Ken Moraif  

Matt, Hello everyone, and welcome back to our part two of our series on estate planning. And this is for all you estate planning maniacs out there who want to pass on to your greedy, unwashed, undeserving heirs the fruits of your labor in the least cost, most tax efficient way, and they get it the way you want them to and of course, I’m kidding about the greedy, unwashed, undeserving, but in case you have one of those, just hose them off. I found that works well. So we’re going to get into beneficiary designations this time. And so thank you for watching. I hope this podcast finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. And so we’re going to dive in. Let me bring in Jeremy, my co host. Jeremy, good to see you. Hello. Nice to see you. Yeah. Are you excited about talking about beneficiary designations? You know, I will bet you you couldn’t sleep last night. Yeah, you had butterflies all night thinking about, Oh my gosh, we’re gonna be talking about Benny designation.

Jeremy Thornton  

Adrenaline spike is every time you say beneficiary or estate planning, every time, is that what it takes? Yeah, yeah. We’re building off of the basics that we kind of went over last time. And so diving a little bit more into those specifics, are beneficiaries?

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, just to kind of give everybody kind of the big picture, right? So we’re, we’re going to walk through, you know, the major components of the estate planning process, kind of in a 30,000 foot level. But then we’re also, just because we want to be thorough, we’re going to break it down into little component, little digestible bites, where we’re going to get into, more specifically, you know, living trusts, and all those other things that we talk about. And so those will be coming soon as well, so that you can dive into more detail. But for purposes of this one, we’re going to kind of be a little bit big picture, but we’ll get into some we’re gonna have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have when talking about beneficiary designations, absolutely, I’m telling

Jeremy Thornton  

you, yeah, I don’t know what that line is, where you’re allowed to have as much fun, but we’re going

Ken Moraif  

beyond it. We’re crossing it right cross. Yeah,

Jeremy Thornton  

okay, great. All right, so let’s, let’s jump right into it. For beneficiaries, what goes by your will and what doesn’t,

Ken Moraif  

yeah, so that’s something that a lot of people don’t understand, and that is that your beneficiary designations, okay, that’s what you where you designate, and you do that with like your IRAs, where you put in, who gets it and what percentage, et cetera, your life insurance policies, annuities, any kind of a document where you have designated who your beneficiary is, that supersedes your will. So if your Will says, I leave, you know, a third to each of my three children, yeah, but your IRA beneficiary form, you filled it out when you only had two kids, and it says, it goes to my two kids. Then that overrides your will. It will go to the two kids, not the three that the will says, wow. So you have to always be very, very careful that what you want, you know, what you put in your will and what you put on your beneficiary designations for all your various investment accounts or whatever else matches. Because if it doesn’t, the beneficiary designations supersede.

Jeremy Thornton  

Yeah, it’s authority is not as great. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s a very interesting point that I’m sure not everyone thinks about.

Ken Moraif  

And I’ve seen it happen where, you know, they’re surprised by that. And unfortunately, this the surprise happens after Yeah, death, yeah. And at that point you can’t delay, yeah, you can’t change

Jeremy Thornton 

It’s hard to make those changes in your HR profile from it anyway. All right, I’m not sure you get two more be there.

Ken Moraif  

We’re getting morbid. We’re supposed to be having fun.

Jeremy Thornton  

That’s my bad. Okay, so this kind of brings up the next point of why is it so important to review your statements and your your profiles periodically.

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, so the example I just gave is one reason why you should periodically review all your beneficiary designations, and you know your will or your living trust, when you create that, you name beneficiaries in that as well. So all of that you need to review periodically to make sure it all aligns. I remember a story that I think illustrates how important it is. This was from a long time ago, but a teacher in New York, she was married and she named her husband her beneficiary. Okay. Mm. A year later, she divorced him, and she got remarried. And 20 years later, she had children with this second husband, and she passed 100, 200 $300,000 was in her retirement plan, and the beneficiary designation was the original husband. Oh no. Well, that ended up becoming a big lawsuit because, of course, the husband and the kids, you know, they said, No, we’re we’re the beneficiary. We should get this. And what the court ruled was, I’m sorry, but if she really wanted you guys to get it, she would have changed it. The fact that she didn’t, I have to go by what she did. I can’t read her mind as to what she said. And so the original husband that she was only married to for a year ended up getting the inheritance. So reviewing your documents is extremely important. Yeah. And you know, any life changes, any new additions to your family, or, God forbid, subtractions, you know, anything like that. You need to make sure that you review all of those beneficiary designations, make sure they all match up.

