Sign Kentucky Banking Living Will Free

Industry sign banking kentucky living will free

so my name is mark rechman i'm a volunteer for the support group have been doing this for a while i am a probate and a state lawyer um i work at the law firm of wood and lamping been there 40 years this whole program developed as a result of work that i do with wkrc wkrc that's the radio station on on the am dial has a radio program called simply money it's a money show that is on at six o'clock in fact they're on right now um they're on for an hour every weekday and i'm what they call the legal correspondent which means that i come on and do a six or eight minute little piece every other tuesday uh on legal issues as they relate to money and uh some years ago when i bet it's been 10 years ago um i i did a program about putting your affairs in order because i got a call from a college roommate um old old friend of mine whose wife had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and she had been treated and had undergone a whole series of treatments the cancer went into remission for a short while and he was calling me because the cancer had returned and after meeting with the oncologist and the cancer doctor the doctor said to my buddy eric he said go home and put your affairs in order eric had no idea what that meant so he knew this that i'm an estate lawyer so he called me and said what does that mean and i put my recommendations to him in an email a link to email and when i mentioned this to one of the hosts over at simply money they said well let's take that email and turn it into a a radio a special program which we did [Music] and it was apparently helpful to some people because we had a number of calls and as a result of that i agreed to take the program over to the cancer support group and do a live presentation over there and they asked me back and they asked me back and now it's probably been 10 years so this is something we've been doing uh for for quite a while you should each have been you should have each received an email um yesterday or today with the outline that i will use it has the words legal primer at the top six steps to put your affairs in order and what we're going to do is really talk about the simple legal paperwork that is involved in this whole process of putting your final affairs in order and they really fall into two broad groups the first two steps are things you need to do to deal with issues legal issues that arise while you are alive and then the last four steps are things you need to think about related to what happens at your death um so let's start with number one and uh number one is the power of attorney for financial affairs a power of attorney is a phrase we use to describe what we call the law of agency an agent to someone who represents another person right the law of agency is the whole body of law that deals with how agents obtain the authority they have what authority do they have how do they exercise it the word attorney in fact means agent and so a power of attorney is a power of agency put simply it's a piece of paper that i sign that appoints someone to be my agent and that person my agent has authority that is described in that piece of paper and i can give that person a little bit of authority i can give them a moderate amount of authority or i can give them a very wide range of authority if i give them a limited amount of authority we call that a limited power of attorney also known as a special power of attorney which means that i appoint someone to do a single task or a small number of tasks probably the most common example of that is the power limited power of attorney that you can get when you go to the bmv by the way i was there today and had one of those lovely experiences where you wait half an hour in line and then find out you don't have that one piece of paper you need to get your project done but the bmv allows you to they have a little pink half a page piece of paper that you can fill out so that when you go to the bmv you can renew your plates for your spouse or for your kids you can do it all in one trip that little letter of authorization is in fact a power of attorney it's a limited power of attorney because it's limited to just affairs of the of the bmv for our purposes for the purposes of trying to assist someone facing a chronic or terminal illness a special power of attorney doesn't do us much good unless of course we have dozens of them so what we do instead is recommend the execution of a general power of attorney which is a broad scope of authorizations and these documents can be anywhere from two or three pages long the one we use at my law firm is has grown into about six pages and it includes everything from paying bills to defending lawsuits to filing lawsuits to trade buying and selling stock opening and closing bank accounts beneficiary designations on life insurance dealing with the life insurance company dealing with annuities and nowadays we also have many people involved with what we call digital assets which means a power of attorney a a modern form will also contain authority for me if i'm appointed the agent of another person for me to handle their their digital their virtual assets on the computer um commonly a power of attorney will be given to a family member don't be thrown by the word attorney you don't have to be an attorney to exercise a power of attorney and the vast majority are not so i have signed in in my family i have signed a power of attorney that appoints my wife to be my agent my wife assigned a power of attorney that appoints me to be her agent we don't use them they're sitting in a file drawer but should either one of us ever become unavailable either