Ep 63: Are your estate documents in order? Featuring Cody Barbo

Episode 63 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (39:29)

Episode 63 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Cody Barbo joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman on a planning failure both hosts admit to personally: estate documents that never get finished. Notman had nothing in place even after his son was born, and Holt describes a process that took four or five months, cost substantially, and required a chief of staff to complete. The pattern they describe will be recognizable to any advisor, where the question gets asked, three attorney introductions get made, a follow-up happens, and two years later nothing has been executed. Barbo’s explanation is direct: many advisors have never done their own. The conversation lands somewhere broadly useful, which is that conviction transfers where instruction does not, and that showing a client your own completed work moves them in a way that handing over a referral list never does.

What this episode covers

• Why estate documents so rarely get finished, even for advisors and their own families
• The referral-and-follow-up loop that reliably produces no completed plan
• The scale of the coming wealth transfer, and how unprepared the recipients are
• Doing what you recommend, and why demonstration outperforms instruction
• The credibility risk of being asked whether you own what you recommend

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, are your estate planning docs in order? Pretty serious question. Well, I figured I needed to ask, is your friend. No, I appreciate that. And in fact, they are. For a long time, they were not. Probably, I mean, even after the birth of my son, I didn’t have anything done initially.

Really stupid looking back. I had beneficiary, I mean, you don’t just mean beneficiaries on accounts, do you? Yeah, isn’t that what estate planning is? You’re a CFP. I mean, come on, you know, there’s so much, so much you have to think about. So much you have to think about. Yeah, my wife and I redid all of our docs maybe two or three years ago, everything. And then just refreshed them and looked at them. I think it was in the last six months. Wow, so you have an active capacity to update them and access them. Yeah, I mean, life happens, right? Whether it’s new businesses or assets or whatever, life changes and kids grow up, get older and who you want to list as a guardian might change.

All that stuff happens. How about you? I do have my docs in order, although I went through a whole process probably about five or six years ago, hired a super high end estate attorney, spent a boatload of money, took probably four or five months to get it done and needed my chief of staff to actually help me get it done because it required so much complexity. When we have businesses and business interests, some of that stuff is in our own name, some of the stuff we choose to put in trust and do all kinds of complex structures. And this stuff gets really, really complicated and intimidating more than anything.

But I think the biggest challenge has been as a financial advisor, getting our clients to do this has been really, really tough. And I think that we’ve let a lot of people down, Derek. A lot of people, I mean, you’ve probably experienced, have you ever dealt with a family that’s not had their docs in order? Yeah, more often than not, Adam, unfortunately, I’ve seen this many times over the years. And I always made it a point to ask, do you have a will, do you have a trust? And when was the last time you had it updated? But most people said no, they hadn’t done it for some of the reasons you even said, because it could appear to be a very challenging and overwhelming thing to do.

But then also I would offer like, okay, well, you probably should do that. I’m not an attorney, but you should get it done. And then would recommend some attorneys. And two years later, they haven’t done anything. I remember one client specifically who said that they had done their estate planning and I had a copy of their trust, their will, powers of attorney, client passed away. Wasn’t updated enough. And there wasn’t enough dialogue between the attorney and the client, his life happened. This was over 10 years ago and the family’s still fighting. And it’s interesting because the whole family before he passed away, super successful, self-made man, seventh grade education, but multi-millionaire.

And his whole family said, kids, grandkids, cousins, oh, we all love each other. Everything’s fine. He died. They’re still fighting over the money today. Wow, not the legacy he probably intended. Not at all, not at all. It’s just so sad to see things like that happen. How about you? Have you ever dealt with something like that? I got inspired by this idea a bunch of years ago called the 100 year legacy. And I started asking my clients this question, what’s the 100 year legacy? Of course, most people had never even heard of this. And I said, I’m literally making it up. What is the 100 year, I mean, if you wanna be as intentional as I have a 100 year impact on the planet, your family, whatever, charity, church, government, whatever it might be.

You can actually be intentional, but it’s gonna take actual documentation because you’re not gonna be here to tell us. And I’ve had a couple of situations. I had a situation, gosh, not too long ago where a couple was always like, we’re not gonna do it, we’re not gonna do it. They decided to become pilots. You can kind of hear the end of the story. Oh no. They took their private plane and they flew to go visit their daughter and the plane didn’t make it. And their argument was always, well, the other spouse, if we lost one, the other spouse would have everything in order to fix everything and get it in order and get the assets and the insurances and the income.