Jeremy Thornton  

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a it’s a heartbreaking kind of situation that easily avoidable. If you just have a system set up, somebody keep you kind of accountable. Check it every once in a while, every, every, I think last time, we said every three years, every

Ken Moraif  

three years at a minimum. Yeah. But anytime there’s a life event, you should change it. You know, for example, I just had a new grandbaby. Congratulations, yeah. And so, actually, I had two in the last three months, but yeah. So this, this one was born, like two days ago. And so, yeah. So, you know, fortunately, we’ve already updated everything to reflect that, but it is a change. It is something you want to think

Jeremy Thornton  

about, yeah, if you have to update your insurance, probably good to check those beneficiary statements too. Yeah. Okay, so kind of talking about beneficiaries and who is named on there and checking it. Why would it be pertinent to name a trust as a beneficiary. What would I gain from doing something like

Ken Moraif  

that? Yeah. So, you know, trusts are a lot of people have a mistrust of trusts because it sounds like it’s this black box. You know, money goes in there, never to come out again, right? You know, and there’s all these complications with all this stuff. But really the reason you have a trust is there’s a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to make sure that the inheritance that you leave goes to who you want it to go to in the manner you want them to get it, timing that they get it, and all those kind of things. So trust can serve multiple purposes for your spouse. For example, you can have what’s called a Q tip trust qualified terminal interest property, just like the Q tip that you stick in your ear. And I like to call that the, you know, the if you have a Brady Bunch family, right? Or you have a second spouse, you want to make sure that the money for the surviving spouse is there, but maybe you want it to go to your original children, yeah. Okay, so a Q tip trust can do that. You also may want to set up trusts for grandchildren. There are trusts that are called Generation skipping tax trusts, which potentially can house the inheritance that you leave to them for up to 100 years, and it can protect it from lawsuits and divorce and and bankruptcy and all of those things you know, for a long, line for multiple generations. So trusts are not necessarily a bad thing, and there are basically two kinds of trusts. There are revocable trusts and there are irrevocable trusts. In most cases, the beneficiary is a an irrevocable trust, okay? And irrevocable sounds terrible, right? It means, oh, no, you know, it’s cast in stone. It can never be changed. Yeah, that’s actually not true. If you put language in an irrevocable trust that says so irrevocable means that the rules of the trust cannot be changed. Okay, okay, it’s irrevocable. You can’t change the rules. Once written, it’s done, and once the person who wrote it dies, it dies with them. It can never be changed, yes, but if it’s properly drafted, this irrevocable trust, you give the trustee the ability to make changes. Yeah, okay, yeah. So now the rules by which they can make changes can never be changed, but the fact that they can change the rules given what you’ve allowed them to do, can happen. So you could give the trustee power to give more money to one beneficiary versus another for health reasons or whatever it may be. So trusts are a lot more flexible than people think, yeah, and there’s a lot of value there for just multiple reasons where. Basically, you want the money to be either protected or distributed in a particular way, or you have somebody who maybe is not good at managing money, and so therefore you want to name, you want to put it in a trust for them, and have a trustee managing the money for them so they don’t squander it. There’s lots of reasons for having a trust, yeah. And people should not be afraid of them, yeah. And also, trusts are not necessarily expensive, you know, it depends on what kind of trust we’re talking about, but in many cases, you know a trust that you put into your will, which is called a testamentary trust, is not an expensive endeavor and could serve a lot of purposes, as I described,

Jeremy Thornton  

okay, so irrevocable trust rules are set in stone. A revocable trust. Would that mean that the rules can be changed?