because of an illness or because we're out of town or that were somehow unavailable that agent my wife can pull out that piece of paper and act use it to act on my behalf so when considering a power of attorney we want a general power of attorney not a limited power of attorney now powers of attorney have a number of other options besides those options a power of attorney can appoint one person or can appoint multiple people i'm not a big fan of appointing multiple people because you get too many cooks in the kitchen however i am very much in favor of a power of attorney that appoints people in order so for example my power of attorney appoints my wife as my primary agent my oldest son as her backup should she become unavailable and my younger son is his backup should my older son become unavailable so i've got an agent and i've got two people on the bench two backups and i'm a big fan of having backups because things can happen to your agent sometimes things happen to the agent before they happen to the principal so we want a general power of attorney with backup now occasionally someone will ask me well can i appoint two people because it may i think two heads are better than one uh and the answer to that is yes you can but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should and i say that because the difficulty of appointing two people is that that means that in order for any of them to take action they must both sign off on everything which doubles the amount of logistics involved in getting any paperwork filled out particularly if these two people are not living in the same community it also creates an opportunity for disagreement a deadlock between two people means nothing gets done so yes you can appoint more than one person at a time and you can appoint two people and say that each one of them can act alone yes you can do that what i have found is that banks insurance companies brokers are not real comfortable with those arrangements they want one person at a time and they want clear authority and your power of attorney will work best if you give them what they want so we want a general power of attorney we want one point a point one agent at a time with a backup in addition a power of attorney can be what we call durable that means that it lasts a long time there's an old rule here in ohio that is out of date now but for years that rule said that a power of attorney was only good as long as the principal who signed it was healthy and of course that means it's meaningless to those of us who want to use it in case of illness and so a durable power of attorney was developed and the durable power of attorney is one that says if i am sick this power of attorney will continue to be in place it is durable it'll last until i revoke it or until i die that's called a durability clause and it's just a sentence that gets added usually at the end of the power of attorney or somewhere near the end of the power of attorney now some years ago within the last 10 years the state of ohio removed that requirement however most attorneys continue to use that clause to just to clarify any confusion about the issue but also because we have 50 different states in this country if you're dealing with a stock broker who's headquartered in st louis missouri as uh edward jones is and and a.g edwards are both operating out of st louis you don't want a compliance officer in missouri trying to figure out what the law is in ohio do we need a durability clause or we don't i don't go there i just give them a durability cloth so they don't have to go through that process so we want a general power of attorney with an agent and a backup and we want a durability clause okay we want that document signed it does not have to be notarized notarize it anyway it makes it much easier to use and we want to keep it current why is that we've got a durability clause why does a power of attorney have to be fresh in order to be usable well that has to do with the way powers of attorney are viewed in the marketplace by legal entities such as insurance companies and brokers and banks what the law in ohio says it does not say that a bank must honor a power of attorney there is no requirement that a stock broker or an insurance company honor a power of attorney what it says instead is that if they choose to honor a power of attorney then they're allowed to do so what that means is that every financial institution with whom you do business has the choice about whether or not to honor your documentation as a result each one creates internal rules for their company about what they will accept and the vast majority of these over the years that i have run into consistently like powers of attorney that are not old there's no legal basis for that but they want some assurance that this power of attorney is in fact still in place that it's not been revoked and one of the tools they use for that one of the criteria they measure that by is how old it is not very effective a little bit clumsy certainly hard for us to deal with but it's a reality so we want a power of attorney to be general durable one agent with a backup and we want it to be signed notarized and we want it to be current okay now many people will ask me if i act as a power of attorney for someone am i responsible for their bills no no no you are responsible for using their resources to pay their bills but you are not personally liable for any of their expenses so there's no financial commitment on behalf of the agent other than to act in the best interest of the principal now that brings me to my final point and that is that powers of attorney can also have a springing clause a springing clause is a clause that says this power of attorney