Now what? So the surviving daughter was obviously in a very, very difficult situation. I couldn’t help but think, gosh, I could have done a better job of really forcing it. And not too long ago, my neighbor was actually in a long-term relationship and there was no documents, no planning. They never wanted to talk about it. And her partner just often died unexpectedly and she got left with nothing and he was supporting her 100% for the last 10 years. So it was really difficult. You know what I find? The number of people who go from having a loving relationship to literally cursing the name of the departed person because they left him in such a lurch because they just didn’t do their basic docs.

Yeah. It happens. It costs that much stress. It literally destroys the memory and the legacy. And that’s something we can actually avoid. We can help people avoid that. So there’s a cure for this, right? Yeah. There’s a cure. Gosh, it doesn’t have to be like this, but yet for some reason, still people avoid it and so forth. So that’s why we wanted to talk to Cody Barbo. So as you probably noticed in the title here, we invited Cody because Cody is the co-founder of Trust and Will, probably the fastest growing estate planning tool, if not the fastest out there where they’ve actually figured out how to scale solve this problem across all 50 states.

Tell me what you know about Cody. Yeah, I’ve known Cody for, man, it’s gotta be four years now, give or take. Really great guy, a dad, a serial entrepreneur, very supportive of the entrepreneur community as well. But like Trust and Will is partially a brainchild of just some issues that he went through and experienced himself, which you’ll hear him talk about here in a moment. But they’re onto something. I mean, he even references that so many people in the country don’t have any estate planning done at all. At least formal estate planning done, because remember, at least I would argue this, let’s get an attorney to verify, but I think every state has, what do they call it?

Intestate laws where if you die with nothing in writing, the state decides for you, right? It has a default plan. Exactly, it has a default plan. I would rather control that plan myself, but it’s such a massive problem and he talks about that and why they did it and all that. But just a really interesting story and their success is fantastic. They’re on a rocket ship and then some for sure. That is true, that is true. Awesome. Well, let’s hear what he had to say because I think you’ll find this pretty enlightening. Cody, thanks a ton for joining us. They really appreciate it. Please tell us more about your unique perspective on the financial advice space.

Yeah, I mean, we’ve been in the channel for over four years now. I think one of the biggest shifts we’re seeing with advisors, I’m trying to use this term, the whole stack advisor, and you’re like the therapist to somebody’s entire life. So your expectations to have knowledge and expertise on tax, state planning, insurance, in addition to finances, it’s pretty important. And maybe just like general life advice as well. I’m curious because you were obviously, you worked on several other startups before you did Trust and Will. I’m curious, what brought you into this space specifically? Yeah, so first startup was in the social media space at the onset of Instagram and Snapchat.

That’s like 2011 to 2013 in my chapter. And then last company was in hospitality tech. I did work in fine dining for a big restaurant group. And we were trying to bring next generation, kind of like a LinkedIn like platform to hospitality professionals. People make it their career. And we scaled that business, we raised venture. And what led to Trust and Will was more personal reasons. Like my wife and I now married for almost seven years and we’d sat down almost newlyweds and had never really talked about money and taxes and insurance. And when it came to estate plans, like she had lost her dad when we started dating and he didn’t have a will.

And the house went to probate, the cars, the guitar collection were assets that, at least amongst her, her brother and the stepmom were just painful to discuss. And like, I never felt like it was my place to bring anything up. So I just kept my mouth shut. And sometimes, I wish I said something, but at least in the context of our own lives, I was like, I wanna say something. If we’re gonna spend our whole lives together. And at the time we didn’t have much, but now we’ve got a house, we’ve got kids, we’ve got cars, we’ve got a life, we’ve got aging, loved one of things.

Like it’s a lot more full center as like a sandwich generation and put all the three of us in that bucket. And no one was doing this with like a modern, best in class solution. And that’s really what set out Daniel and Brian, my two other co-founders and I, to wanna solve for this. It’s like, this is an everybody problem. And if nobody’s doing it to our expectations, like no offense to legal zoo, like let’s go try and build the best version of our vision of what this could be. Got it. I mean, do you have ideas of how big these problems are in terms of how many people are unprotected with respect to wills and trusts?

