Estate Planning 101 for Dentists

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Welcome, everybody, to a new episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. Today is a show where we're going to talk about your. What called your estate plan. And the estate plan is one of those items in life that sometimes we just tend to punt down the road, and then when we get there, we punt it again or we punt it again until sometimes it's too late. And by not addressing our estate plan, we can leave a catastrophic mess. I will say to those who you leave behind upon your passing. So I know you're tempted, as you're hearing me open up on this podcast to say, I'll deal with my estate plan later. Please don't do that. This is a podcast that will become incredibly valuable for you, especially for those that you care about. And this is a great way to protect yourself, to protect them around all of the legal aspects of your estate, which is everything you owe and everything you own. And that may include or will include your dental practice. And so there's going to be some really important, I think, nuggets in this podcast on the subject of estate planting, planning for dentists, and specifically dental practice owners. And we've got a guest on the show. Eddie Johnson is a dental estate planning attorney. He is here in San Diego with me. Eddie, welcome to the Dental Boardroom podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to join.

Just a quick backstory. Eddie and I were at a really cool event recently called the Mommy Dentists in Business, or M Dibs. And it's such a cool group of women who are mommies and who are dentists, most of whom are dental practice owners. And Eddie was there talking about the need for good estate planning. And that becomes, I think, especially relevant too, when you have children as well. And so we just struck up a conversation and I said, eddie, why don't you come on our podcast? We've got a growing following and a lot of listeners, and this may help you connect up with some dentists who need some estate planning. So, grateful Eddie, that you are here on the Dental Boardroom podcast with me, let me jump in with a very simple question. What is estate planning? Let's just start there.

So estate planning is really all about taking your assets and planning for giving what you have to who you want, the way you want and when you want. Without estate planning, the government does that for you. So some of the things that you do with estate planning is you can care for yourself during your lifetime if, you know, you become incapacitated and you need someone to make healthcare decisions for you, it can Help you protect others like a surviving spouse or your children to death. Or if you become incapacitated, it can help plan for who's going to take care of your children. It can help keep your assets out of a process called probate, which is a court ordered process that takes a long time and distributes your assets for you and costs. It's pretty expensive. You can use it to pass on certain values and ideals to your children and grandchildren through trusts. And you can protect your assets from creditors depending on how you set up your plan.

So safe to say that if you don't do something, if you don't pre design this ahead of time, how your wealth is going to be handled. Basically the government handles it, correct? They decide how it's distributed to your beneficiaries. Is that a correct way of looking on that?

Yeah, they. Everyone has an estate plan. It's you either have your own estate plan or the government has one already in place for you. And most people don't like the government's estate plan.

So by default, the government's plan is the plan unless you act ahead of time, before the moment is too late to structure a plan for how your assets will be distributed. Now you mentioned also that the estate plan is relevant before you even pass away. Can you elaborate on that? What does the estate plan do for you before passing?

Okay, before passing you can do things like getting a thing called a durable power of attorney for finances and you can get a advance. These terms change depending on what state you're in. But the durable power of attorney for finances is a process where someone can have the power to make decisions for you. If you become incapacitated, they could file your taxes for you, they could pay your bills for you, they could sell a house, things like that. And then there's the advanced health care directive, which if you become incapacitated, you can say what kind of care you would like, what kind of doctors you want, what kind of treatment you want instead of having the court make those decisions or your family members having to make those decisions. If you didn't want to have life support, if you got really hurt in car accident, you don't want your family to have to make that decision. A couple other things you can do is decide who's going to take care of your kids if you become incapacitated as well. You don't. There's a process already in place that the government has for choosing who's going to be your parents or your kid's guardian. And you can override that a little Bit by choosing ahead of time.

Makes sense.

