Do you finish the Medicare billing for the month? Go and get this done. Get done.

Work with the bank account that has some cash in it, you know, like. Yeah, all the assets and equipment and you know, the lease and all these things that need to be taken care of. And this is something that is kind of like, well, why isn't the law figured this out? Because no one cares. Apple doesn't care. Just transfer it to your trust. The department of Pressure licensing or any of these licensing bodies, they're not going to stamp it because it doesn't fit the law for them. But the estate planning laws and every estate planning lawyer, anyone who has a licensed corporation knows their trust needs to own it. Their trustee is going to come take over and will have the ability to do that. So I wouldn't stress too much about it, but just get the stock transfer done. Remember, this is an internal document anyways, the ownership here. Yeah, just get the transfer done. Keep that stock transfer handy.

And one, this is a good point to talk about maintenance again. So now with all that said regarding real estate, LLCs and corpse now moving forward. Okay, you do this, you get all your entities done, you get your real estate and lo and behold, two months from now, you need a new llc, bought another piece of rental property or bought some cryptocurrency that you want to protect in an llc. Okay, when the law firm asks you for the information to set up your llc, we're typically going to say ask, do you have a trust? Now, whoever you're going, if they don't ask that you need to volunteer it and go, I'm not going to be the owner. My trust is now you've saved a step because you don't have to transfer it later. You're just going to set up these new entities right from the get go with the, the trust. And when you go to buy property, you might have to close in your name because of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lender crap. But then soon as you close, you deed it over your trust. Don't tell them you're going to do it. Just do it. Don't you know, anybody wants to get, you know, 10 bankers involved, just ask them if can I go to the bathroom while I'm in the bank? It's going to require an executive order from the vice president of the region. So just don't go in and tell the bank what the hell's going on. Just transfer after, there's not a problem. Yeah, guys, for you guys that were teenagers, this is, this should be easy. You would never ask to stay out late. You just stay out late. Much easier solution.

Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. Okay. Love it. All right, let's talk about another. I mean, you did Mention cryptocurrency, though. I want to kind of give a couple tips on that.

Ooh, ooh, yeah. Let you know what, a couple tips on your crypto. Yeah. We've got to talk about how do you bequeath crypto? And this could be precious metals. It could be. And we should talk about timeshares. Why don't you hit crypto and then I'll mention timeshares too.

Okay. Does anyone want to inherit a timeshare?

Yeah, as long as I didn't pay for it.

Is this an asset or a liability? I don't know.

I just don't want to pay for one.

Let's talk about something. Some of your family may actually want to get your crypto. Okay. Now, we want to make sure they get this. And this is what's important with crypto. It's. Hopefully over the years, this is going to improve because this is a tricky one if you think about your bank account or cash just sitting there. We'll talk about that in a second. They're going to show up with the death certificate. You have a beneficiary designation that who gets your account when you dive, has your trust, easy peasy, done. They show up with the death certificate, goes over to the trust, who is listed on the account with a beneficiary designation with your crypto. And this is even something Coinbase and Gemini and a lot of custodial places cracking. They're still trying to figure it out. Now, right now, most of those places have a process. If you have crypto custodially held with one of those types of companies, or you present a death certificate of the deceased person and the heir in the estate is able to get it. If there's a surviving spouse, that's. That's easier. If it's kids or others, it becomes a little more complicated. You're gonna end up in probate court, typically. So. So, so. But what about everyone else? What about all my. The defi crypto? My crypto I don't have with the custodial partner. There's no other company that has it. It's on my Trezor device. It's on an anal ledger. It's on a Metamask wallet or a phantom wallet. I mean, how are, how is my family supposed to get access to that? And I've got multifactor authentication. So even if I leave them my user and password, how are they going to get in this? All right, this is tricky. So couple of tips. One, your private keys, one option, and I'm not saying this is all settled and done. There's one way to do it. One option would be is put those private keys in a super safe place like a safety deposit box at a bank. I hate to say it, I know you don't love a bank. A lot of you that have got defi. But keep your private keys there and give instructions to your trustee that could be in your plan on how they go access that and they could be on your accounts over there at the bank so they could get access to upon your passing. But that's one option and you can do the same thing with users and passwords and there's other places of course you could put this but it's gotta be safe and secure.