Ken Moraif  

Yes, but a revocable trust can only be changed until the person who created the trust dies, and then it becomes a revocable right? So in terms of estate planning, yeah, you could have a living trust, right, which is called a revocable trust. So during your lifetime, you can make all the changes you want, but once you die, that revocable trust becomes irrevocable because you’re no longer there to change it absolutely. So whatever the rules you put in, yeah, they are now the rules.

Jeremy Thornton  

Okay, all right, that’s very interesting. Okay, so we’re talking about kind of certain situations with money management or health reasons, things like that. Let’s, let’s say, for instance, I have a child with special needs. How can a irrevocable or a trust in general, kind of help with that?

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, so special needs trusts are a special kind of trust that is there to help to make sure that your heir, if they inherit from you, what could possibly happen is that now they become ineligible for government programs like Medicaid and those kind of things. So by having a special needs trust, you can design it in such a way that they can have the inheritance in that trust, but it cannot be used for anything that Medicaid or any social security or any government programs would pay for. Gotcha. So if you if you draft it properly, and this can be done, then a child or an heir can inherit a good sum of money and not become ineligible for government programs. So it’s very important that that can be a very powerful planning tool.

Jeremy Thornton  

Yeah, yeah. And that’s some obviously to talk about what the professional somebody knows what they’re doing.

Ken Moraif  

And yeah, and by the way, I just want to thank you for saying that, Jeromy, we’re not dispensing legal advice in this. We don’t draft documents. We are not attorneys. All we can do is kind of help clients to, you know, think through stuff, but in terms of drafting the documents and the final decision making, all that this needs to be done with, with an attorney who preferably specializes in estate planning, absolutely okay.

Jeremy Thornton  

So, speaking of trusts, how well they can do, is there? Should I name the benefit of my IRA a trust?

Ken Moraif  

Ah, that’s that’s a question we get asked a lot. Should I name the beneficiary of my IRA, my 401, k, that kind of thing. Yeah, trust. The general answer is no. And the reason why is because the the way that that beneficiary designations are supposed to be is they go to a living person, okay? Trusts are not a living person, right? And so if it goes to a trust, then, and I’m going to get into how you can get around that, but if it goes directly into a trust, a trust is not a living person, and therefore all the taxes come due the day that happens. So usually that’s a really bad idea. You don’t want the day you die. And it goes into this trust that suddenly there’s like, all the dollars come due because IRAs, unless they’re a Roth IRA, but traditional IRAs, they have a lot of embedded gains that have never been taxed, right? And so you don’t want all those taxes to come due upon your death, so you have to draft it very carefully. So if you’re going to name a trust as a beneficiary of your IRA, it has to be drafted properly. And I would recommend talking to a professional about it, because the language is very, very specific. It’s language that the government has given us that says if you use this language, it will qualify. And so you have to make sure you do that. You can’t just name a trust. Now, if you’ve done that, then now the trust can be the beneficiary of the IRA. And there are lots of reasons to do that, but there’s also some reasons not to Okay, okay, okay, so I want to go through why you might want to do it. So for example, I was talking earlier about the Brady Bunch family. Yes, right. So you have children from a previous marriage, yes, you want to make sure they get that money. So if you don’t, you can use a trust to make sure they get it and won’t be changed later. By the new owner of your IRA, okay, you could also, if you’re concerned that your spouse will remarry,

Jeremy Thornton  

yeah, yeah, thinking long term here, yeah,

Ken Moraif  

you know. I mean, that’s an interesting conversation. I’ve had that with my wife, and I told her, you know, I want you to be happy. Sure, you know, so if I go before you do and you want to get remarried, please do right, don’t. But over the years, I’ve been doing this long enough, I’ve had clients have said, No, I go, No mas, yeah, that’s it. And then, of course, you know, we talked about the special needs trust also, you know, you might want to name the beneficiary of your IRA, if you’re if you’re leaving it to a minor, you know, and so therefore, you want them to have somebody who oversees it for them. You may also have a person that’s a spendthrift, right? They’re going to be irresponsible with this money, and you want to be sure that they don’t do that. So naming a trustee of the trust to oversee that can dispense the money to this beneficiary in a way that doesn’t, you know, deplete the whole account, you know, on the first day, on a Ferrari.