Yeah. I mean, the stats, this is late 2017. So there’s not like a de facto source on estate planning. Like when we tried to figure out, well, who’s doing this? Why is there not a TurboTax like company that’s like very prominent in the market? Nobody talks about estate planning. And that’s kind of what we surfaced with some back of the napkin math for like, okay, there’s a couple of sources that say more than half of all adults don’t have this. Generally, if you look at like the demographics boomers, about 50, 60% have it, Gen X, there’s bigger gap. Millennials, there’s a huge gap. And over the last five years, or six years since we started, I put myself in the elder millennial bucket now on the back half of 30, that most of us are getting married, having kids, like really building our wealth for the first time.

And we figured that there would be like the same adoption we saw with Gen X and boomers with millennials over the next 20 years. The one thing that we weren’t thinking of that’s very prominent today in our pitch, mostly to investors, is the wealth transfer piece. You have boomers over the next 20 years transitioning 70 trillion in assets, mostly to younger Gen X and millennials. And it’s like the one lottery ticket you get in life is an inheritance and nobody’s prepared for that. And that’s really what got us excited about solving this business opportunity beyond just to see plenty of documents. That’s what people think of us for.

That’s great for consumers. But to our investors and to our partners, like we’re solving for wealth transfer in the next 10 to 20 years. It’s a great transition into the fact we know that you guys have been moving into the advisor space pretty significantly. Can’t go very far without saying, Andrea’s anywhere at a conference in FinTech these days. But what do you think is the missing opportunity that advisors are just not addressing? They don’t have estate plans themselves. I think that’s one of the key reasons why we got into the channel. We’ve been in business for six and a half years. The first two and a half we didn’t have an advisor tool.

And we’d have advisors reach out and ask like, hey, do you have PDFs? Like I’ve talked to my clients about this. You guys would be a great option in my menu because every advisor should have new turning relationships. Or they can’t get the clients to actually meet with the attorney, let alone do the estate plan. So that was kind of our belief as we, there’s only one player at the time, which I guess has been rebirthed as Encore estate plan. So I’ll give them some credit, but like there is no one in this channel building a brand and building awareness for the importance of estate planning.

So our go-to-market was, let’s just go meet with advisors and ask them if they have an estate plan themselves. If not, then yeah, hey, check out Trust & Will. See if it’s a good sit. And if it’s a good experience, like would you feel confident recommending it to your clients? And fast forward four years later, we’ve got over 13,000 advisors now that have signed up with us, large broker dealers, RAs, everyone in between. And now that the conference circuit’s been in full swing back last year and asked, we’ve got a team that’s out there and just trying to create awareness for this, even with other players in the space too.

Well, it sounds like one of the action steps is that advisors, anyone listening to this, should take a look at their own estate plan. And if they don’t have one, maybe get one, what other action steps would you ask advisors to think about when they’re working with their clients and estate planning comes up? Yeah, it’s not just the clients not having an estate plan. It’s when the last time it’s been updated. You take an average advisor and their book of business and client age range can be like late 20s to 60s and 70s. And as much as we like to imprint on the positives, like, hey, I got married, bought your first house, had kids.

You know, advisors, I go back to that therapist angle, but like they’re typically the first to know if you are gonna get divorced or if you’re having a major health scare, you just lost a loved one, a parent or even a spouse or partner. And if you’re getting remarried, you have a blended family, there’s dynamics that are in play that you’re often the first person that’s being told about this and you’re thinking about it through lens of their financial life and wealth journey. But you spend your whole career navigating this family and their estate. Why not protect it multi-generationally? So we really want to encourage advisors, not just to get their clients to create the estate plan, but come back and make updates.

Because that’s the thing all the time I ask, my team lasts at this point because I ask it on every call, every external call especially, and I ask people in person, if they have an estate plan, people say, yeah. And then on my follow up questions, well, when did you create it? When’s the last time you updated it? Most often people never touch it again. It goes in the box for 30, 40 years until you expire. Right. And nobody knows where it is. Now is the other thing with trust and will, like I was prompted by my wife’s experience, but my own parents, like modest retirement, and they’d never mentioned to my brother and I, I’m the oldest, they’d never mentioned the estate plan.

