Your Spouse.
• The Third Quarter: Living with Your Living Trust after the Death of Your Spouse.
• The Fourth Quarter: Dying with Your Living Trust.
• Postgame: Review and Lessons Learned.
The big game begins the moment the concept of doing your Living Trust pops in your mind. That is when the whistle blows to start play. It ends when both you and your spouse have died and your Living Trust assets are in the hands of your children or other beneficiaries.
Between the beginning and end of the big game, though, there is a lot that happens.
• There is the selection of the Living Trust lawyer.
• There is the understanding of the nuts and bolts of the Living Trust document.
• There is the allocation of the assets – real estate, stocks, bank accounts, brokerage assets, businesses, personal effects – to the Living Trust.
• There is the operation and management of the Living Trust during the lifetimes of both you and your spouse.
• There is dealing with your Living Trust real estate when you sell or refinance that property.
• There is the selection of key players – the managers, agents, and protectors – upon which depends the success or failure of your Living Trust and your inheritance instructions.
• There is the operation and management of the Living Trust when the first spouse dies (the deceased spouse).
• There is the protection of the surviving spouse’s ownership and control of the Living Trust assets during that spouse’s incapacity or incompetence.
• There is the operation and management of the Living Trust when the last spouse (the surviving spouse) dies.
• There is the filing of the last spouse’s estate tax return and payment of estate taxes.
• There is the distribution of the Living Trust assets to your children without creating conflict and chaos between them.
• And there is the protection of your children’s Living Trust inheritance from the winds of their fates: their addictions, divorces, remarriages, mental disabilities, financial immaturity, and creditors.
It does not matter whether you have played the big game before or whether you already have your Living Trust. After you read The Living Trust Advisor playbook, you will know how to play the big game the way it should be played. If you follow my training and listen to my advice, I believe you will walk away from the big game a winner. In my book, winning means:
• Having a clearer understanding of your Living Trust.
• Opening your eyes to the numerous problems and issues in the inheritance arena that you must consider before your first meeting with your Living Trust lawyer.
• Maintaining ownership and control of your Living Trust assets while you and your spouse are both alive, and then after the death of one spouse.
• Facilitating the smooth transfer of your Living Trust assets to your children, grandchildren, and other heirs after your death.
• Identifying potential inheritance problem areas now so you have the opportunity to build solutions into your Living Trust in order to prevent those problems from arising during your life and after your death.
A Few Things You Should Know about My Coaching Style
Before I say something trite right now like “Let the big game begin!” I must first convey a few things you should know about my style of coaching in order to help you follow the instructions in this playbook.
Throughout this book, I will pepper you with numerous examples that illustrate a key point or demonstrate how you can do something. While many of these examples may be drawn from experiences with clients, others may provide you with an occasional glimpse into my personal life. Whether I allude to my business history, divorce, girlfriend, or likes and dislikes, I use these personal anecdotes as a device to support certain issues or emphasize particular concepts that arise in this book.
While I understand the viewpoint that divulging one’s personal anecdotes and professional experiences may be unprofessional, I have always disagreed with it. I believe that providing examples and sharing details that have arisen in my personal life and law practice bring this nonfiction book about estate planning alive and make the advice offered applicable to your life, too.
Therefore, you are not getting a technical lecture filled with charts, graphs, and PowerPoint slides within this book. Instead, you are receiving the advice and opinions of one attorney based on his observations and experiences – both professional and personal. With such a subjective approach, it is near impossible to convey effective lessons by keeping the private life out of the process.
I am fond of broad and superlative statements that appear to be intended to apply universally to every reader of this book. Of course, I know that for every person who embodies such an absolute, there is another person for whom that absolute does not apply. Nonetheless, in order to help convey information and emphasize a particular point, a statement must come across as somewhat dogmatic without reference to exceptions. Therefore, the sweeping generalization is a literary device I often employ in The Living Trust Advisor.
The Living Trust, family inheritance planning, and estate taxes involve complex personal and financial issues. But discussing these issues in a legal manner would ensure this book’s quick demise and bargain- basement status, as it would render the book a somewhat lackluster and uninteresting read. Moreover, if I used fancy legal jargon, I fear that many readers might not understand what I was saying. Therefore, I use nontechnical language to explain many technical concepts throughout this book. For example, the person whom you appoint to carry out your instructions after your death is called the successor trustee. In this book, I refer to that person as the after-death agent. Since your attorney might wonder what you are talking about if you mention appointing your after-death agent, I also supply the technical term.
At my seminars, there are two compliments that I can never get enough of. The first: “Gee, Mr. Condon, are you sure you’re a lawyer? I understood every word you said.” The second: “Mr. Condon, I never thought I would find myself laughing at a seminar on death and taxes. I was really entertained.”
I’m not using these comments to wow you into buying this book or attending my seminars. I’m just trying to show you that I have found success in using humor as the medicine to help folks digest this material more easily, and that this book follows suit with my usual comedic approach.
I have an absurd sense of humor, and this book is riddled with it. With a title like The Living Trust Advisor, you probably would not expect to find such a quality in an inheritance planning book. I am aware that some readers may not find it appropriate to address death-and-taxes-type matters with a comedic approach. However, I could not restrain myself, for two reasons. First, I just gotta be me. Second, approaching such a tedious subject as the Living Trust with humor simply makes that matter less tedious and, if I have my way, even entertaining.
This book is designed to identify situations, problems, and conflicts that arise in the establishment,