Jeremy Thornton  

I mean, that’d be nice, but, yeah, yeah.

Ken Moraif  

And then the other reason is that, you know, in Texas, where our headquarters are IRAs, and those kind of plans are protected from creditors. But not every state is that way. And so there are many states where the money that you inherit in an IRA could be subject to creditors or bankruptcy of that child or that beneficiary. And so at that point, you know you may want to, if you’re concerned about that, if they’re in a high risk profession, you know you may want to have them inherit from you in a trust, because then that’ll help build a wall that’ll protect the inheritance from lawsuits and those kind of

Jeremy Thornton  

things, right? Yeah, there’s nothing worse than your fortune, or your your estate going to Joe Blow down the street that has the defunct on a car or a house or

Ken Moraif  

whatever. Yeah, you know, earlier, I was talking about the Q tip trust, right? And, you know, we jokingly call that the bimbo trust. Oh, no, you know. And that’s where, you know. And that was because of a client, you know, she was saying, you know, she was saying, you know, I know what’s gonna happen the moment I die. Some bimbo is gonna show up, seduce him and take all my money. Yeah, right. So I want to make sure that, you know, I have a bimbo trust to protect against that. So, you know, yeah. So if you want to make sure that, you know, money doesn’t go off to somebody that you don’t want, right? We’ve actually had situations, you know, where a Q tip trust was not created, where the spouse inherited the money and then got remarried and died, left everything to the new husband, yeah, and then that husband died and left it to his kids. Oh, wow. And the original kids got nothing. Oh, no. So that’s another reason why you know you may want to consider having a trust if you’re if you have, like I said, a Brady Bunch

Jeremy Thornton  

family, right, right? Yeah, stipulations upon stipulations.

Ken Moraif  

It’s amazing. You know, how creative people are, yeah, how many different ways they find to to to mess up even the best late. But now let me just say something about that. You know, as much as you may want to rule from the grave. Sure you know, I’ve, I’ve talked with clients who are so anal about this. They want to, they want to, like, you know, make sure that every possible iteration, every variable, yes, you know, is all everything at some point. Yeah, you’ve done all you can do, right? And then, you know, and if you’re so worried about it, then spend it all before you die. And then you

Jeremy Thornton  

don’t have to, yeah, don’t leave anything. Yeah, that’s fine. Have fun while you can. Okay, great. So that brings up another points per capita versus stirpes. What does that even mean? What? What? What did I just say?

Ken Moraif  

I remember when I first heard the per stirpes, yeah, and I thought it sounded like a disease or something. Oh, my god, is that? Is that contagious? You know, I don’t want to get per stirpes. Don’t do that to me. Yeah. So a lot of time the the per capita and per stirpes are also how you want the money to be distributed. So it’s a form of a beneficiary designation. And so per capita, capita is, is the Latin word for head, right? Capita. So per capita means, if you have three children, then you have three heads, yep. And what happens there is that, therefore, at the time of death, there are three heads. But if one of the heads pre deceased, you Yeah, then now there’s only two heads left. So therefore now, instead of the inheritance being done in thirds, it’ll be done in half. Okay, so per capita means at the point of the inheritance we count how many heads there are, yes, and that’s how we divvy. Up right? Now, most people don’t want per capita to be the way they prefer. Per stirpes. Per stirpes means it goes by the bloodline, okay? So, for example, you have those three children that I mentioned, right? And one of them pre deceased, you, right? Well, the bloodline of that deceased child will receive a third anyway, if it’s per stirpes, if you had chosen per capita, that whole bloodline would be essentially xed out. Yeah. Now you know there’s, there’s a thing called a ton team, okay, so Tontine is where the last survivor gets the money. Okay? And if you name your family, if you name them as per capita. There was a an old funny movie, I think Dudley Moore or No, Terry Thomas, the guy with the gap in his team. I think he was in that movie where these, it was a combat it was a black comedy, right? The family was like killing each other off so that they could be the last remaining, yeah, in the ton team. So you have to be careful. You’re gonna name it per capita. You know, you may create the Tontine thing happening where you know they want to be the last remaining survivor. Yeah, everything,