And I was like, hey, it’s like, do you have this? Mom goes into the garage, gets a box, it’s in there. I’m reading through with like legal gibberish that no consumer understands. And I see my brother and I’s name all throughout and I’m like, oh shit. And then I’m seeing age provisions. I’m like, okay, at the time when they created it, we were younger, so there’s age provisions. Now we’re older. I was like, I am responsible for this. And my brother and I split everything evenly. We’ve got a great relationship, but that was my first question back then. I was like, who set this up?

Who do I call? Like, if you guys, I like, what’s the order of operations? I think this is something nobody’s prepared for in the country. And that’s where with trust and will, you have the ability to notify loved ones of the estate plan that it exists on trust and will, similar to how Apple has a legacy contacts feature. You can appoint a legacy contacts. I travel lots. Every time I leave, I tell my wife or my mom, say, hey, on behalf of me, you have access to the estate on trust and will. And same with my parents. They updated, as they followed us out to Texas, they updated their estate and you can share access with the plan as well.

So I have my mom’s plan in my dashboard as well. So if something happened to them, I can click into it and have some next steps. So kind of, you know, create a network effect around the estate plan. That’s really thoughtful. Is there, I’m curious, is there anything else you think needs to be heard or debated by the advice community? Yeah. One thing that I actually really appreciate about the advisor channel is like, so we sell trust and wills and most people know what a will is through family or pop culture. So we do a lot of education. That’s really like the biggest barrier to this is the lack of education and good old procrastination.

So like, it’s funny how in the advisor channel, like everybody gets, well, how do you guys compare to wealth or vanilla? I’m like, okay, why start there? Like, let’s talk about your book of business. How many of your clients have an estate plan? Like how many of them have an estate plan? Cause if you can’t get most of them to do this, like who cares? There could be 50 more companies coming into this channel. Getting the client to do it is the hardest part. And that’s really where we anchor back into the presentation to advisors, especially if they’re looking at it through a competitive lens.

I’m like, who’s going to be the best firm that gets your clients to do this? And like some firms are geared towards your high net worth and above clients. The others like trust and will or more mass market. It’s totally fine. You can have multiple tools that you use as long as you’re getting your clients to get the estate plan done. That’s the single most important thing. So like, I’m a huge advocate for just continuing to be education first. And for our team with obviously Andreas and a great team on the advisor side, just be helpful and like be helpful in educating the advisor and their clients.

And if we do that, we’re doing our job. I’m curious. Do you want to talk at all about where you’re going? I’d love to share a little bit about the future of Trust and Wealth. So we’re six years in on our journey. We’ve raised 50 million in capital. We’ve got a hundred people on our team. And I think people sometimes, this is intentional because you have an advisor, audience and network. People think of us in this relationship of wealth, vanilla, trust and more. And I’m like, that’s fine. That’s great. But we’ve built a massive consumer business that by next year, this time next year, we’re targeting nine figure run rate.

We’re targeting Trust and Wealth being the largest estate planning company in the United States. That’s the business that we set out to build. And because we’re solving for wealth transfer, not just paying points for advisors in the client relation to estate planning, we’re building a national brand. So TV campaigns and commercials, ambitions to do a super bowl spot as an example. We have a hundred institutional partners that are not broker dealers or RAs. These are some of the largest financial institutions like UBS, American Express, USAA, maybe Federal. We work with large insurance companies. We’ve got AARP, we’re the official estate planning partner of AARP. Trust and Wealth wants to be everywhere and anywhere that a family is.

And if we’re doing our job, that’s the reach that we get in helping families actually do this at the end of the day. So we’re building a ton of new product. We have some marquee partnerships, including in the advisor space that we’ll be announcing later this year. And we’re still having fun. I think founders, you get so stressed out and bogged down and the day-to-day of the business, we get to help families every day and we’ve built a great business. And that’s what keeps me going all these years. I love that. It’s working really well. It’s working, yeah. That’s working fucking hard. Don’t shy away from that.

The thing that people at least want is to think about their own death and mortality. Every day we gotta get just fired up and excited about it. And if we can get partners excited about it, advisors excited about it, clients will get excited about it. And that’s what changes this actual trend in our culture is to be okay talking about deaths and what happens to our staff and our family. Ends on a pretty deep note, right? Talking about our death, but about how they get excited every day to talk about it, to help people make sure that their wishes are executed on. It’s pretty powerful.

