Sign Maryland Banking Last Will And Testament Computer

Industry sign banking maryland last will and testament computer

perfect well good morning thanks for those of you who are joining us for our last get it done week session we are now to our final day on wills trusts powers of attorney and estates so i will hand it off to our two presenters mark bobatek with golden oak elder law and byron mcfarland who is our register of wills for howard county with that i will hand it to our presenters thank you for being with us and mark take it away thank you for the horizon foundation's sponsorship and your hard work to make this happen we really appreciate it um so good morning again everyone as tiffany told you my name is mark babacheck and you can say boba tech or boba tech but if you call me mark we're good i've been in a state planning and elder law attorney here in howard county for a little over 25 years now and i own the tiny firm name golden oak elder law we have a lot of ground to cover today so without any jokes or further ado i'd like to introduce our honored guest for this workshop byron mcfarland is the register of wills for howard county since being pushed elected to the position now uh eight or ten years ago is that right byron eight ten years ten okay um byron is a howard county native and he says he was first uh inspired by a high school teacher at glenelg high school to vote and then he started watching c-span and then he interned with the county council and after college worked with the maryland general assembly and there he learned about giving great constituent service and folks i want to say as a frequent user of the register will's office that they give great constituent service and although they're not allowed to give you legal advice um they really take great care of families at a very tough time when people are in distress and so byron has a whole team of wonderful people and we are blessed because as we've seen from recent elections in in candidates who are running for office there's a large variation in their honor and their compassion and their commitment and their competency of they and the people around them so we are really truly blessed to have byron anyway he says that he um the politics can be a great way to create positive change and that he's had a chance to prove as registered wills to everyone who he comes in contact with that government can work for them uh in a positive way so welcome honorable byron mcfarlane and thank you for joining us this morning thank you mark all right i'm going to share my screen now and we are going to go through a um we're going to go through a little bit of an outline and our goals are going to be in the next 30 minutes to help you in the audience decide whether you should try to do your will on your own or whether you need to get some legal guidance um and so we want you to remember that this is general advice only that byron and i are giving you and it's not intended to be specific legal advice for you uh if you have a question that involves legal advice you've got to ask the lawyer you really can't even ask the registered wills staff they can tell you what the law is but they can't tell you what to do um any comment on that byron yeah um you know we we get phone calls all the time we have people who come to to visit us and they want help with all of the estate planning side of things um but really where we can explain the process for what happens after people pass away but if when it comes to writing your will advance directive a trust what package of estate planning tools might be best for them we can't give that kind of advice so um you know we can we can walk you through the process but we can't we can't help you decide what's best for you and byron that takes us to our first question on the agenda which is what is probate in about 30 seconds so probate very simply put we also call it estate administration probate is the process of basically dealing with all of your assets after you've passed away and figuring out who gets paid what essentially who gets to serve as your personal representative you've also heard that called the executor usually it's a pretty simple process um but it's really just sort of a matter of you know figuring out if there's a will if there's a will we follow the terms of the will if not we'll follow what are called the laws of intestacy which we're going to talk about and figuring out what the assets are in probate and this is a really important point is that probate only deals with assets that are titled in your name alone or with no beneficiary so any assets that you have that are jointly titled or have a beneficiary do not come through probate so you can see that that's question number two here on our outline and it's very important you need to think that any joint ownership or beneficiary designation will take priority over your will and your will will only or or your intestine if you didn't write your own will the state wrote one for you um that will take all those other forms of ownership will take priority over what you have said in the wheel or what you've allowed the state legislature to say in the will that you didn't write for yourself so byron let's um let's go over really quickly this what the state legislature wrote as the will for the people who don't write their own what if you're um what if you're a single person and you have no children uh well that's me actually uh so exactly what would happen i'm not married on any children so um the the way that it works is you know the your are our intestacy laws so the laws that govern what happens when you die without a will um that determines who gets to serve as your executor and who gets to inherit and so for someone like me um it's it's actually really