One thing then to clarify is that having an estate plan isn't necessarily a way to fund your disabled self or your beneficiaries if you pass away your sort of successors. That has to do with insurance. Now insurance might be related to estate planning. There are often reasons to get out an insurance policy based on an estate planning design. But just want to emphasize those are two unrelated things. The estate plan is all about making sure what you do have, not necessarily what insurance policies, what would happen with insurance policies, but what you do have, how that would be distributed. Now I guess if you do have insurance policies in place at the time of setting up your estate plan, you would want to designate perhaps how the insurance policy proceeds are handled. But it's my understanding that insurance policy proceeds are handled directly according to the insurance policy itself outside of estate planning documents like a will or a living trust trust, which we'll get into later. Is that correct? With insurance?

Yeah, when you designate a beneficiary, a lot of people don't realize that with insurance, with the retirement plans, stuff like that, you have beneficiary designations. So you're saying who's going to get that? And people forget to update to update those. And that is, that is part of estate planning as well because people don't know that. And then they come to the attorney's office and they might have their ex wife stole as a beneficiary on their 401k and that's going to override their will, at least in California. And. Or a trust.

Yeah, I think they call that it passes by operation of law. Is that the correct term?

Yeah, that's correct.

So then in an estate plan, here's where I want you to fill in the gap for me. Here are the main documents to have in your estate plan. Number one is a living trust. And I want to go into a little bit more depth on a living trust in a second. But the purpose of a living trust is it allows you to bypass probate. So upon your passing, your assets are distributed through the trustee and you have to designate trustee, somebody who would survive you like a family member for example, or a close friend perhaps. And the trustee will distribute or administer your assets based on the terms of the trust and not therefore based on the mandates of the probate court. So that would be. Number one is a living trust. Did I explain that okay, Eddie?

Yeah, that's one of the things that the trust does and that goes hand in hand with a poor over will. Because see, you don't just have a trust or you could have just a trust or will, but you wouldn't, you shouldn't. Most people should have both. So, and disclaimer, this is not legal advice. I only practice in California. So pour over will is what happens is it doesn't always make sense to title everything into a trust to fund everything into a trust. You have a lot of smaller assets, personal property, heirlooms, things like that that you're going to want to go into the trust when you die, but you don't want to have to write out every single thing in the trust. So that's why you have a pour over will. And so all it's essentially it captures all of those little items that you have at debt that are not currently owned by the trust and pours them into the trust so they avoid probate.

Got it. So will is going to be document number two. So the first one is a living trust or what's called a revocable trust. Those are synonymous. Living trust, revocable trust. Not entirely. There's, I suspect there's various types of revocable trusts. Perhaps, I don't know but I use those terms, or at least I hear those terms interchangeably. A living trust and a revocable trust. That's document number one. Document number two is a will, which is a catch all for anything that's not listed in the trust that you might accumulate after establishing the trust. And the will basically pours any, anything else over back into the trust upon your passing.

Yeah, in California there's a limit. There's a, it can only be an asset, can only be worth so much. I think the California limit's like 144,000. Either you can plan for that. And also the another thing that the living, that the form of will does is you can designate guardianship for your children.

Which you cannot do in a living trust.

Yeah, yeah. So you, you could, the living trust, you could, you could put stipulations for how you children were taken care of. What can be pretty complex. But yeah, you designate beneficiaries in your.

Pour over will or guardianship.

Guardianship.

Yeah, got it. So that is critical if you have children who are still dependents and are at home is if both spouses were to pass away, it's the will that designates who the guardian is. And I suspect there would be something like a contingent guardian in case the first guardian is not able to or willing to. So that's very important then if you have children. So, so that's the second document the will. And then we have some powers of attorney. And if you have never heard of that term, power of attorney is you basically giving somebody else a right, a dis. A right to make discretionary decisions over some aspect of your life. That's how I understand it. And the first one is a power of attorney over asset management or financial affairs. And that's where you're giving somebody else the right in the event that you are incapable mentally, even though you might still be alive, you are incapable of managing your financial assets as deemed by a doctor, I would assume. And that person can then make those decisions. Is that the. Is that a. The title of that document, Eddie, is a durable power of attorney for asset management for finances.

Yeah. Capital changes state by state. And you can dictate which powers you do or don't give. And you don't have to wait for it in capacity for that document to be effective. If some older adults who trust their children and just want their children to manage their finances will give them a power of attorney for financing.