shall not take effect until i become ill i'm not a fan of that um and it's fairly i feel that way fairly strongly and there's a couple of reasons why um often the power of attorney the springing the triggering mechanism in a power of attorney usually is the health of the principal although it might be the you might say this power of attorney is not valid until 2025 you might say it's not valid unless i live in new york there can be you can create whatever condition you want most people when they have a springing power of attorney say that it becomes a valid when they get sick the problem is that when you go to use that power of attorney and you hand it to the teller at the bank or you mail it into the insurance company or you go see your stock broker they have no way of knowing whether or not the trading event has happened so is the principal sick how sick is she is she sick enough that this power of attorney's in place or not and so by creating this triggering event you've created a hurdle an obstacle a complication for your agent to help you and it certainly strikes me that if i'm asking someone to help me when i get into a jam i don't want to make that more difficult for them i want to make that easy for them but there's actually a more compelling reason in my mind and that is the question of trust and reliability i have had people say to me yeah i like my oldest son to be my agent but only if i'm sick because i'm not real sure about him time out if you are considering a springing power of attorney because you don't have faith in your agent then you're considering the wrong agent springing power of attorney will not protect you against someone who is not trustworthy and i'm afraid that people will use it as an as a as a crutch to do something they shouldn't do to begin with so don't use the springing power of attorney if you have any reservations about the agent you're appointing and it seems to me that if you if you think if if you don't trust them while you're healthy why would you trust them when you're sick and you can't keep track of them so i'm not a fan of the springing power of attorney and i think you'll find that most experienced estate lawyers feel that way a lot of casual lawyers what i mean by that is general practitioners they like the idea because they've never had to use one they've never actually gone and gone through this whole process or had a situation where it came up for those of us who do this work exclusively we've walked that path and we have learned differently so a power of attorney should be it should be general it should be durable it should appoint one agent at a time with a backup it should be signed it should be notarized and it should be fresh as in recent and it should be fully empowered not springing and if you meet those criteria you'll find that your agent can do a lot for you if you're unavailable because of illness or any any other reason i remember years ago both of my sons hiked the appalachian trail the appalachian trail is a hiking trail that begins in northern georgia and ends in northern maine 2200 miles and these two young men both graduated from college uh one of them from graduate school the other from college and they strapped packs on their back and they walked the appalachian trail non-stop for four and a half months non-stop on their way to the trailhead they drove through cincinnati and i had both of them signed powers of attorney and they ah dad what do you what you know they thought that was just the dumbest thing in the world i said look guys you're going to be unavailable you're not taking they were so concerned about traveling light that they actually cut the handles off of their toothbrushes to save weight you can bet they were not carrying cell phones and they were not carrying laptops no way so there was no way for me to reach them or no way for them to reach me as long as they were on the trail so i had them sign the power of attorneys before they left i also had them sign living wills and powers of attorney for health care which we're going to talk about next and off they went to georgia and they got on the trail and uh off they headed and um they were out of touch so they did call in and check on they stopped they got off the trail and made phone calls once every couple of weeks so i heard from them a couple of times a month and sure enough three weeks into this thing the phone rings and it's my son's doctor so on his way through cincinnati my younger son who wears glasses and contacts decided that it was important to have his eyes surgically altered so that he wouldn't need contacts what do you i can't remember now what that's called it's falling out of my head but it's a very very common surgery they do now so people don't have to wear glasses that way he didn't have to carry contacts and contact solution on the trail and he saved up his money and he came to cincinnati because there are there are people here who are particularly good at it and he signed up to have that surgery done and when he went to the medical office they were offering interest-free payment plans and so he said well if i can get if i can keep my two thousand dollars in my pocket and just pay monthly i'd rather do that there was no interest so sure enough he signed up for the payment plan and there was supposed to be a payment from his monthly checking account that was paid the doctor every month and sure enough the first payment came to when he was on the trail and something flubbed up and it wouldn't go through and the doctor's office is on the phone they're talking to me they want to fix it and they said is is eric rechman there and i said no he's not here and they said we need to talk to eric and i said well