Well, I don’t think they’re excited about death. They’re excited about making sure that when somebody dies that people aren’t actually lost also. So there’s been a, I used to joke around a lot with the Trust and Will guys years ago when they first came out, I said, this is perfect because when most people are lost, they need a map and they need directions. That’s what you need when you’re lost. I’m like asset map is the map and Trust and Will is the directions. Bingo. It’s that kind of classic meet the core need. And I love what he said is that it doesn’t really matter so much if it’s the best planning tool.

The reality is people have zero, right? So they’re starting from no place. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve seen this a hundred times with our clients. Oh my gosh, so many times over the years. And how many times as an advisor, have you said, hey, you know what? Do you have a Will or a Trust? No, we don’t. Okay, well, you really should. I’m gonna introduce you to three attorneys. You make the introductions. You check in. Nothing happens. A year or two goes by. Yeah, Adam, I really should have done that. Life’s been busy. Wait, do we have the same clients? I mean, that’s exactly what I’m going through.

Yeah. Seriously. I think most advisors are gonna probably chuckle cause it’s the same problem. We all have the same clients that really just don’t want to. Actually, you know what’s really scary? The number of financial professionals that don’t have their estate plan in order is probably laughable. You know, it’s funny cause I look back at my early days as an advisor and I did ask this question quite regularly and try to nudge them to like, hey, you should go talk to an attorney and here’s a couple of people I know. I didn’t have anything, right? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. I didn’t have a lot going on back then, married in a house, but no kids and more debt than income, you know, stuff like that.

So it was like, whatever. Yeah. But it really is important, but the pain of doing it from going from zero, as you say, and getting it done, man, it was just, it’s too much. Yeah. There’s something actually that’s really cathartic about actually doing your estate plan and getting it done and that relaxation you get in your shoulders when, ah, I finally have done it. Yeah. Now I can actually say it with a straight face when I’m talking to people and not trying to hide it and be like, yeah, yeah, that’s, yeah, I got my beneficiaries on my IRA. Yeah, right, right. That is not estate planning.

Isn’t it? I said, oh, but the person who’s gonna get my life insurance at work is, yeah, that’s known. Yeah, my uncle’s buddy is getting my life insurance. Oh, my estate plan’s done, right? That’s right, I did it, I did it. All right, well, let’s talk about it. So there were a lot of key takeaways and I know you put down a bunch of notes, so help everybody who was listening to this really summarize and let’s debate the tank. Well, let’s think about what he had to say. One of his first comments that I really liked was the term full stack advisor. And he’s referring to it in a technical way.

What other profession does the professional have the capacity to talk to and advise on so many different aspects of a person’s life? Now, I’ve joked about it like an advisor. We know more than your attorney, priest, and shrink all combined, right? We hear all kinds of things. You’ve said that. I have, but in all seriousness, we do. And that gives us an opportunity to be able to actually have a meaningful conversation about estate planning. Doesn’t mean we have to implement it, we’re not attorneys. But to at least have an understanding and have that conversation to get it on the radar is super important. Absolutely. You know, what’s full stack is an interesting term because as you and I know, full stack is a developer term, the technical, an engineer.

Full stack means you understand the front end and the back end of development, the database and the user experience. So that’s a rare person that understands full stack. But full stack for a financial advisor would imply that you are looking out for things that you don’t necessarily get compensated that you’re actually thinking about this holistic mindset that a lot of advisors have been using, this best interest, holistic, comprehensive advisor. And yet we’re still seeing such a gap in the estate planning and the GSD of getting it done, right? We’ve touched on this before. Maybe it’s an issues that the advisor doesn’t get paid to do it.

I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not, but like literally while we’re recording this, I got an email from a client asking if I do wills. So it’s top of mind, like, no, I’ve never done that, but I have a resource for you. And it’d be cool to give them a resource that’s client directed, it’s easy, it helps them get it done quickly. I mean, it just, it makes a whole difference on the user experience. Yeah, well, I think you’re right. People don’t wanna get it done. No, there’s lots of reasons why we’ve talked about every excuse in the book. You can probably even think about them yourself if you’re an advisor, why your clients won’t do it.