Hey, I just learned something. I did not know that. Now, the power of attorney powers of attorney are inapplicable upon passing. Right. Those are only relevant during life.

Correct.

Okay, so durable power. By the way, what is durable in the whole durable power of attorney title?

Good question. I'm just. Different thoughts. I looked that up.

I wonder if that durable means it can be swapped out or changed, that it's not permanent. I could be wrong on that.

Yeah, that's. That's probably it. Because you could have it happen when you're actually alive and capable of making decisions. So you could revoke it.

Gonna look that up. Durable.

Let's see. Durable. Think it might mean something differently. If you got a moment and it comes, let me know. But I wanna move on to the next documentation.

Yeah, and it's not called that in every state either. So it's.

Oh, interesting California term. So then I'm not gonna use the term durable. I'll just say a power of attorney. The next one is for medical decisions. And is that the same as a living will?

This. That's. That changes state by state. So there. Yeah. There used to be a thing called living will here in California. Now you have the. So you have advanced healthcare directive. That can encompass a lot of different. A lot of different powers for medical decisions. But it's a state by state guide. But I would just focus on. We've got these two different main sets of powers, Medical decisions and financial decisions. And for the financial decisions, one thing I forgot to mention that may be relevant to a lot of your listeners is that if you have an adult child going off to college, someone who's 18 or older, you're going to want to get the power of attorney for the medical for them set up before they go to college because what if something happened to them and you could no longer make decisions for them because now they're an adult and they can't be in their incapacitated. So it's, it's a common thing for people to get that set up prior to their children leaving for college, their adult children.

Very good timing there, Eddie. I have a son who's just getting back college applications right now and I would have never thought of that.

Yeah. So thank you. Yeah. And you want to get a hipaa, HIPAA release as well, just so you can show it to the doctor just in case.

Okay, noted. So the four main documents are living trust will with a pour over provision, the durable power or the power of attorney for financial decisions and the power of attorney for medical decisions. Is there any other key document in a good estate plan?

Having the HIPAA release would be the last one. Like I said, that's. So that's your basic covering everything estate plan. There's all sorts of other types of documents you can add in there. But oh, it wasn't just a trust. You want a fully funded trust. So a lot of. I know you were talking about, I think you're talking about funding earlier. If you have a trust that's not funded, it's just a document that's ineffective.

And funding the trust simply means retitling the ownership of your assets in the name of the trust. Correct. For example, I might have the REIT trust, which is actually literally the name of my living trust. And then you got to go to the bank and you gotta the bank retitle the accounts. There's usually a form, they do it all the time, so I suspect it's not that difficult. But you retitle it so that the account is held by the trust. So when you get a statement it will show the name of the trust at the top, not your name. And so you got, you've got pretty much any bank accounts you've got, your house should be trusted or funded into the trust. And what is not funded into the trust is IRAS and 401k. So these sort of official government retirement plans. Since those assets transferred directly to the beneficiary outside of probate by as I mentioned earlier, operation of law is the term there. But let's talk really quickly, Eddie, about the house, since that's a big one that's going to be relevant for a lot of people. How is the house transferred into the trust and is it the attorney who typically does that, or does the the individual, I'll say client, him or herself do that?

It can be either. So they're going to sign off on it, but the attorney can help walk them through the situation, the process, or some some attorneys just give sets of instructions on how to do it. But we work with a we work with an outside company that helps not just the funding the trust with the house, but with other accounts. But yeah, ultimately the owner of the house, the person on the deed's going to have to sign Are you looking.

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Now here's a big one. Is your practice now in a lot of states like California, for example, many other states, if you are not a licensed dentist, you cannot own a dental practice. And you know this very well, I'm sure Eddie, and many dentists, I would say most dentists don't they, I would say a lot of, maybe that's an overstatement, but a lot of dentists don't have a state plan set up. If you're a practice CFO client, this is something we routinely are bringing back up. Hey Doc, did you contacts get your state documents in place? It requires a lot of pushing sometimes to get that done because it's not urgent, doesn't feel urgent, and yet it's really important to do. But oftentimes it's done and the practice needs to be funded into the trust or retitled to be owned by the trust. So let's, let's just plan on this for a little bit. Plant on this for a little bit. Eddie, what, what needs to be taken into consideration when it comes to the practice as it relates to the estate planning documents.