he's on the appalachian trail i can't reach him what can i help you with and he said well i can't discuss it with you because um of the patient privilege i can only talk to uh his wife i had a moment of um emphasis and i said to the guy i'm his wife i was kidding but i said it and there was this long pause and i felt the pause by saying don't you judge me the poor man on the other end of the phone was so flabbergasted that he just said oh okay and he told me everything that was wrong and sure enough i was able to fix it now i laugh about that story because that should not have worked and i should not have done that i really did not intend to play it out it was kind of a joke but it took on a bit of a life of its own and in the end it was harvest because i had his power of attorney and i used his power of attorney to contact the bank fix the problem make the payments and sure enough it was all fine oh and by the way i'll tell you an end to that story after they were done with the trail and they came back through cincinnati on their way back to their homes in colorado they stopped at cincinnati for dinner and um stayed for a couple of days and after dinner uh there was a moment of silence and i looked over to eric and i said oh oh by the way eric your eye doctor thinks you're gay and he he just looked at me he said what did you do and i said it's all it's all fine it's all taken care of so but to the point that power of attorney he gave me worked out very very well because i was able to save the day and make those arrangements despite the fact that i sort of bullied my way through the the conversation with the doctor okay so uh let's talk about item number two living will and power of attorney for health care so the financial power of attorney is about appointing an agent to make financial decisions and conduct and to conduct business on your behalf healthcare power of attorney is the same concept for medical decisions and it authorizes your doctor it authorizes the hospitals the pharmacies and any other medical provider to talk to your agent if you if you hand them a copy a power of attorney for health care is almost always executed in conjunction with a living will a living will is a document i prefer to call an advanced directive and i prefer it because the truth is it's not about living it's a the living will is not a thing it's about dying and it's not a will because it has nothing to do with your property um it's just a name that somebody came up with years ago and it's not very descriptive so an advanced directive is a more accurate description because it is directions that you give in advance about how you want your chronic illness or terminal illness treated and in ohio a living will only covers two things terminal illness which i'll define in a moment and a permanent coma those are the only two issues covered in a living will now my living will happens to say based on my personal preferences my living will says that if i'm terminally ill let me go if i'm permanently unconscious let me go my power of attorney for health care says anything else my wife is in charge if i cannot speak for myself my wife is in charge and the doctor and the pharmacy and the hospital and the therapist you can talk to my wife that's not a violation of the patient privilege the pa client patient privilege the hipaa the health care protection act the hipaa laws do not apply to my agent because she's appointed in my power of attorney for health care and my power of attorney for health care contains a hipaa waiver which authorizes my wife to have access to all of my medical records so um in ohio we're fortunate enough that the state bar association the state medical association the state hospital association and the nurses and the osteopaths and the chiropractors there's a long long list the nursing home administrators all of the trade groups for the various health care professions uh got together many years ago and developed a standard form that's available on the internet for free and you can download that form you can fill it out online and then download it it must be signed and it must be either witnessed or notarized and it's really really important and a really helpful document to have every once in a while i will someone will say to me i'm a little nervous about those documents because i'm not sure if they will if they will take my life too soon to understand the answer to that you have to understand what the living will says and how it defines a terminal illness so under the terms of the living will you must have a disease or an injury that is irreversible untreatable and incurable has to be all three irreversible untreatable incurable it has to be diagnosed by two doctors who have physically examined jail in you are physically have to be physically examined by both doctors and then number three you must be at the end stage of your disease so for example there are many chronic diseases chronic diseases that last for years alzheimer's parkinson's ms there's a long long list both of my parents died of alzheimer's disease well technically they did not technically alzheimer's was not the cause of death but they had alzheimer's disease for years before they died in those particular cases alzheimer's disease is untreatable it's irreversible and it's incurable it meets those three conditions two doctors confirmed that diagnosed diagnosis but we and so we met that condition but until they were at the end stage of their disease the living will does not kick in and does not apply my mother fell and broke her leg we treated that they had an uh a bout of pneumonia or two we had some urinary tract infections there were several medical conditions that arose and by the way a lot of