Almost all the time it comes down to procrastination or intimidation, or I don’t know the answer. We’re gonna debate and have a fight over who should be the guardian. So I don’t wanna start that fight today. Let’s just kick the can and let’s not discuss what we want in our wills because you know, the guardian, who’s gonna take care of the kids or whether I want a DNR or I don’t want a DNR, right? These things are gonna be fights in a household. Sometimes people avoid that or they don’t wanna look at the cost. I think what? Trust and Will is in the hundreds of dollars to get it done.

You know, we had a situation in our family where someone was getting surgery. We got it done using Trust and Will literally in two hours notarized. It was done. Everything. Amazing. It’s all online, no attorneys involved, and we got it done. I think that was more important from a just relaxing standpoint, from a relief. You got it done. They facilitate a great experience. Oh, my family, we did all of our estate planning through them. Really? They mailed our docs to us. We had a notary public, a mobile one, come to our house. Oh, no way. And we got it done. It was just, it was a great experience.

So they do make it a lot, a lot easier. And what I like, what he also had to say is that this isn’t everybody problem. And he and his team were trying to think like, how can we solve an everybody problem that we’re experiencing ourselves? And it’s true because not a lot of, when they came out on the scene, not a lot of companies were really doing this at a mass scale. I think the two experiences you and I just shared are great examples of why people would consider a service like this versus over the old way of doing it. But he did mention that for the advanced estate planning and cases, for the smaller percent of population that has super high net worth, they’re probably not the best solution.

That it’s okay to go into an attorney and pay for those services, but that’s okay too. It’s really interesting how they’ve tackled this. Absolutely, look, scaling, solving a massive problem is really quite amazing. I mean, you see the kind of the social impact they’re gonna have, especially as employers are starting to offer this as a fringe benefit or a voluntary benefit. I think you’re gonna start to see more and more people attempt to try to just get this done. There’s enormous amount of slack in the system and that creates enormous arbitrage when you think about the money management that is about to move from generation boomer and oldest generation that’s still surviving to X and millennial.

We keep talking about this major transfer, but the reality is that I think a lot of our individual younger clients that may be inclined to get this done, their parents haven’t actually done the planning. So there could be an opportunity actually to embed oneself in a family by helping a younger family, we’ll call it X millennial, by solving this problem for them and then actually referring it up to their parents because they know they’re gonna wind up becoming the surprise executor and there’s no documents, there’s no organization, there’s no map and directions, if you will. And so there’s gonna be a great incentive to make sure that the generation that’s alive right now has their stuff in order.

100%, great opportunity to even broach the conversation. Sometimes that’s a little bit awkward, but this is a great way to get in there. It’s interesting, you have a note here about advisors expanding services and we talked about this, Jamie Hopkins in our last episode about what’s your differentiator? And you don’t have to do it all in-house or build it yourself. And so maybe you’re a state planning service that your firm offers, is simply outsourcing to a solution like Trust and Will. It’s a great way to outsource, but still have that value add there like, hey, by the way, like we don’t do this in-house, but here’s a great thing that we know you could try looking at.

No, it’s very true, it’s very true. You know, I wrote this note down, I think we could probably see it, but effectively I said that we do find a lot of times that our clients are saying, well, is this the best or do I need to interview five different attorneys? And guess what happens? They don’t get it done. But somebody said to me a long time ago, they said, what’s the best life insurance when you die? The one that’s enforced, the one you bought. That’s right, the one that’s actually gonna pay a claim. Yeah. And it turns out that whether you bought term or perm or real or whatever.

No one cares. It actually, at the time of claim, it’s usually a lot more than the premium you’ve paid. But if you don’t do anything, then does it really matter? So we sometimes, I think, debate the wrong thing. And this is such a convenient, as Jamie Hopkins also talked about, convenience economy. This is such a convenient solution. You can literally just use this as a bridge. Get it done until you have it renewed again. And I think that’s the big question that we should really be asking all of our clients and all of our other fellow advisors is, is when’s the last time you really reviewed this and what are you gonna do about it?

