Help me with industry sign banking colorado document myself
I'm Pat peacock i'm here today to present the protecting yourself and your family portion of financially fit aging for you and your parents we have experience in these areas but do not profess to be experts we want to provide an overview that gets people thinking about these issues and topics and having conversations about them as well as to provide direction to gain further knowledge information and resources we're going to use we're going to go through two pieces the what to do will you're still alive what to do after you're dead so protection during incapacity that's during your lifetime protection for your family after year after your passing so when you're incapacitated you need somebody to take care of your financial affairs and one way to do that is with a durable power of attorney it needs to be durable so that it continues on after your incapacity you set up the power of attorney you have an agent who's going to act for you you can set that up so that the agent can act for you now whenever or you can set it up so the agent can only act for you after a certain thing happened so for instance it won't become workable until or valid until you are actually incapacitated there have been some recent changes in Colorado two powers of attorney so if your document is older than january first 2010 you definitely need to have it reviewed by an attorney but you should review your documents about every five years anyway so either way it's time to take a look at your power of attorney if you already have one the other thing if you're incapacitated that you're going to need is someone to make medical decisions for you and that's the medical power of attorney there are two pieces really to an advanced directive advanced health care directive the medical power of attorney and then what's known as the living will so some lawyers will put the medical power of attorney and the financial power of attorney into one document and others will make them two separate documents you don't have to have the same person as agent for both you can have one person taking care of your money in another person deciding your medical decisions so a good medical power of attorney your agent has access to your medical records they can make decisions including the DNR that do not resuscitate order again this is this is a little older so hopefully there's not a lot of these out there but if your medical power of attorney is older than january first 2005 it should be reviewed to make sure you have appropriate hip a language in it otherwise parts of the older ones are not necessarily being honored depending on the institution this also gives the agent some post-mortem authority like getting you buried or cremated the living will only applies if you're on terminal or in a persistent vegetative state and this document gives your agent the authority or the power to direct pain medication nutrition and hydration and this is one where you can kind of check the box a lot of them have a check the box I want to be fed for 10 days three months not at all if something happens so those are all things to think about before you go to the lawyer to get these there are you can go out on the internet and get pro forma documents but I do not recommend doing that because everybody's situation is different and if you go to an attorney to have your will or you trust updated they usually automatically take a look at your powers of attorney to see if they also need an update so that covers the living part of the port of the program now once you pass you want your assets to go where you want your assets to go there are several different ways of transferring title on assets after you die one is joint on tenancy with right of survivorship so joint ownership one is through beneficiary designation one is through a will and you can also transfer property through a trust here's the thing about joint tenancy with right of survivorship it by operation of law if one party dies the other party automatically becomes the full owner if you've got to two parties here that supersedes the will so anything that's in joint tenancy will not pass through your will so what I've seen happen is people get these elaborate really great estate plans have everything in place somebody honest to goodness at a cocktail party says to them you know if you put everything in joint tenancy you can avoid probate they run around and put everything into a tenancy with their spouse and so they have totally blown their estate plan so if your financial situation is complicated enough that avoiding probate is important there are other ways to do it and still have your estate plan work and we'll get to that in a minute the other thing about joint ownership joint tenancy is if you are a joint tenant with a someone who's not your spouse you could have a taxable gift and so what happens is somebody will put their child their adult child on their checking account as a joint tenant instead of using a power of attorney that child as a joint tenant has the same rights you did that means they can withdraw the whole account constructive receipt it becomes a taxable gifts so before you do anything like that you want to see if that's going to be an issue in in your state another way property passes as beneficiary designations most of the time you see these online life insurance policies and retirement plans like 401 k's on pensions with a surviving spouse or for our IRA sorry or IRAs you can also sort of have a beneficiary designation on your bank accounts in your brokerage accounts by using the p.o.d and the Tod which is pay on death or transfer on death but again these are things that supersede the will so anything you set up with a