How Can I Sign Oregon Assignment of Partnership Interest

How can i document type sign assignment of partnership interest oregon

welcome thank you so much for joining us today during your lunch hour um we're looking forward to an introductory conversation about estate planning with john davis my name is mira wonder wheel i'm oregon tech's annual giving manager and one of my roles is that i have the wonderful opportunity of meeting with people who have decided to include oregon tech in their own estate plans and these two types of gifts truly do leave a lasting legacy that is in alignment with your own personal passion first i'd like to acknowledge my colleague becky burkeen alumni relations manager who has really led the preparations for this lunch and learn opportunity and and she's also providing tech support behind the scenes so thank you very much becky i do want to mention that we had originally planned to have a gene christian [Music] do this presentation today and unfortunately sadly gene is dealing with some health issues personally and he is unable to be here so please do join us in holding gene christian in your own thoughts and prayers before we get started just a little bit about our zoom process here we do sincerely apologize if we do have any technical difficulties but please do be rest assured that we are recording this presentation and it will be available afterwards in case you know there are any technical difficulties via zoom we're excited to have so many of you with us today um you are welcome to turn on your camera using the little camera icon at the bottom of your zoom box and we do ask that for the presentation portion you use the mic you do mute yourself and that's found with a little microphone icon at the bottom of the zoom box you are welcome and encouraged to use the chat feature throughout the presentation you can ask questions and i will be monitoring those questions if they get answered throughout the course of the talk then we won't include them in the q a but if they do not seem to get answered then i will ask them during the q a session a little zoom tip that i have learned is that you can right click on the video of the presenter for example and pin that person's video so that you will always be able to see it and that's kind of useful for a presentation type of zoom event like we're doing today so now without further ado i would like to introduce our speaker john davis who has agreed to step in and share his expertise with us today john davis is a business non-profit and estate planning attorney with lynch conger llp with offices in both bend and portland he helps individuals business owners and non-profit organizations reduce risk and plan for the future by creating wills succession plans complex family and business trusts and partnerships when not in the office john spends his time with his two sons william and charlie and his wife sarah john is an avid hiker golfer reader and can often be found watching and reading about f1 racing cars and things that go fast now that's something i just learned about john in getting the opportunity to share his bio with you john graduated first in his law school class at willamette university and was valedictorian he previously practiced in oregon and portland oregon at mc mcewen gisbold llp and schwab williamson and wyatt i have the pleasure of working with john in his role as vice president of the oregon tech foundation board of directors where he has served as a board member since 2017. john previously served as the state representative for house district 26 in the oregon legislature from 2013 to 2017 representing the communities of wilsonville sherwood kingwood hillsborough tigard beaverton and aloha in the legislature john was an integral member of the house revenue committee with jurisdiction over oregon's tax policy and vice chair of the transportation and economic development committee john earned his bachelor of arts summa laude from george fox university attended the university of oxford as a visiting student scholar and graduated from law school at willamette university summa laude john thank you again for agreeing to talk on such short notice before we turn it over to you i know that we have a poll set up to see where people are in their own estate planning journeys please go ahead and mark do you not have a plan yet knowing that you will create a plan soon you are in process of creating a plan you have a plan or yes you have a plan but you're planning to revise it looks like most people do not have a plan yet some of you are in process and some of you do have plans that's fantastic so let's go ahead and give this just a couple more seconds all right so predominantly most people do not have a plan so you're never too young to have a plan and i think uh john i will pass the proverbial microphone to you and um you can kind of keep this in mind as you're going through the conversation great well thank you so much mira and thank you rebecca for setting this up and inviting me to share with you today i would love to see you so that i'm not just looking at myself so i know some of you are eating lunch and doing other things but if you want to turn on your video it just makes it much more fun i think for these zoom meetings to be able to see each other so with that i'm going to talk for about 20 maybe 25 minutes about the estate planning process and then i'll be open to kind of taking questions and i love estate planning and i also love oregon tech and charitable estate planning as well so part of what i'll talk about at the end today is how do you incorporate maybe some charitable wishes into your estate plan in an effective way so that you can take care of both your family but also have high impact giving for charitable purposes so i like to start this whole thing about estate planning by talking about the different ways that assets are passed when we pass away because i know so often we default to thinking about well i need to have a will and i need to make sure my will is in place and that is true but there are actually