Can’t you just get this done this weekend and just move on and then at least buy yourself a little bit of space? 100%. And if you go through it as an advisor, yeah, you’re taking care of yourself and your family. But now you can speak to the experience with conviction if you are actually gonna end up referring it. And it’s not just like what I used to do. Like, hey, you should get a will and no, I don’t have one. No, that’s right. You should all over them. I should all over you. You should do this. You should do this. You should do this. I haven’t done it, but don’t worry about me.

This isn’t about me. Right, investments? No, I don’t have investments. Insurance, what’s that? Well, I don’t have to do, I’m just in sales. But you should buy it. I tell you what, it’s really funny. I know that my business had some real moments that it exploded when I started doing what I was telling my clients. Oh, yeah. It changed from like a conviction. I do this myself, let me show you mine. And they’re like, oh, you do it. I’ll do whatever you do. Cause they figure you’re gonna do what’s best for yourself. But we see the shoe cobbler situation and advisors haven’t done half this stuff, let alone set up the trusts and put all the stuff off your balance sheet.

I mean, there’s lots of stuff that we know how to do but don’t do what we know. You know, it’s almost a risk as an advisor. Think about it, you are one question away from appearing to be almost, I don’t know if this is the right word but I’m gonna say anyways, to be a fraud. Oh. And maybe that’s not the best word, but I think let me explain is that what if a client asks, hey, what do you own whole life? Do you own term? Do you invest your money in this with this wealth manager? And if your answer is no, then that’s a major red flag to the client.

And I don’t know how many clients are gonna ask that but some will and I would say probably more now into the future than not just because we are all about information. So how are you gonna be able to answer that question? Yeah, but the funny thing is I think about it from the alternative side, which is if instead of them asking, why don’t we just volunteer that information? Because we have already done. That’s why I’m saying my business changed when instead of the clients didn’t have to ask. I just say, let me show you my asset map and let me show you how the complexity that I’m dealing with.

I had to do this and this, this to work around it but I’m recommending you do this but you don’t need to do this yet. You’re not ready for that, right? So I have bought all this insurance but I put it all in trust at the inception because I know what’s happening to my net worth and I’m planning for that inevitability. Oh, Adam, why are you doing it that way? And we wanna do it that way too. I’m like, okay, fine. Well, we could do that. Well, you don’t have to. So there’s a way when you’ve walked to the path to say, hey, walk this path with me.

The estate plan is no different. When I did a full estate plan, I went crazy and I followed one of my wealthiest clients. So I’m like, I’m gonna do what they did because they know what they’re doing. And I literally structured everything. Took months with a really top-end attorney which was a lot of money as well, right? But once I had done that and I shared that with people, it gave me a much different credibility all day long. Because I wasn’t asking them to basically go jump off the cliff. I had already done that and I knew how to land. And that’s an important aspect, I think, for this.

What a great way. And we’ve been talking about what’s your value adding or differentiator offering the service but also being a consumer of that service. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. I love it. That’s great. Can I do an experiment here? Oh, sure. Don’t worry, it’s not gonna cost you anything. So here’s, if you’re listening to this right now, I want you to pay attention to the following questions because we’re gonna ask you these questions, all right? So you know the answer because we can’t hear you. All right, so I wanna ask you a question you’re gonna answer inside your own head because hopefully you’re not gonna lie to yourself.

All right, you ready? Are you asking me to? Well, sure, you can answer these in your own head. Okay, don’t tell anybody. All right, so I won’t talk. All right, good. Okay, you ready? Here’s the question and I’d like you to practice this because you’re gonna ask your clients the same thing. When was the last time your will was reviewed? Okay, that’s question number one. Number two, do you know who the guardians of your dependent children are? Do you and your partner, if you have one, agree? That’s a big one. And is it in writing? Oh yeah. Do you have a power of attorney that is durable, which means that if you’re incapacitated, it still holds and people can still make financial decisions for you.

Do your documents include a HIPAA authorization, a more modern concept where family members would need to get medical information from you in order to make decisions. They don’t have HIPAA authorization in your documents. They ain’t getting it. Do you have a living will that says what your plans are for medical decisions to be made and who is making that decision? Who is making that decision? Does it matter? Or can anybody make it? Do you have a do not resuscitate order in there? Or are your family members going to be taking care of your vegetable body for the next 20 years and paying the rest of your money for it?