So when you have a practice. My wife and I each have a lot of professional corporations. We, since we're both licensed attorneys, we can own professional corporations. And we, if one of us, something happened to either of us, the other person can step in. But many dentists that I've come across, they have, they're the sole owner of their practice and it's a professional corporation and their significant other is not licensed. So what happens when they die? Because if the unlicensed, the unlicensed spouse can't run the business, what do you do? California, you can set up a trust to revocable trust to hone the practice. And then when they, if you pass away, what happens is the spouse has a certain time period where they're able to make decisions for the practice, hire people on to help run the practice and sell the practice. And so what does that do? If you didn't have that set up, which many dentists, like I said that I've spoken with, don't. Your practice goes through the process called probate. Probate is the, the state's version of an estate plan for You. And so that in California, with COVID and everything, probate can take well over a year and it can take many months just to start getting the process going. Think about that. Your practice, no one's running it if you didn't have it in this trust, no one's running, no one's able to run it or make these decisions or financial decisions until the probate process gets kicked off your business. All of the goodwill that you built up, all of the, all your clients, they're all just going away. And the value of your practice is just nose diving. And what your heirs are going to get is going to be significantly less because you didn't put it into a trust.

Gosh, this feels like a critical point of the whole podcast. This is relevant for me as well as an owner of my own practice, so to speak, of a CP in financial planning practice, and for you as a law firm practice. And now, one thing I want to ask, or maybe even add, is there's a certain period of time, even if it's in the trust, that you have to sell the practice. Do you know what that is, Eddie? I heard it was a year.

I believe it's, I think it's less than that. I think it's 120 days. It's different for dental. What's funny is it's actually in California, it's different for. I believe it's different for dental practice owners than lawyers or other profession professionals. But off the top of my head, I want to say 120 days, but don't quote me on that. It's not a significant.

I'm going to, I'm going to do a little digging on that one and then I'll put it in the show notes because I remember hearing a year, but I could be wrong on that. I have had a few times a spouse or somebody, a trustee, somebody representing the estate of a deceased dentist, and they have a certain amount of time to practice.

It is 12 months. I think the, I think I'm thinking of the other professions, they get a shorter period of time. But dentists, I think have the.

I don't know how they do it with a shorter period of time. Maybe they sell faster. I know selling a dental practice to stage it, to find a buyer to go through the whole due diligence period to get financing for the buyer. It can take a good six months, sometimes more, for the whole process to incubate and then consummate. So I certainly hope it would be a year, at least that would be reasonable to hope or expect that if it's shorter than that, man, you got to be the way the beneficiaries, the trustee, the survivor, the spouse, whoever it is, they really need to move into action really quickly, which is probably difficult given in many cases it's unexpected and everybody's just dealing with the loss of the dentist and then to have to worry about all the finances. It's just such a. It can be such a difficult time. But I'll tell you what, if you've got a good estate plan in place, it can significantly reduce just what feels like a confusing, stressful period because probate doesn't help. So I want to also just clarify. Maybe not clarify, just enumerate as I hear you, Eddie, the benefits of a living trust. Number one is that you get to dictate how your assets are distributed instead of the states game plan. You get to determine that. That's number one. Number two is that a trust is. And you may not have mentioned this one, so I'm just thinking off the top of my head. But a trust you is private. Nobody can see into the trust. Nobody has right to go see how the deceased is distributing their asset. It's a private matter. But if it goes through probate, am I correct, Eddie? That's public. So anybody can go and see what Wes Reed has in assets and where those assets are going. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, that's correct. It's one of the benefits is privacy because. Yeah. There's no. Nobody has to publish a trust. So you. You're. That's one. A really good reason to. Besides the cost and kind of probate, you're avoiding the publicity.

