is the beginning of your Living Trust training. Do you want to cross the goal line, spike that football, and revel in the roar of the crowd? Well, you know the drill. You first have to learn what a football is. To get to point Z, you must get to – and through – point A, which is getting you to understand what the Living Trust is, what it does, and how it works.
I wish I had the ability to get you through your Living Trust training in a 30-second workout montage, à la Rocky. But with this being real life, I can only offer you this mundane instruction: Turn the page and introduce yourself to the various components and players that make up your Living Trust.
CHAPTER 1
How You Established Your Living Trust Without a Clear Understanding of What It Is and How It Works
Or, You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know about Your Living Trust
Before your real Living Trust training begins in Chapter 2, I feel the need to address a point that is somewhat obvious, which I will state in your first person: “I already have a Living Trust. Why do I need your training session on the Living Trust when I have already received that information?”
In the Pregame Warm-Up, I made the bold and very broad assumption that you do not know much about your Living Trust, even if you have one. How did you react to such a presumptive assertion? Did you nod your head in recognition? Or did you fling this book across the room (or the bookstore) in disbelief and anger?
Let me tell you how I came to the assumption that you know very little, if anything at all, about your Living Trust, the document that your lawyer prepared, or you drafted yourself with LegalZoom and that you believe you already know all about.
What Does It All Mean?
I am an estate planning attorney. I am in the business of putting together inheritance plans. In the old days, you would have set forth your inheritance instructions in a will. Nowadays, those instructions will be set forth in a Living Trust. In effect, this makes me a Living Trust lawyer.
I learned this business from my father, Gerald M. Condon, who, in the early 1970s, was perhaps the first lawyer in the United States to conduct Living Trust seminars. This was a real homespun family operation. I manned the check-in table, my father gave the talk, and my mother made the brownies that the attendees devoured during the break.
About a decade after my father conducted his first seminar, Living Trust seminars became ubiquitous. They were seemingly everywhere, offered by attorneys, insurance companies, real estate firms, banks, and brokerage firms. You could not open your newspaper or mailbox without receiving a solicitation to attend one.
In the 1990s, the market for the Living Trust business had become farmed out. It was dog-eat-dog for the same potential pool of clients. Living Trusts became so cheap that reputable attorneys advertised their Living Trust services for as low as $499.
You get what you pay for in this world of ours, and the Living Trust consumer often experienced firsthand that old adage. Some Living Trust attorneys offered a good price, but at the expense of customer service. Practices became about volume. People never met the attorney who purportedly prepared their document. Instead, they saw paralegals who rushed them through the draft reviews. People felt like numbers instead of clients, and were too cowed by the manic process to ask questions. Ultimately, they signed their Living Trust without any meaningful understanding of the effect and function of the document and were politely shown the door. Next!
At his seminars, my father consistently gave what I believe, in my less-than-objective opinion, was the best presentation on the Living Trust since the world was a ball of molten lava. But the Living Trust world had changed, and we had to change with it. The client base for Living Trust business had been tapped out, and people were weary of being bombarded with flyers, advertisements, and seminar invitations for low-cost Living Trusts.
As a result, our Living Trust seminars became “Family Inheritance Planning” seminars. Instead of talking about Living Trust mechanics, we focused on the human side of inheritances, such as how your children can share an inheritance when they could not even share their toys, and how you can prevent your surviving spouse from losing control of her money and property if the children are grasping for an early inheritance. Eventually, this new emphasis on the human and personal element in the inheritance arena comprised the theme of the first book my father and I co-wrote in 1996, Beyond the Grave: The Right Way and the Wrong Way of Leaving Money to Your Children (and Others), which has since become the most widely distributed inheritance planning book in American publishing history.
In connection with the marketing of the book, my father and I appeared on more than 100 radio talk shows throughout the United States, where we answered hundreds of questions from listeners about a wide range of inheritance planning issues – from succession of the family business, to protecting a widow from her own children grasping for an early inheritance, to leaving money to the family dog. Yet, of all the questions asked by callers, 90 percent of them were about the basics of the Living Trust. What is it? How does it work? What does it do? Why should I have one? What happens to it after I die? Where should I keep it? Why does it have so many pages? Moreover, these questions were asked by callers who informed us that they have Living Trusts that were prepared by lawyers!
So.. consider presenting an inheritance planning seminar for your present and prospective clients with an experienced trusts and estates attorney as the guest speaker. By doing so, you will provide yourself with the opportunity to press the flesh and enhance your reputation as one who takes the time to make available information that the attendees will find absolutely invaluable.
I have been conducting Family Inheritance Planning seminars on my own for about 15 years. Although my style is certainly more freewheeling than my father’s horse-sense suffer-no-fools approach, I proudly walk in his footsteps to offer invaluable information about family inheritance planning to audiences around the country. And as they did years ago, folks come up to me after my talks with their Living Trusts in hand, pointing to certain pages and asking me, “What the hell does this mean?”
And if you think there is a lot of ignorance out there with lawyer-drafted Living Trusts, don’t get me started on the misconceptions and misinformation that arise in Living Trusts that are prepared without lawyers.
Too late! You got me started!
The Self-Drafted Living Trust – Don’t Do It!
This book’s title may have given you the impression that I am going to tell you how to establish your Living Trust on your own – without having to pay for a lawyer.
I hope I did not get your hopes up. This is not a “how to become your own lawyer” book. You would never consider being your own doctor. Why would you even think about being your own lawyer?
Certainly, taking the lawyer out of the process probably sounds pretty good to you. After all, if you are like most people, you have never before met with a lawyer, because, quite simply, you never had to. You have never been sued or divorced. You have never sued anyone. You have never been charged with a crime. You have not set up a corporation or partnership or engaged in a complex business transaction.
Indeed, you may have gone almost your entire life without the need to consult with a lawyer. I said “almost,” because now you face the prospect of an inheritance document that, while simple in concept, can be quite daunting to construct. If you have seen a Living Trust before, you have found that they are somewhat lengthy. In my office, the typical Living Trust is 50 pages long.
But even though your head says you need a lawyer to help you through the minefield, your heart may