And that’s okay, but is that intentional? And do you have special needs dependents? People that require additional thoughtfulness in terms of what they’re eligible to get for public benefits as well as private benefits and is your current planning aligned with it? And the last one was mentioned just, in last episode, what is the plan with your digital assets? Yeah. Is there a clear documentation of the digital assets and how to access it and who can access it? There’s a lot of new legislation that’s changed in the last 10 years, Derek, at the state level and at the national level because some of these things didn’t even exist.

Did cryptocurrencies really exist, NFTs? Your login to your Facebook account with a multi-factor. Is anybody getting into that thing? All new. It’s annoying. Yeah. Well, so my thought, look, if you’re listening and you actually answered, I don’t know to any of those questions, this is the moment that you’ve been waiting for, for someone to tell you to go do this or do something like it. That’s so powerful, Adam. I’m glad you mentioned all that. And so if you’re listening, go stop what you’re doing after this episode’s over and go figure the answers to these questions out. You could put us on pause. Right? They can put us on pause, but yeah, they got to finish the episode still.

They got to finish. What could be coming? That’s awesome. No, I don’t even know really what to follow that up with. Honestly, I think that was a really, those are solid, specific takeaways and help yourself, help your clients. I mean, it’s huge. You look at it, it’s as easy as we just did that. Right? I mean, that wasn’t scripted in any form. That’s a list. You guys know this in your head if you’ve been in the space for any length of time. These are just smart things to get done. The challenge is nobody’s asking these questions to the rigor that I think we all should be and I think are expected to as their financial advocate.

And I think that’s important, not just for the clients that you’re dealing with, but also for their parents, your clients’ parents, if they’re still alive, may very well be unknowing executors or executrixes, trustees or guardians, and they don’t even know it. Yeah. It could change your life to find out all of a sudden your brother’s kids are now yours. Yeah, and they’re in a different state. Oh, and nobody thought about the finances and your brother didn’t have any insurance or any trust planning and now all the assets are going to his second wife and you got the kids. Does that change your plans? It might.

Oh yeah. It might, especially if they’re underage children. Right? So think about that. Like just this little, little thing, you could get some stuff done and you’d have some ammunition to deal with these challenges. And I think we just, we tend to turn a blind eye because we don’t want to talk about it, but it’s really dumb. It’s like dumb already. Well, yeah, right. And last time I checked every single one of us as an expiration date. We don’t know when it is, but it’s going to happen. So wouldn’t it feel better just to get this stuff done, have the peace of mind, and then go do the things you really want to do?

Yeah, absolutely. Just so you know, none of us, we’re not compensated by Trust and Will at all, but then whether you use them or you use anyone else, the real key here was to bring up the topic and hopefully get us thinking about it. Cause this is rethinking financial advice, Derek. And that’s what we’re asking everybody to do. 100%, man, I love it. All right, well, with that, we’re going to wrap this up and give you time back to go get some of this stuff done. And of course, check and see if your documents are in order, or ask the people who would know in your family and make sure that there’s a path to get something done.

I really challenge you to try to talk to this, to three to five people this week, right? Ask these questions, get more comfortable talking about it. And if you have a resource like Trust and Will, that’s fantastic. Or if you have a relationship, go use it, but just please put it to work and make sure you take care of several families. This week alone, they will appreciate it. And I’m guaranteeing it’s going to come back to you in many ways forward. And that’s just an experience we’ve both had in doing this personally. Well, thank you, Adam. And Cody, thank you for joining us. Love what you and the team were doing over at Trust and Will, really appreciate you sharing more about your journey and what you guys are doing to help people at large or being across the country at this point.

So all of our listeners, thanks for joining us again. As always, we know you’re giving us lots of five-star reviews, because those are the only ones we allow. Make sure you follow us on LinkedIn, subscribe to the podcast. Please share it. There’s so many advisors out there that can benefit from the stuff in this podcast. So please share it and get the message out there. And if you’ve got something you want us to talk about, send us a note. And you can watch us on YouTube if you’re not watching. Oh yeah, we’re starting to do video now too. That’s right. So you can see how silly we look all the time.

That’s it, yeah. All right, that’s good. Awesome, my friend. Well, great to see you. And I look forward to our next opportunity to rethink financial advice. Sounds good, buddy. Cheers. See you later. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.