beneficiary designation or a pay on death designation is not going to pass under your will and under your estate plan is going to go directly to whoever you've named so you just need to remember that the other thing I would say about beneficiary designations is you should when you every five years while you're checking your documents or more often if necessary check your beneficiary designations I've seen cases where the company went through a computer upgrade and the beneficiary designations were wiped out so you want to make sure they're still they are just as a matter of good planning really especially like on an IRA account if there's no beneficiary it's going to go through your will so you have an IRA account it will have to be probated and you lose the benefit of the tax benefit of stretching that IRA to a person's lifetime and you're stuck with a five year if it has to go through your estate you're stuck with having to pull that IRA out within five years if that's most of the estate you're going to have big chunks of taxable income with not a lot of control over when you receive it if you don't have that proper beneficiary designation so talk to your attorney and talk to your tax advisor if you're not your own tax advisor a will is a legal document it's governed by state law so if you've moved from another state and your documents were made in that state if you plan to die in Colorado you should have your attorney look over the document to make sure it will still do in Colorado what you wanted it to do usually the biggest differences are if you're going from a community property state to a non community property state or vice versa the whole the property passing under will has to be probated the whole purpose of probate is just to change the title so it's sort of an orderly process to move assets from the decedent to whoever they should be moved to if you have a will than you get to say who they go to if you don't have a will then the state of Colorado says who they get to go to the person who carries out the terms of your will is called an executor or personal representative in Colorado it's a personal representative some states still use executor you can also use a revocable trust to transfer assets there are a lot of different kinds of trust but for our purposes today the only one we're going to talk about is revocable so the way it works is you have a will and what your will says is everything that I did not get into my trust during my lifetime put it there now so it's a pour-over will and so all of your assets are gathered into the trust and in the terms of the trust determine who gets the assets it's set up during your lifetime you have a grant or also known as asset law or a trust or on transfers property to a trustee for the benefit of a beneficiary while you're alive and have capacity you can be the Grand Tour the trustee and the beneficiary you can play all three roles because this is a trust that you can change any time you want to you can revoke it anytime you want to and so for that reason the assets in a revocable trust are taxed back on your own tax return your own 1040 um at your death the assets in this trust would get a step-up in basis just as if you own them outright but this is a fairly complex area so we there are source that's where you can get more information but do talk to your legal advisor or whoever is helping you with your estate plan about whether a revocable trust is appropriate for you but it is one way to pass title one thing that a lot of people forget about is digital assets because we have they're just such a part of life anymore we don't even think about it we don't get paper statements anymore so if we were to die would somebody know where all of your accounts are would somebody be able to get into your computer to see your financial records would somebody be able to get into your house and get past your security system so those are passwords in access that you want two grand to somebody some way there are different ways of doing it you can make a list on a piece of paper with a pencil of all of your accounts and remembering all of your accounts can be a challenge too so you have a facebook account a Twitter account an Instagram account maybe you have cash left in paypal on that your personal representative would want to bring into your estate you have an account on iTunes where your music is all of those things Facebook the social media accounts all have different policies for what happens when someone dies and Facebook's actually been sued a couple of times for not releasing information but most of social media it's a license agreement and so you don't really own the account they get to control what happens so you want to check into that the easiest way is to give somebody make sure somebody can access you can I know what Facebook does is they will set the account so that nothing more can be posted to it but that people can go out and get photographs and that kind of thing which is what usually people want to do because everybody's photographs are now somewhere online as well the other things to think about to make sure your family is protected and if you have a partner you need to discuss these things with your partner is if you have minor children who will their Guardians be it's also a good idea once you make that decision to discuss it those people because they may not want to a lot of people don't it's a surprise guess what you're getting three kids um who should take care of these affairs for you if you're incapacitated if you are um deceased who should be your personal representative so that's the person who settles your state who should be your trusty that's a person who's going to have ongoing responsibility if you have set up