Yeah. And here this is opens the door to an important point. When you do an estate plan, it's more than just a trust. We're going to give you a binder. And this binder is going to have funeral and burial instructions, powers of attorney. We've talked about this in the prior two videos. The point is use this binder as a, as a launching pad to get a fireproof safe in the house. Even safe deposit box are not cheap. Me, I'm going to rely on a fireproof safe. That's just my take. I'm a little cheaper that way. And make sure that trusted person in your life, it might be your spouse, it could be a best friend, a parent, a child, your attorney, whoever it is, make sure that one person knows the combination of that safe. And then on a regular basis make sure in your safe are these passwords and these cryptic type things, you know, that you could be passwords. There's so much more I want to say. I'll come back to it but the point is here, the, the binder itself should be in that fireproof safe with this type of stuff. And if you're the type of person that changes your password every week, now that requires you updating that piece of paper in your safe every week because if you die in the meantime, that money's gone ever forever. So yeah, you got comes with the more security mind you'd want to be. It's going to take a little extra work.

Yep.

The funny case to me Matt was it was in Newsweek about four or five years ago. Those that have been to a live workshop of mine have heard me talk about it. Um, a lot of people, okay, we're going to go back in time, back to the good old 80s. Some of you watching Stranger Things. You're you know, flashbacks. I'm waiting for episode eight and nine. It's killing me. July 1st, Matt, if you're one.

I got to catch up. I got to catch up. Peaky Blinders is coming out. So I was all excited for. I did love Stranger Things though.

Yeah. So in the 80s, there was these things called LPs or records. Now it there they were called vinyl for short because they were made of vinyl and they were flat like a pancake people. And you'd put them on a turntable. I know this is crazy. Some of you that never seen these before. And then you'd play music. Now, when you bought a record, you didn't own the song. I didn't own Kiss, you know, Shout at the Devil. I. That. That I didn't own the song. I just owned the album. And if I broke or scratched my album, it was ruined. But I owned that record. Well, come to find out, what about our digital music? What do I own? Do I own that song that just came out by Britney Spears? Nope, I do not. I just have the rights to listen to it on that platform. Well, about four or five years ago, Bruce Willis was at a party and he's big into music and he was. And he's got a huge Apple to itunes, whatever, library. And he discovered that in these contracts for Netflix and Prime and Apple Music and da, da, da, when you die, your. Your account's gone. All that music you purchased, that's. It's not yours. You just have the right to listen to it. And it's a lifetime agreement when you die. That's gone in most of these things. So Newsweek, this big old three page spread of all these digital rights that people have to access movies or music and this and that, and when you're gone, what the probate or the estate issues were, it was really fascinating. So Bruce Willis said, I'm going to sue Apple Music. And he did. And it got some news. But if you watch tmz. But anyway, it was really fascinating. And so here's another point in this password link list is make sure someone has the passwords to your Netflix and Amazon and this and that, because if you don't leave it to someone, they ain't getting back in. It's over.

Yeah.

So interesting, huh?

Okay.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah.

Cory's pushed over here.

You're bringing Bruce Willis in? You know, I mean, what was his name in Die Hard? Lieutenant. Lieutenant. Detective.

In Die Hard, yeah.

Detect Die Hard detective.

Oh, John McClane.

John McClane. Oh, my gosh.

Of course. I was like, what are you talking About.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Gosh. I mean. All right. Okay. Let's get back to. Actually, let's hit another category. Are you ready to switch categories?

Okay, I'm going to say.

You want to say anything else on crypto?

Why don't you mention timeshares? And here's the thing. I think timeshares is a good topic for catch all. You want to just think of anything you might own, like a time. Time share. Do you want to comment? I've been talking here. I just don't want to. I mean, you got to.