simple um both of my parents are living their divorce but they're both living so if i passed away right now without a will um my parents would inherit my estate equally 50 50 and they would both have equal priority to serve as my personal representative and byron i think you have one sibling right so if your parents weren't living then it would go to your sibling how many times i have a brother and sister so if my parents were it would go equally to my brother and sister right now suppose you're married and you don't have kids how would that change if i were married and uh didn't have children um if i had been married for at least five years my spouse would get everything if it had been less than five years my spouse would get the first 40 000 and then half the rest and the other half would go to my parents okay and that's interesting and that five-year distinction is actually a fairly new maryland law there used to be no distinction based on how long one is married and now now there is um and notice folks so what that means is that even if you are married your spouse is not going to get everything if your parents are living they are still going to get half in some cases if your marriage has been less than five years okay well we need to move on suppose you're married and you do have children uh then how would it be divided without a will so it's basically the same as i just described so it would be uh it would be um the first 40 000 plus that plus half of the rest to your spouse and the other half to your children okay um so thank you uh so folks in the audience if that's the will that you want for yourself you may not even need to listen any further because that's what the legislature has written for you until you write your own and once again i want to remind everyone that this only controls the assets that are solely in your name that don't have a beneficiary designation and are not joined with someone else if they have a beneficiary designation they will go to that beneficiary regardless of what your will says and if they are joint uh usually joint is tenants uh joint tenants with rights of survivorship which means that it would go to the surviving joint owner it is possible to create a joint ownership called tenants in common uh where there is not survivorship and where the half owners half would be probated through their estate that's a little complex and it's beyond the scope of today where our real goal is to teach you uh the basics of what should be in a will what shouldn't be in a will and and whether you think that you need to get legal help to create your own will etc uh all right so number four what things should be included in a will and i don't know what byron's take on this is but i really don't recommend handwriting your own will i really recommend paying the 50 or 100 bucks or whatever to use software at least if you're doing it yourself uh or follow a form so first you make sure you want to state your name and it's also good to include any other names you may have been known by with also known as so-and-so etc then you'll name your executor which marilyn law calls personal representative and we recommend for every job in the estate plan including the executor and the guardians if you have minor children that you name at least one alternate and maybe you could even name a second alternate if you if you want um now byron what's your take on having more than one person acting together as the executor yeah oftentimes people want to do this i think um i think especially if you have a if you're if your spouse has pre-deceased you and you have multiple adult children people sometimes like to appoint if you pass if your spouse is deceased and you have you know two adult children you name both of them as co-prs because you don't want to pick one over the other um this comes down to a matter of logistics i think um and making sure that uh it's the your estate is going to be permitted as easily as possible when you have to have two people uh sign off on everything file everything agree on everything um you know that can be that can sometimes become problematic i i strongly encourage folks to just pick one um and and if you need to have a conversation with your family members about why you did that to ensure that there isn't any kind of strife or any kind of hard feelings about favoritism do that thank you to be quite honest in our firm we charge a little bit extra when there are two personal representatives because it's always going to be more time consuming for us um it's it's it's just it is what it is uh all right so uh letter c state who gets your tangible personal property and that three-word phrase is our lawyer phrase for your stuff your tables your chairs jewelry cars votes etc um and be careful you need to make sure that you say who gets it if the first person you name uh doesn't survive you if you have a backup person um then in usually a separate paragraph from the stuff but it could be combined you will say who gets your real estate if you own a house or and or other real estate and then in that same or separate paragraph you should state who gets your money and other property we lawyers often call the money and other property in real estate your residuary estate r-e-s-i-d-u-a-r-a-r-y estate uh so if you see that that's what it means um byron any take on these uh last few items that we just discussed um just that uh you must always always always make sure that you know even if you don't uh you know if all you want to do is say i want everything to go to my my son james uh just make sure that you have a residuary clause because every now and then we have a states where it'll say you know my bank accounts to so and so my car to so and so and there's a residual clause missing and what happens