four ways under the law that you can pass assets when you pass away and most of you already have some planning in place whether or not you know it the primary way that's most often used these days is simply joint ownership so if you're married or you have a child or a parent for example that you might have a joint account with by virtue of the fact that you have a joint bank account or you own a home together with that person or you have an investment account with another person owned jointly that is estate planning and it's estate planning because when you pass away or when your co-owner passes away by operation of law by the fact that you have joint ownership of that asset or that account a death certificate is presented either to the county or in the case of a bank or financial institution to that bank and then voila by operation of the law whoever is the survivor becomes the owner of that account and so i'm sure everybody or almost everybody on this call has some form of joint ownership and if you don't have joint ownership then it takes us to the next level which is beneficiary designation almost all of us here have some form of retirement account life insurance whether it's term life insurance or employer life insurance or whole life insurance a retirement account a 403 b some form of investment account for retirement or insurance those are actually contracts that you have with an insurance company or with an investment company and part of that contract is to manage your investments and make selections for the stocks bonds mutual funds etfs that you want to have or the type of insurance that will be provided but another part of that contract is the beneficiary designation and this is really important because your beneficiary designations because they are a matter of contract override whatever you put in your will or in your trust or in joint ownership so beneficiary designations that you have are going to override and control so much of the time i will meet with clients they'll come in and we'll have a beautifully designed plan and you know what the bolt of bulk of their assets are sitting in a retirement account i ask what's the beneficiary on this retirement account and they say i don't know i set it up years ago and i haven't looked at my beneficiary designations in 10 years and you'll put all this work and spend all this money on an estate plan and you people will not take the time to look at their beneficiary designation so those two pieces are very important to realize that whether or not you have a will or trust set up you already have an estate plan for your joint assets or for your assets that are controlled by a beneficiary designation and then we get to well what happens if it's not a joint asset or it doesn't have a beneficiary designation or that beneficiary has maybe passed away maybe you name a spouse or a parent as a beneficiary and that person when you die is no longer left that's when we get to the traditional way of passing assets which is a will or used more often these days a trust now much of what i'm going to share now is contained in the estate planning guide that you should have received in your email today or in the previous day which is a helpful kind of 20 page guide which will go over some of the things that we talk about today now i'm not going to go through it point by point because when i have a document in front of me what happens is i start reading the document instead of listening to what the presenter is talking about but you don't have to remember every single thing we talk about today you can refer to this resource guide because it will cover many of the things i talk about and more because it is 20 pages and i'm not going to talk through 20 pages of material today and then i'll also talk about some of the other resources that have been attached to the email but the first thing that you'll notice in the resource guide is what is the estate planning process and what is having the will so the estate planning process is really you sitting down with your significant other or your family and setting priorities for number one who you want to manage your assets when you're no longer able and there's two aspects of that who would you want to manage your assets if you passed away and who would you want to manage your assets if you became incapacitated or could no longer care for yourself that's a key question so who's managing your assets who has the checkbook if you are no longer around to write those checks and to make those decisions so part of the prime priorities of making an estate plan is really it's all about people who is going to be there to care for you and to care for your assets when you're not available and you're not around also part of the process that you would work with usually with an attorney is to collect and inventory all the things you own so i just talked about bank accounts property that you may own investment accounts life insurance sitting down and inventorying everything you own and making sure that all of those pieces of your estate all those assets are aligned according to your wishes and then it is taking the plan the priorities that you've talked about who you wanted to make want to manage your assets and setting priority priorities for who you want to take care of with those assets after you're gone spouse kids and charity gathering all the information the inventory of assets the inventory of what you own your contracts your life insurance and then sitting down with a professional and implementing and drafting those plans that's kind of the process that we go through now i talked about accounts that you have that may be joint titled joint ownership and i talked about life insurance and retirement accounts that are controlled by beneficiary designations once you and your spouse are gone or once you have an asset that's not uh joint ownership that's when the will comes into play so most often we're dealing with folks who maybe have a beneficiary designation on the retirement account maybe they have even a beneficiary designation or