I mean, you left me. Timeshares. Thank you. Let me tell a Bruce story. All right, you're up.

Okay.

Timeshares. Oh, let me give. Okay. Timeshare. Now, timeshare is a deeded piece of property. Actually, in a lot of the instances, there's actually literally it's a deed, and so you have to get it transferred to your trust. Now, it's a pain in the butt having to get that done because there's a management company that has to sign off on it. Now, a lot of them are familiar with this and particularly the bigger ones, but there's going to be a cost and you're going to have fees and you got to contact the management company and jump through their stupid hoops. Okay, you bought a timeshare. What do you expect? All right? So otherwise your family's going to be literally in probate trying to get this thing passed on. So now what you may want to do. And I just, seriously, this is a little conversation I had with a client on our timeshare, which was. They were like, man, they're like, I'd give this thing away right now. Do I really want to go to the hassle of doing this? It was only a few hundred bucks, but honestly, they had to pay in fees to the management company and then for the deed to get done, and they're like, let's just not worry about it. I was like, okay, all right. Now if your family uses this, it turned into a regular vacation place. It has meaning. The timeshare in your instance is a good deal. You know, all that stuff. Then get it done. Just jump to the hoops. Timeshare is going to be a little tricky just because there's this management company involved. So I don't know if that was a catch all for other assets because there's a lot of assets that actually pass, but there's no ownership record. There's not a deed, there's not a company certificate or an ownership thing. Like all this personal property, you're going to have like your musical instruments or the guns or certain guns might be a little exception. But a lot of these things is just going to be like, here's who gets it. And you're going to put this in a memorandum of personal property that's part of this binder we talk about in the estate plan. But you're not going anywhere to have to do anything. You're just saying this is who gets it. You know what I mean? Yeah. And the baseball card collection or whatever, you know.

Yeah, yeah. There's some things that there's no actual ownership on record somewhere, but jewelry, art,

like a lot of stuff has a lot of value and, and it's gonna, you know, the piano.

I've. I've had the weirdest things, you know. You know what? Here, I'm gonna throw one out here. I have a client right now that I'm looking at today, a cell tower lease agreement. So they own real property and they're going to sign a lease agreement for, I mean, it's like a 50 year contract or whatever to lease space for a cell tower. And that contract should either be with the LLC that owns the land or your trust, if that, who owns the land. Because again, that trust is going to be the recipient of that lease payment after you die. And that could live on. And so some of you are going, oh my gosh, this is, this is far reaching. So again, any sort of contractual income you have or asset or right to something, you want to make sure that your trust can step in and boom, grab it when you're gone.

Love it.

That was nice. That was a reach, huh? You feel that? All right, I'm expecting something big from you, the rest of the show somewhere, you know, a little juicy nugget, as we call it. All right. Okay, next asset class.

All right, let's talk about where all the money is. Let's talk about your retirement accounts.

Oh, my word. How did I. Geez, what did you expect, Matt Sorensen?

What do you expect? I mean, it is worth only $35 trillion in retirement.

We hold this up for YouTube. Here's Matt Sorenson's book. You can get it on Amazon right now. Yeah, if you call my office. I will sign it for you at my office if you would like.

Yeah, that's called Very special. Very special.

Okay. Okay, so let's talk about retirement accounts and the 4 trillion, you know, in retirement account. Like it's a big deal.