dental care a lot of medical decisions that arose over the course of the last five years of their lives that we treated because they were not at end stage only at end stage does the living will apply and the end stage is defined as ready to die and ready to die means days not weeks and i and i've been doing this now for 40 years i've done it on both sides of the river although most of my experiences here in ohio and i have helped oh i would guess eight ten maybe twelve people um make end of life decisions uh both of my parents uh both of my in-laws um and then a number of clients over the years who had no family i was the decision maker which means i've been in the room when these conversations happened i've been in the i've met with ethics committees of hospitals both at christ at good sam at dignus which is now out of business and saint francis st george and what i can tell you is that here in ohio there is no rush to judgment i have never witnessed any suggestion or even a hint of early organ harvesting or a lack of interest on behalf of the medical community in fact actually my experience has been the opposite my experience has been that the medical community doctors nurses therapists orally hospital administrators they're in that business for a reason and almost without exception that reason is is that they're there to help people and doctors go to school and study because they're there to save people they're there to cure people whether whatever that might look like that is their preset and that's the way that they approach every problem and in fact that momentum that mindset permeates almost every decision they make my experience is getting them to stop is the hard part um and they are so pre-set to if this doesn't work we're going to try that if that doesn't work we're going to try this if this doesn't work we're going to look at experimental research we're going to look at experimental drugs we'll try anything we can do to keep you going and they'll keep taking swings at that that over and over and over and that in fact it's up to us to stand up and say when we've had enough and it's up to our agents to do that on our behalf and you know what i think that's a good thing i think that as a society that's what we want i think we want our medical providers and our our care managers to provide care but what that means is that it becomes incumbent upon us it becomes our burden and our responsibility to stand up and say when to stop and that's what you need to do it isn't a matter of having doctors rush to judge it's the other way around is we have to tell them when to stop and that's been my experience over and over and over and i think that's a good thing i'm not being critical at all this is an observation i'm making about the the nature of the way it works and if you understand the way it works then perhaps you'll understand the importance of having a living will and a power of attorney for health care because if you're not armed with those documents you can't have that conversation with them all right so those two items the financial power of attorney and the health care documents uh are documents you need to keep your life affairs in order while you're alive the next four items we're going to talk about are things that will affect after you're gone that will take effect so a last will and testament you've heard that expression a will is a document that you signed that tells us number one pay my final bills pay my final taxes appoint my wife my child my cousin to be in charge of this process all of my household items i give to so and so and all of my assets of value i give to such and such so this spells out what who's in charge and who gets your money and the will is the most common vehicle for that although we also use living trusts and testamentary trusts trusts are simply a more sophisticated way of accomplishing the same thing wills are very simple they're very straightforward they're sort of like calculators they do a very specific function and they do them well trusts are more like computers they're much more sophisticated they carry much more nuance you can do much more interesting and creative things with them they're particularly helpful if you've got property in more than one county especially if you've got property in more than one state they're particularly helpful if you've got a spouse that is not able to manage her own or his own affairs they're especially helpful if you've got children who are not good with money maybe they're disabled or maybe they're in a bad marriage maybe they have a drug problem but a trust can be is a is an important vehicle to accommodate special circumstances that cannot be addressed in a simple will these documents need to be done while you are still competent they require two witnesses a trust requires a notary if there's any real statement and these can be done by most lawyers the prices will range anywhere from 250 dollars for a simple will up to four or five thousand dollars for fancy trusts and if you're i had a client recently that owned four four pieces of property in three different countries and his bill was quite a bit more than that we had a lot to accommodate but that's very unusual most of the time a will is going to cost you a few hundred dollars and a trust is going to cost you a few thousand dollars the beauty of a trust is that at your death assets that are titled in a trust avoid the traditional probate administrative process that saves a lot of time and money a lot of time and money depending on the nature of the estate i've gotten a state on my brand new estate on my desk now that has about a million dollars in it about a hundred thousand of that's going to go through probate and that'll