then as we just talked about with the laws of intestacy well if there's money left over um let's just say you didn't include you didn't you didn't specify how you want your real estate to be disposed of well guess what that gets disposed of by the laws of intestacy if there's no residuary clause ah interesting um okay then to put the will into place you're going to need to sign it and you're going to need to date it and you need to have two witnesses now in maryland it is not necessary to have a notary to notarize the will especially in this pandemic time when it can be hard to safely get to a notary you can validly do your will with no notary now that's not the case with the financial power of attorney which we'll talk about later but at least the will you can do with just two witnesses um and so here are a couple more tips you always want to avoid anything ambiguous or that could be miscon construed in the language you use in a will you always want to say what happens to the asset that you're giving away if the person you're giving it to pre-deceases you meaning passes away before you usually your choices are that it can lapse meaning that they don't get it and it doesn't go to their estate or you could leave it first terpes or by representation first derbies and that means down the bloodline to the person's descendants however first derpy's does not mean to their spouse if their spouse survives them it means their descendants okay um also if you want the personal representative to have discretion to divide things unequally say so because the law will presume that things should be divided equally if you just name several people um finally i think that it's unwise to specify a certain account number to a certain person rather than a certain dollar amount because if you leave a certain account to a certain person then there may be ambiguity about whether that account shares in the estate expenses etc it just can sometimes get messy so we encourage you to think of everything that you have as one single pie and that you divide the pie in whatever fractions or percentages you want i'm not discouraging you from leaving a flat dollar amount to a person but we've just found a lot of messy situations when you leave specific accounts to specific people and byron i don't know if you have any uh comment on that i know i i think you're you've covered it um okay uh then you want to name guardians if you have any minor children which means under 18. and in maryland there are two types of guardianship the person who's responsible for raising the child is called guardian of the person and then separately we have guardian of the property and that is the person who's responsible for the money and finances of the child and in some states guardian of the property is referred to as a conservatorship so if you hear that phrase conservatorship that's the same thing as what we call guardian of the property here in maryland once again remember we want you to name a backup person in case the first one can't do it or stops being able to do it um all right byron has suggested that you put a funeral expense provision in the will and so byron can you explain what that is yeah um so uh kind of what is often a kind of boilerplate provision in a will is it's what's called a funeral clause and what that does is it authorizes the personal representative to in their discretion spend essentially as much money as they want on your funeral memorial service uh wake you name it um and the reason i always encourage people to do this is if if it goes above that i think it's actually 15 000 now mark um that keeps changing okay i didn't even know that though so thank you um an illustration of that it does change i think it was three thousand or five thousand when i first started it was in three thousand five thousand ten thousand now it's fifteen thousand you know what we found is you know a casket alone can be six thousand seven eight thousand dollars so um so it's fifteen thousand and frankly it's it's up to you it's your personal decision it's your money if you want to have a more you know a larger memorial service or funeral that's up to you but if it goes over that fifteen thousand dollar amount you have to petition the orphans court and the orphans court wouldn't then have to basically uh you know they get to decide what your what is an appropriate funeral for you um and really if you want to make sure that that stays in your family's control put a funeral provision in and you won't have that problem great thank you um then finally on our list we we recommend in general that you waive the bond the bond means that you have to take some of the estates money it's usually a few hundred dollars but it could be several thousand if the estate size is larger and pay it to an insurance company to guarantee that the executor won't won't steal or or misfem the estate money if they do then the insurance company has to pay it back and then it's their problem to go chase the bad guy but usually you have someone you trust to be the executor so you can say in the will that you waive the bond um and in most cases again if you're not willing to waive the bond then you should rethink whether that person really should be the executor in the first place in most cases byron do you have a different take on that no not that you're spot on okay well thank you all right so number five we have a short list of what things we do not think you should include in the will if you do it yourself and the letter a is i've seen too many times people putting things about funeral arrangements into the will and then when does the will get taken out and looked at after the funeral is already over so if you have specifications you've got to talk to your loved ones and joke about it