Just privacy. Yep. Okay. So that's number two. Number three, I have that a trust is much less expensive to administer than a probate court. Who assigns a probate representative, I assume they would be called.

Yeah.

To deal with the administration. And I think there's like a fixed fee scheduled based on the size of the assets. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct in California. So it's not just the representative. There's also the. The attorney that you're going to be paying and they each get the same fees. So for the first hundred. I think it's. For the first hundred thousand dollars, it's 4% and the next hundred thousand. And this is of the total value of the estate.

Not.

And that doesn't. That's not before you take out the. Yet. So then the next a hundred thousand is 3% and then up to the next 800,000 2% and then up to 9 million, 1%. That's, let's say you have a $100,000 estate. Well, $4,000 is going to the personal representative and then $4,000 to the attorney. So that's already $8,000 of 100.

That's 8%. 8% gone. Poof.

Yeah.

So I actually didn't know that, that it's based on the assets. Not the assets, less the debt, which would be the net estate. So that, that can get very steep. If you have a house, let's say you're here in California. Here in. Yeah, California, but especially here in, let's say, Southern California, and you've got a house that's worse, worth a million and a half, $2 million, which isn't uncommon around here. And then you have a practice, let's say, worth a million dollars. And then you've got KS, IRAs, that kind of thing. Then out of curiosity, do you know, are the 401ks and IRA, since those passed outside of the state, are those not subject then to the fee?

Those aren't subject to probate.

Got it. Okay. So it's only anything that actually goes through probate that's probated would have a fee attached to it. That makes sense. But that can get very steep. You could even compensate from the estate a trustee. Some people do it at no cost, I'm sure, like a child or a sibling or somebody. But you could almost carve out a provision to compensate that person for administering the trust. Is that common to compensate the trustee?

Yeah, the trustee can be. You can have. There's professional trustee management companies. Yeah. So it's common. And then also for the fee for the personal representative, sometimes people will waive that because if you're already going to inherit the money, if you get that money as a personal representative, you're going to be paying income tax on it. But if you get it down the line from inheritance, as long as you're not over the, the minimum amount for estate tax for federal and your state doesn't have estate tax, then you get that money without having to pay any taxes on it.

Good point. That's good tax planning. Okay, I'm going to pause that for one sec because that's what I want to end on is estate taxes, how they're different than income taxes and how estate taxes may be relevant to a, to a dentist. One quick clarification is you said that there are professional trustees out there. So let's say I pass away. I could have in my trust that I have a professional trustee, be the one to administer my trust. Or I could have my brother who might be a financial advisor. I can have him be the trustee of my estate.

Correct, Correct. And the only reason to use a professional company is if you don't trust your family members or if maybe this is a really complex trin minister but most people will use someone they trust, so to speak.

So going back to the benefits of a trust, the. There's privacy, there's. There is specificity on how the assets are distributed. It's less expensive. And then the fourth one I have is that you can sell your practice sooner since you don't need to wait for basically approval from probate to sell the practice. How did I do there Eddie? On listing the benefits of a trust, living trust.

Pretty good. Those are all the ones that I gave. I can probably think of a few others. The.

Let's see. So you could avoid a will contest. So litigation over a will which ha.

Which is common trusts can't be contested or at least not as easily as a will. Yeah, you could still be contested.

Yeah, you could still contested. I mean there still could be trust litigation as well. But there's will. Will contests are fair, can be fairly common. There is one instance that I can think of where you would want to have a will based plan. You know we talked about litigation. It's not that common but it's. If you have. If you see a lot of.

Family conflict and you just want are you have or you have so much you have more debt than you have assets and you want the court one of those two and you want the court to referee that then. Then going through probate can be good.

So never thought of that one. Hey, I'm just lifting up my hands on the matter. You'll let the court deal with that mess? Yeah, I can see that coming in handy in some situations. I had a client the other day and this client was in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania. Their Pennsylvania state planning attorney said they didn't need to set up a living trust, a revocable trust based on the state law. True that some states don't require or it's not a good idea to set up a living trust.