a transfer on death designation on their bank account but then we get to property property is kind of the prime asset that's often controlled either by a will or a trust and a will in order to be effective and to transfer assets has to go through the probate process in oregon and probate process is the process by which whoever you name in your will is the executor and an oregon executor is called a personal representative takes your will takes your death certificate as well submits it to the court usually in the county in which you passed away and then go through the court mandated and overseen process of transferring the assets and that process is rigorous in the sense that the court oversees each part of it with the executor the personal representative the court oversees the inventory you have to provide an inventory of assets to the court and say this is what the deceased person owns that's not controlled by a beneficiary designation or joint ownership these are the probate assets number two is you have to take steps as the executor or whoever you name is the executor because you're gone has to go through the process of collecting all the debts and paying identifying all the creditors all the debts that are outstanding from the deceased person and paying those debts the executors also required to pay taxes because once you we all die in the middle of the year uh even if it's on january 1st we owe taxes for the year in which we died so the executor has to make sure the final tax return is paid for both the last year if there hasn't been a return for the previous year filed and for the year in which you passed away and then the executive will talk about this a little bit more later the executor has to make sure that any estate taxes are paid and in oregon we do have an estate tax and i'll talk about what that process looks like and once all those pieces are done once the will has been submitted the death certificate has been submitted all the family and errors have been notified all the creditors have been notified there has to be a publication in a newspaper once creditors have been paid once taxes have been paid once all of those steps are done then the court will authorize the executor to make the distribution to the heirs or to the they're called devisees isn't that a great name under oregon law we i like to think of them as beneficiaries that's usually the term we use more often now the beneficiaries set forth in the will the court then authorizes the executor to distribute the assets and so what we want is for all the different tools in your estate plan to work together correctly what we don't want is for you to have wishes set forth in your will that are different from the beneficiary designations that you have set forth in your retirement account these days the primary assets that americans have are retirement assets life insurance and the homes and guess what all three of those things are all are governed by different documents usually when it comes to who the beneficiaries are the life insurance contract is going to be governed by the beneficiary designation your retirement account your 401k or 403b or ira are going to be controlled by the beneficiary designation not by your will and then all your other assets that don't go through beneficiary designation are typically controlled by your will now is there a way to bypass the probate process the answer is yes and the answer there is to use something called a revocable living trust you may have heard of it called a trust or a revocable living trust or a living trust or a family trust it goes by different names but the process with the trust is that you in advance you draft a document a trust document with your attorney that looks a lot like a will it talks about your family it talks about who you want to be your trustee which is the word we use in the trust context for an executor who will manage those assets collect those assets pay final debts and then make the distributions that you have set forth in your trust so you'll have your family your trustee and your beneficiaries all need and this document by creating it in advance and then taking steps to place assets in your trust either by re-titling your home in your real estate n the name of the trust putting your bank accounts and investment accounts in the name of the trust or aligning your beneficiary designations on your life insurance and your retirement account to flow through the trust what happens is because the trust is in existence and funded when you're still alive the moment you become incapacitated or when you die the trustee who you ever whoever you have named as the successor to you because you have complete control of your assets when you're alive but whoever you've named as that trustee that successor the day after you pass away or when you become incapacitated they are empowered under the law to take control of your assets pay those debtors and make the distributions to your beneficiaries without having to go through the probate process and oregon has a trust code that governs the duties and the responsibilities of the trustees which are very similar they're a fiduciary just like a executor in court courts can get involved if there's a trust dispute or if you need to deal with certain creditors so there is a process that is overseen if necessary by a court although the goal is usually to avoid the 6 to 12 month process that a probate requires by making the administration quicker and less expensive with the trust so in summary i know i've been talking for quite some time about the ways you transfer assets but there's four ways when you die number one joint ownership with somebody else a spouse a loved one a parent joint ownership beneficiary designation life insurance and retirement accounts primarily and sometimes investment accounts a will for your assets that aren't covered by the first two a will is used and then a power and then a trust if you want to avoid the probate process and the reality is even though in my practice i tend to recommend trusts more often because