Yeah. If you've got one and you got some Money in it, you probably care about who gets it, right? So here's, I'm going to give a couple tips on it. First, you have a beneficiary designation, whether it's an IRA, 401k, HSA covered, I don't care what type of account it is. I'm grouping all those together. You have a beneficiary designation that says upon your passing, who gets my IRA, my 401k. Now, we love having your trust involved, but if you've got a spouse, my general recommendation, and this is most advisors that are savvy on this stuff, or estate and tax lawyers, we like to have your spouse first, if you have one. So upon your passing, elect your spouse for your IRA. This could be Roth, traditional 401k, whatever, because there's special spousal rollover rules that allow your spouse to inherit your account and do it as an IRA or 401k in their name and not have to make it an inherited IRA. Where it takes has to come out over 10 years and it's more of a pain. They can just bring it into an account in their name and treat it like it's their own IRA or 401k. So list spouse first and then trust, your trust will be the secondary beneficiary. Now, if you don't have a spouse, you're going to list your trust. Now, when you list your trust, and this is a directed ira, our company or any other, you know, your fidelity or whoever, when you list your trust, they need a copy of it. They have to have a copy of it because they have to be able to know who are the identifiable beneficiaries. Now you can just provide a copy. You know, you'll have a PDF copy of your trust from us that sign that you could send, but they actually need a copy. And they don't just need the trust certificate, they need the whole thing because you need to be able to know who is the beneficiary in there when you pass. That's got to be identifiable in the document. So if it's your two kids, you know, and that we can look in there and say, okay, this is who's going to get it. So remember retirement accounts beneficiary designation form. You've got to update that when you sign a trust. And once you have a new estate plan, update all those on all your accounts.

Okay? Now some people, the retort to this is, well, hold it, Mark. I don't. I'm not going to go through probate with my retirement account. Why the hell am I worried about this? And like Matt was talking about with kids, keep in mind again, your children, young or old, may not be in the right skill set, mindset, life set, situation, physically, mentally, to handle your retirement account. They could end up blowing it. And so be responsible to your children and do the right thing by maybe putting strings on it. And, and we talked about that back in last part two. But this is when it really happens. You've got to update your retirement account beneficiary so that it goes to the trust. If you don't say it goes to the trust, any going to the trust, it's going to go to your 21 year old at college looking for some cash to go to Tijuana this weekend. That's not where we need your retirement account.

Yeah. And let me just give an example. Because we've had, you know, I mean, we have over 10,000 accounts, lots. We're opening a lot of new accounts. And so we see people pass away. We've had a lot of accounts. People pass away and they need to get inherited. I will tell you, I can, I can call it every time when there's someone in their 20s that inherits a retirement account drained that next week, the whole damn thing, okay. And that might not be what you wanted now maybe you were like, you know, what if they want to cool? You know, but the, Those in their 30s and 40s, they tend to keep them invested. They're like, hey, I get this. I understand the power of a retirement account. I've been working my bond off for 10, 20 years. I know the importance of having this nest egg down the road. I'm going to keep this as an inherited account and keep it growing for my future life. And so just think about that as you're planning. If you've got older kids, a large account, you may want to just. You sure, I get it. Have it go outright. But if you've got younger kids, even Those in your 20s, the benefit of the trust here is you can't have some controls in there if you want, about when they get the money.

Yeah.

Okay, now let me say your bank accounts, you can list the trust too. And this is the same beneficiary designation thing your life insurance policy needs, that needs to be updated too. Now list the trust as the beneficiary of your life insurance policy. The only one that retirement accounts, where I say list spouse first and then trust is just because there's spousal rollover rules on retirement accounts. But for bank accounts and your life insurance Even a personal brokerage account, that's not retirement, just a brokerage trading account. That stuff just lists your trust as the new beneficiary.

And I think a lot of people just when they start thinking about trust planning, they're like, I don't have any money. I'm not rich. You know, I don't need a trust. And then we go, do you own life insurance? Oh, yeah. Or at work. They have a policy for me. Well, that's what we're talking about. That, you know, it's. It again, sometimes it might surprise you how much you're really worth.

And so particularly dead. Yeah, particularly dead. We've taken the life insurance.

So I think that's a reality check for a lot of people. On that note, I'm trying to think here. I've been looking through my notes. Yesterday I did 10 mistakes we make with our retirement accounts. And. And this funding was such a big part of it.

Yeah.

And. Yeah. And so I just wonder if there's any other. Just kind of little things that you should be thinking about in the maintenance or funding.