Jeremy Thornton  

yeah, depends on how badly they want it. Yeah, yeah. Don’t want to generate any animosity, that’s for sure. Okay, what if I want to cut out talk about Taw teen and people cutting each other out from the inheritance. What if I decide, You know what, that third child, that third child, is a problem, and they’ve got given me nothing but grief. I want to cut out one of my heirs. Is that something you can do?

Ken Moraif  

Well, of course, it’s your money. You can do that. You know, I’ll tell you, in my experience, it’s rarely that the child is not deserving or is not whatever. Almost always when, when a child gets disinherited, it’s because they hurt the parents feelings. Yeah, it’s an emotional thing. It’s not a financial thing, yeah. And so they, they hurt my feelings, and done, I’m cutting them out, yeah? And the thing about that, and that goes back to, like, Cain and Abel, you know, it’s like, it’s, this is biblical times, yeah? And so if you are going to do that, then what might make sense? And again, I’m not dispensing legal advice here, but what might make sense is to do it through a living trust. Okay? Because if you do it just through your will, the what you’re going to invite if you do that is two things. One is the disinherited. Child is probably going to contest the whole thing, of course, and they’re going to say that you weren’t in your, you know, you weren’t in a good frame of mind, or you weren’t sane, or you were unduly influenced, or, you know, they’re going to pressure, yeah, they’re going to want to say that that’s not what mom and dad intended, right? You know. And they always love me, and I should get, you know, my share. The other thing that you’re going to create is the other children are going to be in a really difficult place, because you’re gone, right? You’re gone now. So they’re dealing with this. And now a family Ward erupts, and the other two children are like, Oh my gosh, you know, what are we going to do? Right? This third one who’s being belligerent, they may feel guilty, you know, maybe we should just give them a third after all, it’s my brother. So you have all of those kind of things that could come into play. So and one of the things you know we talked about, and we will have a separate podcast, the bite sized version, as I mentioned, about living trust. But one of the reasons why living trusts are a pretty powerful estate planning vehicle is if you are concerned about contestation, okay, okay, meaning that you’re concerned that an heir or somebody else could come in and contest your will, right? And the reason why living trusts are so powerful in that regard is because the effort that you went through to create the living trust, you had to hire an attorney, you had to draft all these documents, you have to go through a lot of rigmarole to set it up, right, right, right. And so that effort shows intentionality. It shows that this wasn’t like, Oh, I just changed my will because I got mad. You know that the child I actually took the time to do all this stuff, and so that makes it very, very difficult to contest. Yeah. And so if you are going to cut your child out of your your will, you might want to consider creating a living trust and not including them as the Benny of your living trust. Now in the future, if you make up, you know, and you love them again, then you can always add them back, absolutely, yeah, yeah,

Jeremy Thornton  

yeah, time, yeah. But

Ken Moraif  

remember, like we said before, the living trust, once you die, becomes irrevocable, yeah? So if you cut them out, and then you die without changing it, they are cut

Jeremy Thornton  

out, yeah, yeah. Review those documents. Yeah. So, yeah.