cost about five thousand dollars to administer the other nine hundred thousand dollars is not going to go through probate and will probably cost a thousand dollars to administer that whole blooming thing because there's beneficiary designations already in place so there is a real advantage in using trust for your larger estates in saving the time and expense of probate administration however there are a few less expensive ways to avoid probate less expensive than a trust sometimes referred to in my business as poor man trusts that's a lousy expression because they aren't trust at all but they are tools for people who don't have a million dollars or don't have a half a million dollars but still want to avoid probate and that is in item four and five so four talks about your house for example you can put your house in two names with survivorship you can put your house in a living trust or you can name a transfer on death beneficiary and your house will avoid probate you do these things by seeing an estate lawyer a joint survivorship deed if if you have a if you own a home and you want to add your spouse to the deed or you want to add one of your children to the deed this can be done for about 200 250 if you have a house and you don't want to make your son the co-owner but you want to designate him the beneficiary you can use a transfer on death affidavit cost you about the same thing and if you've got more sophisticated needs use a trust if we look at the page two of the outline the same rules apply to bank accounts stocks bonds brokerage accounts you can have them own joint with survivorship you can have them owned in the in your name transfer on death or payable on death to the beneficiary or beneficiaries of your choice or you can put those also in a trust card titles in ohio you can do the same thing by the way transfer on death is not available for real estate or cars in kentucky but we do have it available here in ohio so if you have a car and you want that car to go to your daughter at your death and you want to avoid probate in doing so you can take your car title the ownership certificate that you own that you have you take that to the bmv where i was this afternoon you wait in the line out in the sunshine with a pretty day that was nice they've got everybody spaced out at six feet and i hope you have your paperwork in order are they or you'll have to make a second trip like i am um so car titles also can be placed tod but you can also avoid probate by being sure that your beneficiary designations are up to date on your life insurance on your retirement accounts on your annuities retirement accounts have beneficiary designation forms wherever your retirement account is the bank the brokerage house insurance company wherever your ira maybe it's at work you have a 401k at work or a keo call the hr department get a beneficiary designation form if your ira is at u.s bank call u.s bank or better yet go online and find the form online to fill out the beneficiary designation get that signed and get it mailed into the bank same with stocks same with annuities life insurance i've been at wood and lamping now for since 1976 44 years it's the only job i've ever had i started in the mail room when i was a law student i started in the mail room sorting mail i remember that first day vaguely and i remember i had a stack of paperwork this thick to fill out i had to fill out a w9 with my social security number and i had to fill out a health insurance application form and and then there was a background form and you had to fill out the form giving your how many tax withhold uh withholding units you would get and verifying your social security it's a you know the stack and in that stack there was also a form that said as part of your employment you have a ten thousand dollar life insurance policy who should we pay it to and i filled that out put my mother's name in there i was single at the time i put my mother's name in there well that was 44 years ago my mother is long gone i'm married now um i need to go back and change that well i have gone back and changed that years ago but the point of the story is don't forget those old policies you may have gotten one when you were in the military you may have gotten one when you first started with a job or maybe your parents bought you one of those little what they call penny policies from some door-to-door insurance salesmen back in the 1950s this was common back in those days don't forget those little policies hunt them down find out the insurance company name get a beneficiary form from their insurance company fill it out send it in so you know it's current okay now the last thing i want to talk about is funeral arrangements this is a little um personal in the sense that each one of us has different visions about what we want how we want our remains to be managed what i want to do is just give you some idea about how the market works in this in this community so the funeral business the funeral industry used to be what we call a cottage industry and what that means is that the industry was made up of thousands of mom-and-pop operations small little funeral homes maybe you might have somebody who owns two or three locations but for the most part these are just single location funeral homes they're all over town they're all over the country and if you want to make a funeral arrangements that's where you went well in the 1990s there was a consolidation that occurred consolidation is the word that the businessmen use for when cottage industries evolve in no longer so that they're no longer cottage industries like pharmacies you know used to be there was a pharmacy and they were individually owned and they were all over