Let me say a couple other ones. Somebody gets some common questions like, what about my cars? Do I need to put my cars. Do I need to go to the DMV or motor vehicle or whatever? Not typically you can, but generally the DMV is going to transfer with the trustee or even executor of the will with or which Also, most states say if it's a surviving spouse or kids, they show a death certificate. They. They can affect the transfer of title on cars. Again, that's different from real property. But typically vehicles, you don't need to stress about getting that in the trust name. In most states, rules will pass based on death certificate, and trustee or surviving spouse or kids can go affect that. Yeah,

well, I think the last thing on maintenance, it is funny, I get a lot of people that say, ooh, here's a good point. People go, well, we probably need to redo my trust. I set it up 15 years ago. And I'll say, well, hold on, slow down, tiger. A lot of times if you get a quality trust to begin with, a simple amendment at most to update maybe some names or this or that may be all you need to do. And now, on that note, Matt, you had an experience this week where someone said, yeah, I need to amend my trust. And you're like, oh, okay, just send it over a couple of things. And it was. The way you describe it was better. You were telling the other attorneys as well. So there's A balancing act here.

Yeah. Sometimes you just need to do a new trust rather than amend the trust. You. Okay, now I'm married. Okay, you got married now. All right, now we might need a whole different estate plan. You might need to redo what you did. Now, sometimes we can keep the same trust name if you want, so that way all the assets you already put in the trust can stay. But we may rework the whole documents. And it's probably the same fee as a new trust because if you get remarried, you have a new spouse, all these assets you have, there's probably. There's a lot of more caveats on it. Who gets what? My new spouse actually gets this or this percent and then my kid this. And you know, and by the way, this prior spouse I had in this prior plan out, you know, there's a lot more going on in that. So sometimes you want to restate the whole thing and just do a new estate plan, but maybe keep the same trust name because you already have assets in it. Now maybe you want to change the trust name and that's okay. You can move properties and do all this refunding again to get the right trust name on it if you have a new spouse. But just a consideration there, some changes are significant, like remarriage, divorce, where you might start the estate plan over entirely. But other things, like I just want to change the trustee or I need to do something special for one of my kids because of whatever circumstance that might be one of my beneficiaries. That stuff you can just do through amendments.

Yeah, I love it. Good stuff. Well, everybody, this concludes. Can I say that.

Yeah. I have one important message. One important message, though.

Okay.

Okay. This is. Yeah, very important.

Okay.

Get your state plan done. If you've been listening to this and you haven't started your state plan, shame on you. Get it done. Okay. You will die. Okay. You will. It's just a matter of when. Okay. Get your estate plan done. We happen to have a special to incentivize you. 200 bucks off. Our regular state price is only 1500 bucks. It's 1300 bucks. We do the trust, all these other documents we've been talking about, you get to talk with an attorney to work through any questions you have. Do it in all 50 states. So get over to kqslawyers.com take advantage of the special or use someone that can help you get through this and get this done. We all need to have an estate plan in our lives. It's a way to, like we said, at the beginning, when we started this, to create a legacy of what you want to happen with all these assets, all this work you've put in over the years. It also avoids heartache and fighting for your family after the fact, when everybody has an opinion about what you wanted to happen with your estate, but you were too lazy and didn't care enough to get it done and save your family the heartache of having to fight over everything.

So, boy, Mr. Field Trip, do you want to shame anyone else? This is the shaming moment of the show.

I just felt. I was just moved to share that message with you all today.

Yeah. Oi. Yeah, well. Oh, my gosh. Well, I was going to say, this concludes our three part miniseries. You can catch it on American Movie Classics every Friday night after Shawshank Redemption. And we will be there for you and for many, many years to come. So this is a classic. This is going to go down. And, you know, history is one of the best three part miniseries on estate planning. Is that too much?

I mean, no, no.

You got to manifest it if you want it.

That's so millennial of you. All right, well, thanks, everyone, for listening. Of course. We'll be back next week with another amazing episode of the Main Street Business podcast. Until then, keep your state plan done, all right? Okay, thanks.

See you next week.