i've had experience probating estates and i have a lot of experience administering trust with clients and i find that in nearly every case my clients especially surviving spouses surviving family members prefer the ease of administration with the trust the reality is you're going to find some differences as you talk with attorneys and if you meet with an attorney and as you talk with practitioners some people just have a preference for the probate process and some people have a preference for a trust and you can do all the same things with either a will or a trust you'll often hear oh i need to set up a trust for fancy tax planning and while i do believe it's easier to make some of these tax elections that that can be made with a revocable trust with a living trust it is still possible to have all the same fanciness and tax planning with the will in fact i have some of my largest clients who have some of the largest estates and they just said john we just prefer to have it overseen by the court and that's fine and i've talked to them for years about the differences with a trust for the state but you'll find attorneys and you'll find financial advisors and you'll find other people in our industry who have differing views on whether or not a will or a trust is the right thing now you think okay great i've got my beneficiary designations lined up i've got my joint ownership or my ownership of my accounts lined up i've got my will in place i've got a trust maybe i've got everything i need right well the paper continues there's other documents that i recommend that everybody have as part of their estate plan one of those that you're probably familiar with is the power of attorney and a power of attorney is used to give somebody else oftentimes a spouse or a loved one authority to act for you with respect to financial matters your bank accounts retirement accounts etc if you become incapacitated that's a key thing to understand a will or a trust will control when you die a power of attorney is only effective while you're alive i can if i had a nickel for every time i have a client new client come to me and said oh my parent died but i've got their power of attorney or banks see this all the time people walk in and a loved one has been lost and the successor walks in and said well i've got the power of attorney and as soon as somebody passes away a power of attorney is no longer effective so a power of attorney is good while somebody's alive while they're incapacitated while they're in surgery if they're in a care home or a nursing home can't manage their own finances the power of attorney is effective to allow somebody else to manage funds and there's a limited power of attorney or a general power of attorney so sometimes and you'd probably experience this you may have an elderly parent you may have a loved one who wants to give you access to a bank account but not all of their assets and you'll often have banks they'll have you sign a limited power of attorney and that gives you access over the single asset that is described in that limited power of attorney when you come in and do an estate plan with me and with most um estate planning practitioners or if you use legal zoom or rocket lawyer online or something like that you will almost always get a general durable power of attorney and a general power of attorney gives your agent whoever you name we often call that person the power of attorney but technically the legal name is the agent under the power of attorney you're giving them general authority for all of your assets with that power of attorney so we think of the will is for after we're gone the power of attorneys when we're still alive i also have all my clients sign an advance directive and medical power of attorney because the general power of attorney typically covers financial matters but not medical so oregon has a form of advanced directive and medical power of attorney where you can designate who can control your health care decisions if you're no longer able to make those decisions decisions yourself so number one it gives somebody else authority that is health care decision and then number two it allows you to select your preference for life-sustaining treatment tube fainting and end of life care if you're in any of those situations where you might be in a coma where you're unconscious and won't live a long time do you want to be sustained on life support in tube feeding or is your personal moral preference to not be kept alive in those situations and so there's a detailed questionnaire that goes with oregon's advanced directive and medical power of attorney so as you're thinking about what are the documents that i might need as part of my estate plan you're going to want number one you're going to want to look at your account ownerships and your beneficiary designations be sure to check those number two you're going to want a will or a trust number three you're going to want a financial general durable power of attorney before you're going to want a medical power of attorney or an advanced directive um you'll often hear that referred to as a living will other states call a living will oregon calls an advanced directive i call it an advanced directive and medical power of attorney so we're covering with your medical power attorney while you're still alive with your general durable power of attorney your financial matters while you're still alive with your will or your trust you're covering what happens to your assets when you're gone and then we want to answer the question what happens to you and your body you can select ahead of time through the documents and one of which we've provided to you already in the packet a disposition of remains and your wishes for where you want to be buried so you can specify in advance whether you prefer burial or cremation or don't have a preference you can specify where you want to be laid to rest and then you can also specify who you designate as the authorized person to take care of your body and your remains so we're trying to cover in a comprehensive