a trust or if your will creates a trust should you trust trustee be an individual like a family member or professional there are private fiduciaries I've seen both attorneys and CPAs be trustees for clients on corporate trustees which are usually bank trust departments the advantage to that is they don't die they're still they are the disadvantages they don't know your family so another thing to discuss with your legal advisor as you're setting these things up whom would be your final errors if there were nobody left to inherit who should the money go to your heirs at law which would go down to like second cousins or a charity that's something to think about and if you have charitable intent if you want to make sure your charitable your favorite charity receives money at your death this is the time to think about that and how you want that to happen whether it's ongoing or one payment so these are all all the things that these are the questions you should be prepared to answer when you go to the lawyer's office so the last thing I would say is people don't want to talk about this people don't want to face their own mortality it's really difficult to get people to sit down and think about what they want to happen because then they have to think that they won't be there or that they will be incapacitated and it's scary but the thing is is that for CPA's clients see a CP a much more often than they see their attorney so if we can have those conversations with our clients and with our own families the best thing you can do for your family is have your affairs in order I've seen cases where young families that in one case the parents were killed in an automobile accident they left an 11 year old son and no will there were two million dollars in life insurance proceeds and then Social Security survivor benefits for the Son and the family the two sides of the family just went at each other who was going to be Guardian at this child because they thought they were going to get the money so you can save all of that you can save the rift in the family by having everything set up ahead of time there are some resources that will give you more in-depth information about what we've talked about today on the web or are there any questions I don't curiosity do you know when you say if you don't have a welcome place to state decides who gets it do you know if I assume you're some sort of process for that yeah it's called intestacy and who gets your who gets your money depends on what your situation is so in a situation where you have a married couple it's their only the children of the children are the children of that marriage there are no hitters and there's the spouse would inherit everything in a situation where you have a second spouse so you have children by your first marriage children by your second marriage and a new spouse then the statute determines so the spouse can get in that situation would get up to fifty percent of of the estate and when I say up to fifty percent depends on how long you've been married to that person determines how what percentage they get and then the talents would go to the children so guess yeah yeah yeahs anything that's outside you know the Leave It to Beaver ward in June kind of box is going to be fairly complicated so another reason to have a will so we sorry about probate is there some kind of dollar limit that people are under where the state doesn't have to get involved that's a really good question in the answer is yes there's a smallest state proceeding you still have to change title which is what the purpose of probate is but you don't have to go through a probate where you're filing reports probate requires you to file an inventory and in accounting for the estate and to send things to all of the heirs and so forth and you pretty much have to have an attorney to do probate because you do a pure before the court when you open it a probate and when you close it oh you can do non-appearance but you're going through the port on a small estate proceeding there's a form you can use it says this is the way it is you can fill that out and attach a death certificate and usually that would be sufficient so what happens is people may put all of their assets in a revocable trust because the trust doesn't go through probate but they keep the car out so you need to transfer title on that car you can take the smallest state affidavit the death certificate go to Motor Vehicles in um transfer the title does that answer yeah yeah as long as it's not real estate and it's under a certain amount and I think the current amount is 56,000 but don't quote me as it changes from time to time you mentioned there are several ways to transfer ownership are passed away you know beneficiaries or through well well what are the advantages of using beneficiar
es versus the will well if you use the will it has to go through probate unless you're under that amount that small state amount so there's a cost associated with that without probate or without the will if you have everything either a beneficiary designation or a joint tenancy then you don't you don't have an estate essentially because everything's going to pass directly to those people but remember somebody's going to have to pay your final bills so if you have more than one person getting your bank accounts who share who's going to write those checks you know that that sort of thing so the bills yeah yeah yeah that's a that's a really good point they do keep coming for a while so does that answer your question I do know a lot I've have seen people who have done it that way and its work the kids got along well enough to write the checks and pay the final bills but it doesn't always happen that way any other questions okay thank you