at family gatherings the ones that we can't have this year but but you just have to let them know what you want um because that way they'll be able to do it um even if you just let them know hey i wrote a piece of paper about what i want and i keep it in such and such a place um you need to tell them that and remind them that okay the second thing that we don't recommend is any conditions such as if you say johnny only gets x if he does y or janie can live in my house for three years if she pays for the expenses folks i'm telling you that these kind of conditions lead to ambiguity and arguments and byron any any comment on that yeah and um and kind of taken to an extreme uh some of these conditions that you might want to put on a bequest aren't enforceable so if you say you know i leave ten thousand dollars to my son provided he uh gets married within ten years that's not enforceable and i understand why you may want to encourage family members to you know live their lives in certain ways but um also not enforceable if you say i leave him money if he gets divorced from his awful spouse right or that um or that they have children and they're raised in a particular faith um those are the kinds of things that aren't um or you know occasionally we see a will where it requires uh it conditions a a bequest on someone marrying within a certain race um you know those are the kinds of things that are uh i would hope no one on this call would do something like that but that's that we see those things uh not just in howard county but across the state and those things aren't enforceable now um when byron and i were talking about this he reminded us so we added to the list that if you are disinheriting someone meaning leaving them out it is a bad idea to give a reason because then they may be able to challenge that reason it's also a bad idea to leave them one dollar despite what you might have heard when you leave the one dollar you have made them a beneficiary of the estate which it gets them the right to notice as an involvement in the estate so just say they are to be treated as though they had pre-deceased you and that they are to receive nothing by the way if the person you're leaving out has descendants you know meaning children or grandchildren you may want to specify whether they're deemed to be pre-deceasing you without issue meaning that you don't want their money to go down the line to their kids um or maybe you do and then you would say that they're be to be treated as though they pre-deceased you with issue um all right byron can you think of anything else that's come to your mind about what should not be in a will or is that pretty much wrap up our uh our list i i think there's just one other issue and i don't think you and i discussed this before but um after you have completed your will after you've executed it and you've had witnesses sign it do not make any notations alterations cross-offs you know insertions you know you want to change the amount that someone's going to receive please do not do that because number one unless any notation on a will has to conform to the requirements for a will so if i scratch out uh the quest to someone i've got to sign it and witness it as well um and usually what we see is is we just had one the other day where this will had probably 15 different notations and none of them are valid and i'm sure the decedent thought before they passed away that they would be um but if you want to make a bunch of changes like that either write a new will or um or write a cod assault which is an amendment to a well thank you for mentioning that i see that too often even in my practice okay we need to speed along we have a very long list of things that we'll go through very quickly but this is really the important part of our workshop probably the most important and that is when your will should be complex enough that you should probably get legal help in doing it and as you can see as we run through these factors quickly i would say that more than half of people in howard county have one or more of these factors and probably should get legal help um so a if you probably don't question your competence but if you have a situation where you think people around you may question your competence you should get some legal guidance next if you own a family business or a part of a business that's probably a situation where you should get legal help then if there's if you know that there is dissension among your family um and or you plan to leave things unequally to people who are you know of equal status such as your three children that would often uh be a good idea to get some legal help um next if you're married but you have one or more children from another marriage or another relationship things are going to get messy if you don't get legal help with that um next if you want to protect the inheritance of your young children beyond age 21 you need to do a trust then you should see a lawyer we have the uniform transfer to minors act which makes it easy to leave money but it maxes out at age 21 and there's nothing you can do to keep the youth from coming and getting it at age 21. byron any comments so far about those items nope okay next if you have minor children and you have life insurance you want to make sure that the life insurance isn't left directly to the children because then it will go through a court supervised guardianship until they're 18 and probably even worse than that that for their 18th birthday they'll get a check for their whole you know their whole inheritance of the entire life insurance policy and usually that's not a good idea so see a lawyer because we can help you do better um next if you want to protect the inheritance of your adult children at all ages in case the