estate plan while you're alive and well what happens if you become incapacitated and what happens after you die and i want to direct you rebecca's got pulled up a attachment that you should have received called the my final wishes plan it's about a one uh the largest largest attachment that was set to your email but this includes all the bells and whistles you could ever want when it comes to planning in advance for your burial your funeral and the disposition of your body and this goes in as much detail as you want to get you don't have to fill all the sap in fact most of my clients don't fill all this out but some of them do you can designate your funeral and your burial arrangements you can designate whether you prefer organ donation you can designate the disposition of your body and your remains as i just talked about you can designate where you want to be buried what you want your grave marker to look like um your casket and vault selections uh the preparation of your body the flowers the music the obituary information as much as you would like to designate for your family you can use and this is a very helpful document because you can fill this out in advance of meeting with a professional or an attorney and this will be a really effective document for your family i just lost my father last year for example he passed away at 85 in november had a wonderful life wonderful practice as a as a professor and a psychologist but you know my dad could just never make a decision when it came to where some of his stuff was gonna go and where his body was gonna go so we knew he wanted to be cremated so dad was cremated and then it took us until august of this year to decide where we're gonna bury him because he had a couple options out there you know and i in retrospect you know this is what i do but i would have preferred that my dad just be very clear it would have been a gift to his family if he had just said here's where i'm going to be buried and here's how i want it to look and maybe here's what i want on my grave marker now people have different perspectives on how much they want to plan ahead for that sort of thing but if you would like to provide that i really see it as a gift to your family and then that gets to what about your tangible personal property so i've been talking about you know the big assets right the house and the retirement account and your investment accounts but you've got your stuff you've got the things in your household you have um you know the jewelry the family heirlooms well under any well-drafted will or trust you will have the ability to use a separate document called the distribution of tangible personal property which is pulled up on the screen right now and you can use a document like this to ahead of time designate who you want to receive particular items of personal property and this is different because you may want for example your children or loved ones to receive the bulk of your assets but you've got cousins friends other family members who you want to receive that piece of artwork or you know that piece of jewelry whatever it may be you can designate specifically without having to go into your will or into your trust and change it every time you want to make changes to the distribution of personal property you can use this separate document and make changes to it i will say that there's myriad of stories even from my own family losing my dad my one of my sisters just swears that dad told her she could have this watch one my dad was a watch guy so he had like 10 watches right she just swears that dad said um you know i can have this watch well we can't find the watch we don't know where it is right so there's just constantly one of those nagging things with my family of there's the watch gene christian tells a great story which is a little bit tragic right of his father passing away and he has two other siblings and his dad passed away with almost no assets and was left with basically a pickup truck um a gun in the back a shotgun uh a jewelry and a piece of jewelry which was uh a a necklace right from from his wife and from gene and the sibling's mom and you know what there was nothing in gene's dad's truck that said anything about who gets what so gene worked with actually the sheriff's deputy was there and found his father to get the truck sold get the tools in the back distributed get the gun sent off and then gene made a decision which of his sisters was going to get the piece of jewelry and gene tells the story that to this day the sister who didn't get the piece of jewelry is mad at gene for giving it to the other sister right so we often think oh well the rest of the family can decide who gets my stuff but these are the sorts of things that really are a gift to your family if you can decide where you'd like to be buried how you'd like to be laid to rest and then what happens with your important personal property right the valuable jewelry the mementos in the family that mean a lot i really see it as a gift to family and when it's well laid out and when it's taken care of in advance and go through this process and take this time it really is a gift to your family that's what i've seen uh in my practice now speaking of gifts the estate planning process is also one of the most powerful ways to make a charitable gift and it is for a couple of reasons taxes and because of the impact that it can have so i mentioned that i would talk about the oregon estate tax the oregon is one of a minority of states now that still has an estate tax oregon the state tax kicks in at all assets that you own of any type including retirement accounts life insurance value of your home all bank accounts you have and the stuff you have everything you have it's aggregated together and added up and if you're in oregon oregon does the wonderful thing they actually add up the value of everything you own anywhere in the world that means even if you have a vacation house or a piece of property in another state they count that to get to the one million dollar exemption so oregon taxes