Why Do Estate Plans Fail? with Phillip George

*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

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We are here with Phil Up George and he is an elder line of state planning attorney based out of Watkin County and Bellingham, but he covers the entire state of Washington and he’s as close as your zoom screen. So that’s really important that Phil is here and we’re talking about having goals, setting goals for your later life care, which is so important, and Phil whip come back to the show. Well, thank you. I appreciate you having Sus Anne. You know, we’ve been talking in the very first half of our our about, you know, setting goals and all those things, and there’s a lot of people out there that may think, oh, well, I just I have a will, I have a I went to my neighborhood attorney down the street that set me up, but knows nothing about later life, just the family law. Turney. I mean there’s a lot of people out there. That’s what they do. They don’t realize that this is so specialized, especially with how laws are changing, how the laws of Medicare or changing Medicaid, all of those different things, navigating those, you know, daunting worlds on. The average attorney doesn’t know anything about this and that’s they’re not trained on that. And you’re absolutely correct. And then they don’t they don’t really want to be trained on this. Just you know, there’s really no such thing as your friendly neighborhood attorney anymore. That covers everything. Laws have becomes both so specialized. But you know what it really comes down to, the the folks that I deal with and and you know I say this on my website, I say this during my seminars. Unfortunately, most retirement plans fail when families need them the most, and what I mean by that is when you judged their plans by their goals. So not wanting to being forced into nursing home care, not wanting to run out of money do due to long term care and not becoming a burden on their families most. Upwards a seventy to eighty percent of retirement plans actually fail to yeah, that’s because people don’t people don’t approach it the right way. They legal planning as just a will and a power of attorney. And if you think about what a will and a power attorney are, a will just basically says, at it’s at its most basic, this is why I want my assets to go when I die, and a power of attorney says this is who I want to be able to make decisions for me until I die. And then maybe you’ll have a living will which will say, okay, this is how I want, this is how I want to die, and so what you’ve done is you’d created this die, Die, die plan. And if you know you’re one of those lucky folks who basically just well passes away in their own bed one night, right winds, which you’ve actually figure out is the lottery in that planning is fine. But if you would end up, let’s say, having a stroke and being rushed off of the hospital and then having to go into a Rehab facility and then having your family try to find a care facility for you after that and then trying to figure out how to pay for those things, that’s when it things really become a nightmare and that’s where this normal planning really falls off the rails. And I would say, I would add one more thing to them. What if you are found on responsive in your home, oh my goodness, and and if you don’t have what’s called a pulse form, if you’re if you’re you have an illness or chronic situation, heart condition, something like that, first thing at medical responders going to do is look for that bright green document on your refrigerator and if that’s not there, they will do everything they can, include breaking ribs, absolutely suscitate you. And if you don’t want that yeah, they’re but they their a lot obligated to do that. So all of those things are so important to to, you know, voice your wishes, to you know, to make sure that you have your your wishes put out there so that people know absolutely. And you know, what I also like to do Susanne is when when I complete a plan with a couple, what I like to do is I like to bring their families in and I called a family that and what we do is we sit down and it’s an hour and a half, two hours, and I go through everything that we’ve done. We I go through the goals that we’ve set, I go through the wishes that the parents have for their kids. I go through the roles that the kids are going to play and what what assets are available to them to actually complete their goals and be successful with them. And hearing, having the entire family in the same room, hearing this message at one time from the same voice about what is expected, what they want done with our assets, how they want to be treated if they can’t make decisions for themselves, it goes such a long way towards avoiding fights with the family hugely. Oh my goodness, it really really does. Know, I was reading a study that came out of Stanford about three years ago and it was saying that there was families. They talked all these different families and seventy percent of people felt that they had spoken to their children about what their what their goals were in retirement, what they wanted to have happened when they passed away. It turns out only about thirty percent of the children actually thought that that same conversation had happened. So just because you think that you’ve had that that you’ve had that conversation with your children, doesn’t mean that they’re on the same on the same boat with you. You need to make sure and double check and have that conversation again or, better yet, have that conversation with a professional in your children, because I have to tell you, sometimes children pay a little bit more attention to an attorney than they do their own absolutely, absolutely, and you know what, it does have more credibility when it comes from an attorney. And I will tell you this. The attorney is going to say, okay, Mary, daughter over here has a full time job. She’s working, you know, you know, fifty hours a week. She’s not in the you know the situation yet where she can care for you. But Joe over here, your son, has a wife that’s home. They’re willing to take you and yes, you may have to make a move, but your quality life is be