child gets divorced you want to leave things in a trust that's written properly and you should see a lawyer for that next if you own real estate outside of maryland or whatever state you reside in or if you want someone to be able to live in your house but just for a while but not to get the house forever again a lawyer should help you with the drafting of that next if you have significant debt you may be able to specify things about it in the will and estate plan and i think you should see a lawyer next if you want to avoid the probate process through the court with a living trust either to keep things private or for other valid reasons that you may have a lawyer will be needed uh estate taxes in maryland start at the five million dollar level so if you believe that your net worth is at or near that amount uh you should get a lawyer's help and finally there is a maryland inheritance tax that's separate from the estate tax and it exempts people who leave things to their spouses or their ancestors such as parents or their descendants such as children and grandchildren and even exempts currently brothers and sisters it does not though it also exempts things left to charity it does not exempt your nieces or nephews or your friends this is true regardless of how small your estate is it is a flat 10 inheritance tax currently and um i recommend that you see a lawyer if the way you want to leave things is going to involve that all right we have about five minutes left to stretch things so byron any comments on that list of things uh about when you should get a lawyer to help you with your will i i think you covered pretty much everything um especially um especially the if you have a really high net worth um we have an estate right now if you can believe it uh there was a will no trust and it's a probate estate of 275 million dollars wow this was a this was a big real estate tycoon who passed away um and it's sort of amazing that he didn't have a trust um and uh and that sort of gets into the privacy issue um you know an awful lot of people don't need a trust but you know if privacy you know i think it's important to understand the probate process is a public process right so all the the paperwork that comes through our office is public record um now for your peace of mind it's not like we have you know some you know mob of people you know rummaging through estate files you know uh trying to you know find things on people um but if if privacy is a a big concern of yours then the trust is is is going to be helpful absolutely thank you for that and by the way anyone can look up maryland is pretty technologically advanced that anyone can look up the records and filings of any estate online without leaving your chair and if you want to order a copy of the actual document itself you just uh put it on a credit card right there online and it gets emailed to you usually within minutes so um so it's much easier now for people to find things out about estates than the old days where you had to physically go down to the courthouse okay we need to move along i'm going to skip number seven for the moment and we'll come back to it because i think it's important to talk about where you should store the will and the other documents if you have them which are financial power of attorney and health care documents you can file them at the register wills office and what is it byron three dollars or five dollars to pilot it's just it's five dollars and we store it's a confidential service so the contents of your will are confidential uh as long as we hold on to it so i rarely recommend that as the place to store it because i believe that when you do the will you want to do a financial power of attorney and health care documents together and the registered wills will only take the will they won't take the other documents so i think it's messy to store the different documents in different places however especially if you think somebody doesn't like your will and might try to get it and rip it up it is going to be safe once it's at the register will's office and nobody is going to get it away from you so that's a time that it can be good in addition if we look at paragraph d here copies of all the other estate planning documents except for your will are widely accepted by the financial community so you don't need really to have the originals of the other documents but you need to store the original of the will itself in a safe place so for that reason it's not a bad idea to send your will to the register will's office and then when you do a console or or a change your will of course you need to get it back um and put the new one on file and it's in its place um some of our clients keep things in a safe at their house or in a safe deposit box but do not use a safe deposit box if you're the only name on the signature card you should have a spouse or an adult child or a sibling or a good friend or somebody else on the signature card at the safe deposit box uh in my estimation byron any any comment on that do you have any differences yeah on the safe deposit box um the way it works is if we have this every every couple of months we'll have someone who you know a relative passes away it's usually a parent um and they they aren't sure where that like they know there's a will or they heard one time that mom kept the will in the safe deposit box you know it's kind of a process we've got to get a court order i have to go to the bank we've got to deal with the bank's legal department i actually personally go into the vault to look at them uh to see if there is a will more often than not there isn't one so it's sort of a there's an expense and if you don't have a key the box has to be drilled um so if you're going to use a safe deposit box that's