everything above one million dollars and again that's the value of retirement accounts everything unless you've used a fancy estate planning technique with an irrevocable trust or you've gifted assets to your family while you're live everything is considered included in your state so oregon's estate tax kicks in at one million dollars some of you may be in washington uh washington's estate tax kicks in i believe it's 2.2 million now it's adjusted for inflation each year oregon's is not congested for inflation and everything you own above those exemption levels and i'll just talk about oregon is subject to an estate tax oregon's estate tax talk starts at 10 and ratchets up every half million dollars to a maximum rate of 16 so if you think about everything added together and someone have retirement accounts life insurance payable the value of their homes et cetera et cetera et cetera um all that added up to say two million dollars you would have one million dollars exempt from the estate tax and you'd have one million dollars subject to the estate tax the estate tax rate would be 10 on that million dollars and so there'd be a hundred thousand dollar estate tax bill and so that's why i use this as a transition to talk about charitable giving can be one of the most powerful things you do when you pass away first of all you've taken care of yourself and probably your family uh during your life and this is an opportunity to leave a legacy whether it's with oregon tech or with any other charitable institution so for the impact it makes it's tremendous and i've seen the impact in working with many of my clients who are charities i work with a lot of charities we're working with oregon tech foundation of course so think of number one the impact that you can have number two the tax benefits whatever you give to charity when you pass away is carved off of that estate tax so let's say you have in oregon uh a two million dollar estate you pass away you give away a million dollars to charity and a million dollars to family the million dollars you give to charity is taken off of your estate size and you have no estate tax due at all because you only have the only million dollars that's going to family members is subject to the estate tax so it's a great way to reduce an possible estate tax burden when it comes to retirement accounts i'll circle back to kind of one of the things i started talking about one of the most powerful things you can do is to do charitable giving with your retirement account because most of our retirement accounts unless they're a roth ira have not been taxed there it's an ira a traditional ira it's a 403 b it's a 401k and those funds have not yet been subject to income tax and for those of you who experience required minimum distributions as you take out money from their retirement account it's subject to income tax that's not so if you designate a charity as a partial or a full beneficiary of the retirement account whatever you designate to charity you get two tax benefits one the charity gets the entire amount tax-free because the charity is income tax exempt so if you have a hundred thousand dollar retirement account you give a hundred thousand dollar you give 100 um of that to charity the charity is going to get the full 100 000 they will not take deductions for income tax so that's benefit number one number two if you name a retirement account to a charity that's deducted from your gross estate for purposes of calculating the estate tax so that's why it's like a real double tax benefit now i've got clients who say well you know i really want to make a charitable impact but you know i'm not comfortable giving a huge amount for my entire retirement account or a big chunk of my assets to charities so are there other vehicles and you may have heard of things like charitable gift annuities or charitable remainder trusts i think the charitable remainder trust is one of the coolest high impact estate planning and charitable devices that we have now so a couple things to preface it one is that because of a change in federal law on january 1st of this year your beneficiaries who receive a retirement account unless they're your spouse or a couple other designated lists they have 10 years to take out your retirement account so if you saved over the years and you have a 500 000 or a million dollar retirement account what it means and let's say you have one child and you designate that child as the beneficiary that child has 10 years to take all the money out of that retirement account which means that they cannot spread it out over their lifetime like we used to be able to so that means their taxable income is going to increase substantially each year that they take distributions so one technique is to use what we call the give it twice plan and this is a charitable remainder trust in which you place your retirement assets and it doesn't have to be retirement assets it can be a home it could be an investment account it could be a bank account it could be any other sort of asset you can put any assets you want in a charitable remainder trust you put it in a charitable remainder trust and in that document which can be in your will or in your trust you say i want my family to receive income from this charitable trust for a term of years and you can set that term of years as at five years up to 20 years or if you name an individual you can do their lifetime so you can say i want my child to receive a percentage of income every single year from this charitable major trust for their entire lifetime or maybe you just say it's 15 years so i've got a number of clients who say uh you know my kids are adults or they'll be adults by the time they inherit but you know i want to help charity i want to help them so i'm going to give it twice by naming a charitable major trust for my retirement plan my kids will get distributions of income from that charitable remainder trust for call it 15 years or 10 years so they'll get it once because if you look at the current actuarial rates on charitable remainder trusts