Nikki Foley: The clock is ticking. Only 150 days remain to accomplish something your future self and your family will thank you for. If you could complete just one important financial task before December 31st, what would it be? Would you update your beneficiaries? Update your estate plan. Whatever you choose, commit to getting it done before the year ends. Welcome to Paladin Financial Talk. I’m your host Nikki Foley and I’m joined today by founder of Paladin Financial and featured adviser Jeff Foley. Welcome Jeff.

Jeff Foley: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Nikki Foley: Absolutely. So, Jeff, we’ve been doing this 150-day countdown and we’ve been encouraging our listeners to pick one meaningful financial goal from each show and to take action. And so today we’re going to help them choose one final task. You are our part four. And so, you’re the final one here. No pressure.

Jeff Foley: No pressure at all.

Nikki Foley: One thing that could have the greatest impact to the people they love. So, are you ready to dive in?

Jeff Foley: I am ready. So exciting. So exciting.

And we also have a special guest today with us off camera. This fine-looking young man, but we didn’t give him any camera time today. Michael is here interviewing for summer internship with us for next year. So, hello Michael.

Michael: Hi, everyone.

Nikki Foley: All right, Michael. Thanks for joining us.

And Jeff, glad to have you here. So, as I mentioned, we are in our fourth and final episode in our four-part series where our advisers here at Paladin have been focused on one area, small intentional actions that can create meaningful financial results for tomorrow. And so, let me tell you what we’ve covered up to this point as a recap.

Jeff Foley: So, I have been listening.

Nikki Foley: Oh, you have? Okay. All right. Well, let me tell our listeners then in case they’ve missed one of these episodes that Jeff Quick started by just recommending one financial goal to realistically accomplish by December 31st. So, he started off keeping it very broad and then Ellie came in and she gave us an episode to how you might find some additional hidden money in your finances. And so that was a good one to look at what you might already be doing that could uncover some extra funds to potentially contribute to your financial plan. And then Matt lent some tax perspective in our 150-day countdown in episode 3. And today we will bring it to you. It’s your turn to help us find one action related to your legacy. And so, our listeners get ready because we want to determine one financial goal to build a simple plan around December 31st. And with that, Jeff, I want to talk a little bit about you. You have been on this show. You have run this show for years, but I want to talk about something that you’re working on right now that I think plays right into our topic today. So, you’re currently working on a new designation related to this topic, estate and legacy planning. What designation are you currently working on and why?

Jeff Foley: Yeah, working on the Certified Estate and Trust Specialist. I like to say that financial planning is one of my hobbies. So, enjoyed that. Did the Certified Tax Specialist last year, the Certified Estate and Trust Specialist. And estate planning, it’s one of the four pillars that we talk about at Paladin. You have your financial plan, your tax plan, your health plan, and your estate plan. All of these things need to work together. And estate planning is an area that is kind of a gray thing for a lot of people. A lot of fear and confusion with it. So, the more we know the better.

Nikki Foley: Yeah, absolutely. And we have found when we work with clients and prospective clients that often time estate and legacy planning falls lower on the priority list for our clients. And I’m excited for you to share your perspective today as you might lend some a new thought for some of our listeners and something that they can get excited about.

Jeff Foley: Yeah.

Nikki Foley: So, let’s dive in. Let’s get excited about estate planning.

Jeff Foley: That’s right.

Nikki Foley: Well, clearly, it’s one of your hobbies. So here we go. All right. So Jeff, I’m going to do this in a question-and-answer format if that works for you. And the first thing that I want you to share perspective on is why do so many people delay this conversation around estate and protection planning?

Jeff Foley: Yeah. I think the first thing that comes up is as humans, we don’t like to think about bad things. So, let’s put that off in the dark corner and avoid it as much as possible. We heard from someone that a coach that we’d worked with some time ago is our minds were designed to protect the space suit. So, conserve energy and talk about estate planning for a lot of people who consume energy. Second big one is we avoid what we don’t know. So, if you don’t understand something again let’s not focus on that and do the things that we know very well. We also avoid things that we think are difficult. I think that ties together as well as again conserving energy and people would rather spend money on things that are here and now versus this nebulous thing down the road that hey, I’m not going to be here potentially so I don’t want to worry about it as much and spend my money there. So, part of that comes with assuming the cost is going to be a lot of times a lot higher than what it actually needs to be. And people often assume as well that everything’s going to work out fine. My wife, the kids, everything’s going to be good. And I think I’ve referenced this book in the past, but there’s a book by Chanel Reynolds called What Matters Most, the Get Your Sh*t Together Guide to Wills, Money, Insurance, and Life’s What-Ifs. And she walks through a scenario where her husband was a biker, had an accident, and was on life support for a number of days, and all the bad stuff that came about it. They didn’t have their stuff together and she talks through lessons learned with that. So, encourage you if you’re on the fence about do I want to bother with an estate plan, get that book, and check that out.