I can't speak state to state as far as the laws go, but California doesn't require a living trust. It just. It just means that if you have a will, it's going to go. If it's just a will, you're going to go through probate to deliver those assets. The tr. The trust is just a way of avoiding probate. But yeah, I don't know. I didn't know of any way of any seats that. Where it's actually a bad idea. I've never heard.

Yeah, I'll have to dig back in on that one. That was the first time ever and I've been working with doctors a long time where they. Their estate planning attorney said, no need to set up a revocable trust. And that was Pennsylvania. So if anybody listening here is in Pennsylvania and they've heard otherwise, please reach out and let me know. All right, let's pivot then over to the estate tax for a sec. Because we've been talking about the estate plan as a mechanism to really protect your assets, keep it private to direct where they go and whatnot. But one thing I want to emphasize is that a living trust, a revocable trust, is not a taxable entity. Now, a lot of times people have heard of trust, so they're a trust fund child, or these wealthy people set up all these trusts. There's a second purpose for the use of trusts. It's, and we call it advanced estate planning. That's if you are in estate tax territory, meaning your assets are so big that they're going to be subject to what we often hear as the death tax, which is totally separate from income tax or capital gain tax or taxes on incomes. This is totally separate. This is a wealth tax. And at the point of your passing, your assets have to be subject to tax. Now, there's a very high threshold that you have to get to before the taxation kicks in. At least. At least right now.

Yeah.

And so a lot of people will set up these various trusts and a lot of advanced estate planning attorneys can get fairly complicated and how these things are set up with all with the purpose of reducing the estate or the death tax. Now, one other clarification I'm going to have here is that it's all called a transfer tax or what's called a gift and estate tax. Whether you gift money in your life or whether you gift it after your life, it's all a transfer tax. And it's all a part of the same equation when calculating how much is due in taxes for giving your wealth to somebody else. I don't think we'll spend much time talking about the estate tax itself, so to say, because right now the vast majority of dentists are under the estate tax limit. So let me just put some numbers on this. Right now, you could pass away with 12 million just you by yourself. You're not even married with about 12 million. I'm rounding a tad there but about $12 million. And you don't have to pay a dollar in estate taxes. Now, if you gave away during your life 10 million and then you passed away with 5 million, you're going to be subject to 3 million of estate taxes because again, the total transfer allowed is pre death and post death is 12 million. And every year you can give up to, I think it's $16,000 per person without being subject to having to tabulate this transfer or this gift. And so most people, most dentists that I work with aren't having to track gifts during their life because they're not substantial enough. So when they die, if they have less than $12 million, they're not subject to the estate tax at all. If you are married and you collectively between the two spouses, have therefore twice that 24 million, if the total estate, the house, the practice, the cars, et cetera, is under 24 million, then you're not going to be subject to estate taxes. Now, it hasn't always been that way. If we go back in history in the year 2000. Eddie, bear with me a sec. I'm just going to throw out some numbers. In the year 2000, it was only $675,000. Anything above that was taxed with the highest marginal tax rate, estate tax rate of 55% of your wealth. So if you died with $5 million and you and your spouse therefore have somewhere around 1.213 million in exemption, then you're going to end up paying a million or so in estate taxes based on that very low threshold of only 675,000 that escapes estate taxes in 2005. So fast forward five years, that was 1.5 million and the highest bracket was 47%. Five more years, it's 5 million with a 35% max tax bracket. 2015, it goes up to 5.4 million. With the 40% tax bracket, 2020, the exemption goes way up. We're at 11,500,000. So I'm sorry, in 2015 is 5.4 million. If I, hopefully I said that right, 2020, it was 11.5 million out of 40%. Here we are 2023, it's about 12 million at, again, a 40% max tax bracket. Now, Eddie, am I wrong when I say that this could all reverse and we could get all the way back down to, say, a million dollars as the lifetime exemption amount?

So in 2025, the exemption, unless something's done, the exemption amount's going to go back down. I think it's what Is it going down to whatever it was before 5 million something, adjusted for inflation, so around 6 million something, I believe, rounding.