you know might be a six or seven percent payout each year to that beneficiary and if you look at how much they would get over the 15 years they're going to receive the full amount so you've given it once to your family and then here's where the term remainder comes charitable remainder trust says that at the end of that term of years whatever is left in the account will go to charity well under current investment return conditions you know most investment advisors say are saying yeah we could get five to ten percent or maybe a seven percent rate of return six to eight percent rate of return in a charitable remainder trust that'll pay out every single year to your family and guess what the entire balance the entire corpus that you originally put in there with a reasonable investment return will still be there at the end and that remainder can go to charity that has a couple of benefits number one is you can stretch out the distributions to your kids over more than 10 years so it could be for the rest of their lifetime so number one is you're able to stretch out the tax burden for your kids receiving distributions from that charitable remainder trust number two you're making a high impact gift to charity because at the end of that 10 15 or 20 years whenever the payments end to your family they'll go to your charity of choice so it's a powerful device where you can still give to family and you can still provide for charity so i have been talking for a long time i hope that what i've shared is helpful but i hope that you have maybe some questions at this point and i think mira you're gonna feel some of those questions yes so unfortunately thank you so much john what a wealth of information you just provided us all i really appreciate it i do have one question but unfortunately our chat feature doesn't seem to be live here so what we're going to ask folks to do is if you have a question at this point click the participants box at the bottom of your zoom screen there's a little box that says participants if you click that then a an additional box will show and you can raise your hand and then i will call on you to uh ask a question and then that way hopefully we won't get like multiple people unmuting and trying to ask questions at the same time but while we're letting folks raise their hand i do have a question here at what point do you really suggest that people individuals you know contract with an attorney to set up an estate plan versus you know kind of trying to do it themselves with the diy you know online service or something like that is it do you have like a dollar amount and age what would you recommend it's a great question and some of it is personal preference of course um some folks are diy folks and they want to have it done i will say in nearly 100 of the cases when i have clients who come in who did illegal zoom will or trust or did a rocket player will or trust it's almost always not signed correctly so so a word of caution that if you do your own documents with legalzoom or rocket lawyer or an online provider you need to have your documents notarized plus two witnesses so in oregon to have a will correctly executed and available to submit to court you have to have it notarized and witnessed by two additional people which means that if it's you and a spouse you're going to be sitting there with a notary and two other witnesses to sign things correctly that's usually the missing piece where clients who try to do it themselves you know haven't been successful what i would say is if it's feeling cost prohibited to see a professional because i get it we're expensive it's not cheap lawyers are terrible right i'm the first guy to admit that i'm a lawyer get your documents done just do it yourself it's better to have something than to have nothing and remember to please work with your financial advisor to coordinate your beneficiary designations on your retirement accounts and your life insurance so just get it done and coordinate your beneficiary designations that's my first piece of advice um in terms of you know when is the right time if you think to work with a professional i i would recommend as your kids maybe get older get closer to graduating um as you've built up more substantial assets if you own property um if your retirement account your investments accounts are getting larger that it's a good idea to at least have a conversation with an attorney about whether or not you've got the documents in place that you want of course i'm a little biased i loved it if everybody who wanted an estate plan would come see an attorney i realize that's not practical and that's not the reality of the world so i just want to encourage people to get your documents done whether or not it's with me or with another attorney or online and um my sense is that if you really do take the time to thoughtfully go through the you know printed materials and you know get your ducks in a row as far as what your wishes are that that can actually help reduce the expense of an attorney because you've already gone through so much of the process in preparation yeah that's a great point and for if you're looking for an attorney to meet with a couple of resources i have i am part of a network called wealth council and you can go to estate planning.com and just type in where you live and it will provide members of of the network that i'm a part of who are in your community where you live and who are near where you live and for example i really like only charging flat fees when it comes to estate planning so that clients know when you come in how much you're going to pay i do a lot of work by the billable hour for business and non-profit stuff where i can't really predict how long it's going to take but the estate planning process is pretty well designed to go for a flat fee so my recommendation is as you call around as you email attorneys as you look for professionals ask them do they do it flat fee thank you john okay i see that james monroe has his hand up so james why don't you go ahead hello oregon tech board member james