town there was consolidation in the 1990s and now all the pharmacies are owned by cvs or by the hospitals right there the number of independent pharmacies are you can count them on one hand now funeral homes that's what happened the consolidators come in they bought a bunch of these these places you don't know it because the name didn't change and the name didn't change because the ohio law says the funeral homes have to be named after the the funeral director so the names are always named after the funeral director not the owner so when these places sold they didn't change their name for the most part but they are in fact owned by conglomerates and when the conglomerates came in part of what they did was they recapitalized which means they injected more money into the industry you probably haven't noticed this but most new funeral homes in the last 15 20 years most of the funeral homes around cincinnati have started to look a lot better they're bigger they have new parking lots they have a fresh coat of paint they've expanded and they are almost all offering cremations now it used to be the only place in town you could cremate was hillside chapel over behind good sam hospital on dick smith in fact interesting little side fact cincinnati had the first crematory in the country and that's it over there on dick smith avenue it was the first one open to the public but in the 1990s and early 2000s most of the decent-sized funeral homes in town bought uh cremation facilities and built them in their facilities and so that whole industry has gotten a lot of capital injected in it when an industry receives a capital injection there's only one thing that can happen and that is prices go up and so prices have been creeping up steadily for years now it used to be an average funeral in cincinnati cost about three thousand dollars that was 20 years ago now that average is probably closer to eight thousand dollars and that's an average you can spend more than that be prepared for that uh now the other phenomenon that happens when prices go up in any industry discounters moved in and so we now have discounters in the business and i just want you to know that you don't have to use them just be aware of it walmart sells caskets costco sells caskets next day delivery you go online now of course with the covet i guess they probably aren't guaranteeing next-day delivery these days but you can buy these you can buy funeral equipment and and um tools and so forth the caskets and and so and so forth at quite a discount and when i say quite a discount 40 and these are the same caskets and the same items the same equipment that they're making right up the street at hildebrand in batesville it's the exact same equipment they're just they buy them in quantity and they sell them at a discount and there are some optional operators here in town who will offer services at a discount um it's probably been a year ago since i saw this but on i-71 about a year ago i saw a sign cremation on sale for 4.99 499 normally 699 um now it's not my intent to be morbid here it's not my intent to sell anybody anything i'm not in the business i just want you all to know that those options are available to you and that there's been this shift in the industry my mother-in-law went to a discount funeral director up in cleveland and made her arrangements ahead of time she didn't pay for them ahead of time but she made the arrangements ahead of time so when she died our four daughters went to that discount place and all the arrangements were made um all i had to do was write a check we didn't have to make any decisions the whole thing cost twelve hundred dollars at a time when funerals were costing six eight thousand dollars um and i'm not sure that we would have done that on our own um i think i know my i know why my mother-in-law did it and i think she did it because my father-in-law and her were interested in trying to be um frugal about that they didn't think that that was a value to them it wasn't a family value in that family to spend a lot of money on a funeral but it's hard for the children and the family members to come into a situation like that and say i want to save money on mom's funeral that you know that that's awkward so my mother-in-law by doing this ahead of time took all four of her girls off the hook and said you're not going to have to make this decision i'm going to make it for you so if you're interested in that kind of thing if you're interested in helping your children then pick a funeral heart parlor make some of those choices if you want to use a discounter fine if you don't want to use a discount or fine but if you make those choices while you're still around and especially if you pre-pay it and that's a great gift but if not that's pre-paying it is optional but pre-planning is a wonderful gif sort of the wrong word but a wonderful thing to do to help your kids understand what it is that is important to you and what values you put on on these on these last steps so i encourage you to do it and as i said if you want to know more about discounting just google it there's uh the place that i use for my parents is on erie avenue over in hyde park and um but there are other places around town and and the options are there as i said the equipment you can buy online at a reputable at costco or walmart you can buy these uh this i have known clients who've bought their caskets ahead of time and had them delivered and put them in their garage kind of weird huh but you know that's an option available to you so uh with that having been said my watch says it's 7 30 which means my hour is up kelly um but i'm glad to open it up for some questions all right sounds good let me stop the recording