fine but as mark said make sure someone else is on the signature card and make sure people know for sure one way or the other what's in there and the last thing i'll say do not under any circumstance leave some of these other uh estate planning documents like your power of attorney or your health care directive in your safe deposit box that's the last place you those are things that you need people to have their hands on in case you are incapacitated or you're near the end of life so the safe deposit box isn't going to do you any good so make sure that those are easily accessible that's great advice to say it a different way those documents are needed while you are still living whereas your will conversely is not really needed until after you pass away um so it is really hard to get into a safe deposit box it takes the court order for them to get in while you're living if you can't get in um okay so thank you for that comment i think we want to finish up by reminding you that there are other documents that are important in your estate plan and these are the documents that are important while you were living and they are a financial power of attorney to let someone uh someone do financial transactions for you or often in my recommendation to my clients i recommend usually that they have two people acting together just as a safeguard and check and balance against bad decisions while you're disabled you can find maryland state forms at this link that i have listed here on the attorney general's website there are actually two financial power of attorney forms on the website a more general one and then a more limited one and you can choose which one you want to use finally i'm very pleased to tell you that the horizon foundation several years ago which is sponsoring our workshop this morning spearheaded and sponsors the speakeasyhoward.org website it lets you do your healthcare directives validly online with no witness no notary no nothing and it makes it easy for you to walk through their process if you go to that website also if you've done written healthcare directives the speakeasyhoward.org website lets you upload copies pdf copies of the documents that you wrote and it lets you print out a card for your wallet or your purse and i won't go into this anymore because it was already covered in another workshop this week but i've cited here to the website the attorney general's website where you can go for the printed forms if you want uh if you want to so thank you for your time this morning the main point was to describe the general process of what should and shouldn't be in a will and when you probably should get a lawyer to help you through the process um byron i think i should invite you i would like to invite you to um to say any final words of wisdom um in hopes that you don't have to meet in person any of our of our uh our audience this morning anytime soon yeah um well i i really appreciate the verizon foundation this is one of a couple of programs i've done with them and i they do a great service to the community trying to help us get this information out um you know i i think in closing i just want to say um for everyone on this uh call um we've obviously thrown a lot of information at you and it might feel overwhelming um the for your peace of mind i always tell people this and this is not to this is not to uh you know prop up the legal industry or anything but um having some peace of mind is priceless and so talking to a professional who has been dealing with this and can walk you through you know really tailor me giving you a tailor made that suits all of your needs uh estate plan and knowing that everything is where it's supposed to be my family will know exactly what to do when when i pass away um i gives you you know incredible peace of mind like i said at the beginning i'm single i don't have any kids right now yet um but um but i have a will and i and it gives you peace of mind you know there's that that moment before you sign on the dotted line where you're a little hesitant um but i know that if something happens to me my family will know exactly what to do and that gives me a great peace of mind so i hope that if um you know you're thinking about going through this that you you think about talking to an attorney to make sure that you you get comprehensive uh solid advice thank you very much honorable byron mcfarland the registered wills for howard county um tiffany thank you and i guess we should ask the logistics of the people who have um personal consultations later today or maybe some for monday um remember the personal consultation is not going to be with the goal of writing your will it's going to be helping you do triage about whether you should have a lawyer help you or whether you think you can do it yourself um so tiffany what do people do do they just sign into a link yeah everyone who has one-on-one appointments this afternoon has gotten a confirmation email with the conference line in that email so we actually ran out of appointments because a lot of you have great questions uh but i know mark you have said you'd make your information available to individuals afterward as well right i will indeed and we've set some time aside on monday afternoon for additional consultations if anyone wants to get a hold of us at our law office great yes we will send out to anyone registered for any of the events this week um contact information for all of our presenters links to all of the webinars any of the slide content we can share all of that will come in an email next week so with that i will say thank you to our presenters appreciate your time this morning and if there's nothing else we can go ahead and end great thank you so much great have a great weekend everyone thank you thank you