So that's. I think the term they use there is. It's sun. This current provision. Sunset. Sunsets. And it reverts back to a prior, assuming nothing.

Yeah. With the law.

So you think something's going to be done with the law?

I don't know. I hope so.

So let's say it drops down to 5 million and maybe I'll try to put in the show notes what that is. But if it's 5 million.

That'S. That gets on. That gets pretty close to where a number of dentists are going to be potentially subject to estate tax and might need some advanced estate planning at that point. Right now I have one client. Really, I've got one client who dentist. He's actually a medical doctor who needs an advanced estate plan because he's above the limit. But the vast majority of my clients don't have to do advanced estate planning. They just need their basic estate planning documents in place that we talked about. But this could dramatically change that if it comes down to sub 5 million. Now, if you're married, then you got twice that and you're probably still. Okay. Not subject to the estate tax.

Correct.

So we're going have to keep our eye on that one.

Yeah. Because it's not like it's grandfathered in for you just because you create your estate plan before. So you definitely have to plan for that.

Great, great comment there. Okay, let's end off on one. One question here, Eddie, you're going to hate this question, but I'm going to say it anyways because one thing I know about dentists, they love to do things themselves. They're educated, they are hardworking, and they like to save a dollar. And so often they will try to do things themselves. The DI wires. I'm a consummate DIYer myself, so I get it. Oftentimes people try to go to Legal Zoom to do these things. What do you think about a doctor trying to set up their estate planning documents through LegalZoom as opposed to getting a professional attorney to help help handle this for them?

Yeah, it's a terrible idea.

You're.

You don't know what you don't know. Legal Zoom is just a template, which would be fine for an attorney who spent years learning how to adjust the template based off of current laws and what's needed for that person's specific. Their specific concerns and goals. If I can, I could perform dentistry on myself. Yeah, I Could pull a tooth out myself if I want to with a pair of pliers. It wouldn't be a great idea to. I could, or I could, I could. I. If I got a really bad cut, I can probably get a needle and some thread and stitch it up myself. But I don't know if that would be a good idea either. So you don't know what you don't know. And it's not going to be you that gets hurt when your estate plan is not effective. It's going to be your loved ones who are already dealing with a lot of grief and now they're going to have to be put to that.

And what are going rates for an estate plan? Basic estate planning documents these days it.

Varies state to state. But you know, for your bait for your basic will trust ancillary documents for a single person, you're looking starting somewhere around 3,500 and then for couples somewhere around 25, 5,500. But it's going to change city by city, state by state, and then irrevocable trust. You could be double, triple that depending on what you're looking for.

The other thing I'll mention too is that not only may you do it wrong, if you try to do this yourself on LegalZoom, there is some element of coaching that I believe is very relevant and just guiding. Then an attorney who's done this dozens, if not hundreds of times can walk you through a lot of the conversation. For example, how does this affect your specific practice? And this is not something I recommend doing on your own. Plus, just don't take the time. Your time is better used in your office, leading your team, leading your patients, doing treatments, closing on cases, all of that. Such a better use of your time than trying to do your own estate plan. So that is my strong recommendation for doctors. This has been extremely informative. Eddie, I'm so grateful for you coming on the show. Do you want to give a little plug about yourself and how people can contact you?

Yeah, absolutely. So you can either go to my website, which is estate planning attorney CA.com so CA for California, if you're. If you live in California and my phone number is 858-737-1232, that's 858-737-12302 and I can help you out with whatever you need regarding estate planning.

And if they're another state, is there like a common website directory that sort of consolidates attorneys in a given area that you could reference or they should just Google local estate planning attorneys.

You can always go to AVO.com and look up attorney there. Or just use the local business results on Google if you. But you're going to want to do your research on top of just those.

Got it. Avo. That's a. What is that? Avo.com. great. Okay, there's, I think a lot more on this subject we could delve into, but I think today we just wanted to cover the nuts and bolts of basic, good, healthy estate planning.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.