going to be so much better. And so having that opportunity to really, you know, focus and give if you give somebody the real scenario in a non objective way, where Mary can say, you know what, I can make this decision and not feel like I’m going to hurt you know daughter that’s working fifty hours a week. Those conversations when you have, when you bring a professional in like you, it’s just this amazing thing that happens that all of a sudden they’re able to, you know, function much better. You know what I’m saying absolutely, or you know what I’ll find is that people are so stuck on the notion that their power of attorneys, their order of agents, has to go from oldest child the youngest child because of orderly, even even if the youngest child just happened, you know a bank manager right, they don’t take advantage of the special demon and the special skills that their kids just having those conversations with them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this family meeting with people and just the conversations. Then that that sparks with their children means that we go back in and end up changing their plan accordingly because one child says, Hey, wait a second, I never wanted to do that in the first place. Well, I’m not glad. And you know, I can remember our scenario, yeah, where my mom had my former sister in law initially because they were good friends and they were close up in my hometown. They she appointed her power of attorney, but then my mom lived with down in Lynwood with me, and so I had all the responsibility and no authority, right, which is which makes you first. You don’t do a job with both of your hands tied behind your back. Yeah, until finally I had to say to her, mom, I love you to pieces, I will, but here’s the thing, I cannot do this without you changing things. And and it was really hard because it caused a riff in the family because, you know, my former sister in law was going, well, wait a minute, why are you taking this away from me? Because it’s not working. So there was the fight, you know, and I was just trying to do right by my mom, right. So those are things I think too, and it’s also honoring the values of your loved one. I think that you know, when you really come down to it. I know when my mom was on Medicaid, she only got like fifty nine dollars a month or some ridiculous amount of money. But you know what I help supplement her with. I threw her a couple hundred bucks every month, but we would go out to dinner. And whenever we went out to dinner, it’s like, don’t ask me why, she insists and on paying, because it was important to her that she did the follow she wanted to do it. Well, my family just went crazy about why are you having your mother paid the bill? Because she wants to. It makes her feel good and and this is the difference between when we understand a little bit about, you know, how we’re working together as a family, to have somebody like you that gets everybody on the same page and say, you know, it’s important to my mom or your mother that she doesn’t feel like she’s a burden with your children, and these are some things that we need to talk about on what her values are. That is where you come in, which is so value, you know, so important with this whole process. It really is. It gives a voice to everyone, it gives a lost everyone in the family. Everyone can have their point of view, everybody can be heard, but at the end of the day we can make a decision and everybody falls in line behind that decision absolutely, and it does. It really helps bring about the best results. Because if if one of your main goals is to not to become a burden on your family, and by extension, that means that you do you don’t want your family to just start fighting like cats and dogs, having these conversations is the best way to achieve that. Absolutely. So, Phil tell us a little bit. You cover these things in your in your seminars. Absolutely, and so I have, on a monthly basis, I have these these free the tirement, retirement and a state planning seven arts. You can actually go to my website, wwwasa Legal Solutionscom, and we’ve got the list of them coming up there. But I do like I cover this and I cover a lot more on on basically how to change the way that you approach retirement planning, how to really approach retirement planning to give you and your family the best possible chance of having a successful retirement and put your family in a position and where they can succeed if they’re working for you, instead of putting it in a position where all they might have to quit their job, they might have to do something else in order to really help you and and just really one. You know, I always say when is it? When do you should you start creating an estate plan? I mean, are you? Is Anybody ever too young to do that? I think people should create their first estate plan when they first had children and then after children leave home, when you turn sixty five, you need to get another estate plan that then we’ll cover you through the retirement. Yeah, best way to approach it, obviously. And then the last thing. How often should your state plan be reviewed? I would say every three to five years. You should go in and you should see your attorney and you should talk about it, and that’s something if you have a good attorney, that would be part of the package that you signed up for in the beginning. I mean, every three to five years we can review what you have and make sure it’s still achieves all your goals perfect. And how do we reach you? You can reach me on my website at Wwwa Tionscom or over the phone at three six, Hud seven, four six, seventy, one hundred and sixty nine, and I am always available on zoom. Fabulous, and we’re going to come back. In this last segment we talked about what’s the failures are. Well, guess what we’re going to talk about now. How do you set up a successful retirement plan? And we are going to be right back right after this. – We at Answers for Elders thank you for listening. Did you know that you can discover hundreds of podcasts in our library on senior care? So visit our website and discover our decision guys. That will help you also navigate decision making. Find us at https://answersforelders.com/.