Nikki Foley: Sometimes when there’s a story that goes along with, you know, an activity like this, the story can be very compelling.

Jeff Foley: Rich and compelling.

Nikki Foley: Rich and compelling. Absolutely. So, Chanel Reynolds is the author on that. And again, the book is What Matters Most: The Get Your Sh*t Together Guide to Wills, Money, Insurance, and Life’s What-Ifs. Oh my.

Jeff Foley: I know. We just got blocked. Our rating changed.

Nikki Foley: And so, Jeff, if people have a tendency to delay and not face this conversation, what can often happen is mistakes. And so, what would you say are some of the most common mistakes you see involving beneficiaries, wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and so forth? You see this a lot in the role that you do?

Jeff Foley: Yeah, the first big one is beneficiaries are not filled out. And if that is the case, you pass away, your estate is your beneficiary, that asset is going to go through probate. Literally just met with a couple yesterday. Very well put together, very knowledgeable. Looked at one of his investment statements. He’s got about a million dollars in his retirement plan, still working, contributing, and right on there, no beneficiaries listed. So it happens even with people that are, you know, quote unquote have their sh*t together. Two, beneficiaries are outdated. Divorces happen, additional kids, divorce, you know, whatever it might be. Third would be not considering how you structure your beneficiaries. Outside of what we need to get into today, but there you have per stirpes and per capita, or different ways that you can set up your beneficiaries, which determines if you have a beneficiary that predeceases you and you don’t update your beneficiaries, who gets their portion of the assets. People think having a will gets them out of probate. That’s not the case. So, if you have a will, it’s giving the probate court guidance, but it’s not a guarantee and it still has to go through the probate process. So even if the will is followed, it has to drag through that process. Setting up a trust but not doing anything with it. So, you’ve got a very expensive paperweight that’s, you know, six, eight inches deep. And think of that as a bucket, as we’ve talked about in previous shows. You set up the trust, it’s a bucket, but you have to put things in the bucket. And it’s very common that people don’t do that or they only partially fund the trust. And I think the final one is not having healthcare directives and financial power of attorney. So, a lot of people might have a will, but they didn’t take the extra step of having a healthcare directive and a financial power of attorney. So, if something happens to you, you’re incapacitated but you’re still here. Who do you want to give what authority in that process? So, you think of that book that I referenced. She talks about how her life would have been much different. Things would have played out much differently if she had that in place ahead of time.

Nikki Foley: And you know, the last two that you mentioned there with having the power of attorney and a healthcare directive, especially the healthcare directive, that’s something that is—you can actually do that for free by downloading, and there’s a template that, you know, we’re in the state of Minnesota, like they’re not hard activities, but oftentimes we get in the way of ourselves that we don’t get something done. And if you look down that list, you know, there’s a couple of them, at least half of them there are—you have to take action. And so, setting aside time, meaningful time to get things done is a key piece of all of this. So, whether it’s your Saturday morning or a Friday afternoon, you know, making sure the beneficiary is taken care of, making sure that you are actually investing time in it because it’ll pay off and it’s a critical one. You know, Jeff, you mentioned the per stirpes and per capita. I think most people can’t even spell stirpes, let alone what that might mean. That is something that we’ll put in the show notes and define that because it’s often not commonplace in the language that people have. And so, understanding what that means so that you don’t unintentionally disinherit somebody.

Jeff Foley: Yeah. The other thing to note of that since you mentioned is every institution that you have an account handles that process a little bit differently. Sometimes it’s a very obvious checkbox where you say I want per stirpes or per capita. Sometimes it’s buried in the fine print. So, you want to be aware of every institution that you have assets at, how are they handling it?

Nikki Foley: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a good point to bring up, Jeff. What are some of the topic-related reviews families should complete before year end? So, what are some of the major things that are related to this topic that people should do before year end? And is this an annual thing, like a recurring thing, or is it once you do it one time? Can I set it and forget it?