monroe ladies and gentlemen hey so so you brought up another quick question but i actually have a twofold question for you before that um can you touch on real quick the difference in cost between the probate process real quick and hiring an estate planning attorney because i know it's quite different it's a lot less expensive to do it ahead of time right that's a great point so the in addition to the time i mentioned that it takes six to 12 months to go through a probate process with the court in oregon you have to use an attorney in the probate process they the courts basically require it now and that even for a very very simple estate is five to ten thousand dollars of attorney's fees if it's a more complex estate it's going to be more than ten thousand dollars that's another reason uh for my clients it really isn't any more expensive to set up a revocable trust in advance compared with doing wills it's almost the same amount of work for us now it includes a lot of the same information so you'll maybe do a little more work maybe spend a little bit more money doing a trust up front but you're going to save because your family doesn't have to go through court and doesn't necessarily have to hire an attorney to administer the trust on the back end although usually i do recommend clients when they've lost a loved one that they um they at least call and have an initial meeting with an attorney to just get to know the trust administration process but i found that it's usually about a quarter of the cost um sometimes much less of going through a full probate and then and then my my my question before you brought that one up in my head um you you had talked about when to sort of get a trust when to get that stuff lined up so take my example um i have a one and a three year old if something happened to my wife and i we went out to dinner got in a car accident died how does the state if not pre-set up deal with the carrying of our children and those things yeah great question so as part of the estate plan of course we would designate who the guardians would be if you don't designate that or you don't have your documents set up for your kids then the court your local court and dhs would make a determination in the best interest of the child of who would be the legal guardian for those children but when it comes to your assets this is another piece that's important the default plan if you don't have a will or trash setup is that your kids get access to all your assets at age 18 and most people don't want their 18 year old to get their full life insurance their ownership of their house bank accounts et cetera et cetera what they want is to have those assets held in trust or held and managed by somebody else for their kids for a much longer period of time until their kids are more mature great questions and i see lee han tan has hand raised so go ahead and ask your question um my question is what is the legal age for uh for my kids to be the power attorney or the executor is it 18 or 21 what does it need to be that's a great question um the legal age is 18 so your kids can own assets they can serve as a personal representative as an executor or a trustee at age 18 i typically don't recommend that you name a child in that age bracket to be in that role unless they're extremely mature for being an 18 year old so i recommend a couple things the best in my opinion the best possible trustees if you've got that friend who's an accountant who knows your kids really well and you trust them implicitly with your money that's a great choice if you have a family friend who's really good with finances who knows the family if that is not an option if you don't have somebody who's in a role like that you can look to name a professional trustee whether it's a bank or a trust company or there are individuals out there who will serve as trustees and executors and they're usually a little less expensive than having to name a trust company or a bank okay thank you so at this point there are no additional hands raised that i see is there any final question before we close out james one last question real quick john um at what point should somebody put their trust as the beneficiary for their assets for their life insurance for their annuities for things like that um i come across a lot and have had a few different answers so in your opinion what at what point should the trust then be named the beneficiary for all that stuff boy that's such a good question james because um i'll give you the lawyer answer that we love which is it depends uh a lot of it depends on if it's a first or second marriage situation because usually i will recommend that the spouse be named as the primary beneficiary still it's a married couple on a retirement account but sometimes not sometimes if you want to provide protections against remarriage and if that so a spouse remarried they could give that account or that money to a new spouse or somebody else and not direct directed to the kids when they pass away if there's a concern about that clients will name the trust as the primary beneficiary life insurance i almost always like to have that unless it's a small policy but if you have a term policy that's 500 000 or a million dollars life insurance is a great asset to flow through the trust for a couple of reasons number one is it becomes the easiest most fungible tool to use to fund what we call the credit shelter to preserve the deceased spouse's million dollar estate tax exemption which is a little beyond the scope of what we're talking about today but so i would leave it at it depends thank you for those excellent questions and um answers john and thank you so much again for taking the time to be with us during our lunch hour and for your service on the foundation board you're just a wealth of information and we truly do appreciate you well thank you for joining us i really am just um so pleased to see how many people join this webinar today i hope it's been informative and i hope to get to meet some of you wonderful thank you all have a wonderful day