Jeff Foley: Yeah, you do want to make sure that you’re reviewing things. And maybe it’s not every year if you have everything buttoned up. Major life changes—kids, grandkids, divorce, things like that, health changes, changes in your outlook of life—any, all those things are forks in the road. But I think it comes down to keeping it simple. If you don’t have an estate plan in place, your action item here before the end of the year is very simple. It’s going to take less than five minutes to do: simply schedule a time to meet with someone. So, find an attorney. Don’t overthink it. You don’t need to make any decisions about who gets what and who your people are, you know, just book something. And one of the things that we’ve added for our clients over the years, we have Paladin Legal Services and we added that. We’re not attorneys. I’ll get into that a little bit, but a lot of people have delayed getting their estate plan in place because, talking about that earlier, they’re overwhelmed. They think it’s going to cost an arm and a leg, etc. So, we have Paladin Legal Services. If anyone wants help with getting a will, trust, healthcare directive, financial power of attorney, the basics in place, you can reach out and we can get that in place for you as well. But get something scheduled. Secondly, if you do have an estate plan, simply sit down, review it. So actually read through: What does my will say? Do I have a healthcare directive? Nope, I don’t. Or it was, you know, 10 years ago, maybe I should get that updated. And make sure that your family or whoever your trusted people are have an actual copy of it. So, if your house burns down with you in it and you’re not here, they’ve got a copy of that on hand. So, sit down and spend a little bit of time reviewing what you have.

Nikki Foley: Jeff, I fumbled that. I fumbled through my question. I realized that this was our big aha of, like, what your final recommendation is. And so, what I heard you say is do not make this more complicated than it needs to be and take the action of scheduling something if you don’t have it. And if you do have something in place, schedule a time for yourself to review it.

Jeff Foley: Yeah. So the point is to do something simple.

Nikki Foley: Yeah. Move it forward. And that’s—that was kind of the aha that I fumbled there. So good job there.

Jeff Foley: It was good.

Nikki Foley: You did a great job of bringing it to life and making it simple. So, this is the challenge that I have for everybody that’s listening today. We have about 150 days left until the end of the year. So, December 31st is your deadline. And we have challenged you to create one financial goal and to take action after each one of these shows. And so, as Jeff has left it with us here, he has made it very simple. You don’t have to have all the decisions made but make sure that you schedule a time. And so, if that is your goal, I encourage you to get on it. If you need to take a little additional time, make sure that you put the thought into it so that you can have that action in place and completed by December 31st. If you have done and followed along the last four episodes, you will have taken four meaningful steps towards a stronger financial picture. So that’s our challenge for the week. Complete the one action before next week’s episode where we start a whole new series and you’ll have to build these items together with us. All right, Jeff, anything that you want to add before we wrap up?

Jeff Foley: I would just say don’t overcomplicate it. Again, people get overwhelmed with estate planning. Just take a simple step, whether it’s the two, you know, the one that we talked about there, whatever yours is, but take it bite by bite and it’s not all that complicated once you get into it.

Nikki Foley: Yeah, absolutely. And so, in closing, if you want to take the next step, be sure you check out our complimentary download that goes along with each one of our episodes. And so, it’s designed to help you put what we’ve talked about into action. And so, this whole series has been around goals. And so, what we have done is we are offering our SMART Goals template at paladinfinancialtalk.com. And if you were listening to my last episode, I went through all the details of what a SMART goal is, but it makes you get into the real details. In fact, Jeff and I were walking—hiking last night—and we were talking about a subject and I started rolling down the SMART, you know, can I get into the level of detail where I actually want to execute? And I got about halfway into it. I was like, nope, this one is not for me. Not right now. And so doing something in a SMART goal format where you have to get it measurable and specific and actionable, and oftentimes you abandon it before you actually take action. And so, get that download by going to paladinfinancialtalk.com. Again, it’s our SMART Goals template. It’s right there on the homepage. Well, with that, if you’re sitting there and thinking, gosh, some of this sounds like me. I really want a second opinion maybe on where you’re at right now. We’re offering a 15-minute, no-obligation conversation to help you get clarity on this topic or something else that might be on your mind. So, visit our website at paladinfinancial.com or paladinfinancialtalk.com, then click the booking tool in the top right corner, or you can always pick up the phone at 651-842-8406. And if you like what you’re hearing, you want more education, certainly follow along with us on our social media platforms for more insights, resources, and upcoming topics. We try to keep a lot of these—if we’re talking about action items or if we’re talking about estate planning—we try to make that consistent across all of our channels. So, follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. And thanks for listening and we’ll see you on the next episode.