Ken Moraif  

And then the other thing also is, you know, a version of what you just said is where you have disproportionate inherent you’re gonna leave a disproportionate amount to and, you know, I remember a very good friend of mine is an estate planning attorney, and his mom and dad asked him to rewrite their documents, essentially writing him out of the out of it. Oh, no. And he’s like, really, what? And they’re like, Well, you’re a successful lawyer. Your sister’s a teacher, right? You know, your brother’s a policeman, right? They need the money way more than you do. Yeah, so, you know, right to write, write yourself out. And he was like, No, get your own Lord. So if you are going to disproportionately leave two children, or, you know, some version of that. I think that a family meeting about it is always a good idea, you know, just talking it out with everybody, explaining why, you know, I’m not gonna leave you a third, I’m gonna leave you, you know, less, because your sister needs it more than you do or whatever, right? You know, get talk to them about it now they may not agree with you, right? And in the end, it’s your money. So they don’t agree that’s, that’s tough, right? You know, I mean, after all, it is your money, yep, but I think that you’ll go a long way towards, you know, you don’t want them after you’re gone to now, like, hate you, yeah, absolutely. The memory that you’ve left, yes, is that, after a lifetime of everything that’s happened, their memory of you is that you, you know, you gave me less because I was successful. That was, that was his problem with it, yeah, so I’m successful, right? Gone through, well, yeah, put myself through. I did that. I built a law practice, and my reward for that is that I don’t get the same inheritance as my brother and sister. He was very offended by that, yeah, about it, yeah, so, but at least I talked to him about it, of course. And the end of that story was they decided not to completely write him out. Okay, he ended up getting less than the others, sure. So it became a negotiation, but, yeah, having a conversation about it is very important if you’re going to be disproportionate in your beneficiary designation.

Jeremy Thornton  

And probably should have, even if it’s not disproportionate, even if it’s even split or whatever, to talk to your beneficiaries about that, and talk to your heirs and say, Hey, here’s what we’re thinking, here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we have set up. Before that time comes,

Ken Moraif  

yeah, yeah. And that’s actually a very good point when, if you have, if you’re doing anything, I’ll say unusual, yeah, meaning you’re going to set up a trust, or several trusts, or you’re going to have disproportionate inheritances, any of those kind of things. It’s a very good idea to have a discussion with your family about the thought process behind it, so they have buy in, but also so they know, yeah, you know, because once you’re gone, they don’t know why you did all this stuff. If you didn’t explain it, they don’t. And if they’ve never seen it before, it’s like a total shock and surprise, of course, and in many cases, that’s not what you want, yeah. And so having them participate in your thought process, there’s two ways of having that conversation. You know, in my experience, one is where you are totally open. Yeah, you know. And I would say probably 65% of the conversations that we have with children of clients, you know, the parents are like, I don’t care. They can know what we have. It’s no big deal, right? But there’s, you know, 35% to go, No, I don’t want them to know. I want to know the structure, sure. I wanted to know what’s going to happen, sure, but there are no dollars. We’re not filling in any of those blanks. We’re just telling them this is what’s going to happen, that’s what’s going to but, but we don’t want them to know about the dollars because of whatever reasons, right? So that’s that’s

Jeremy Thornton  

a very interesting play. They don’t need to know. Maybe we spend more of it before that time comes and they don’t get as much as they thought they were. And if you don’t know, that is complete surprise

Ken Moraif  

anyway, yeah, there’s always the, you know, the concern about taking away their ambition. Yes, yeah, my my mother was actually that way. She was very close to the vest about everything. She didn’t tell me anything in terms of the dollar amounts, sure, she just did not want me to know. And then on her deathbed, actually is when she kind of went through everything with me, and she said, I just want you to know where everything is and what it all is and all this, you know. So during that last week, we spent a lot of time talking about finances, and it was, Kay was nice, you know, to do that. But before that, she she just did not want me to know. Kenny, it’s none of your business. But I do this right now, but I do this for a living, Mom, it’s none of your business. If I want you to know, I’ll tell you, and I haven’t told you. Yeah, it’s none of your business. It’s a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know exactly. So, yes, ma’am.

Jeremy Thornton  

The correct answer. Yeah. All right. Ken, so we’ve talked about what a living trust does, what it’s capable of. The real question comes down to because a lot of people talking about it, you need this trust. See, hear it on ads all the time. What does a living trust not do? What is it not capable of? Like, what is it not meant to do or cover you?

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I consider the living trust the most oversold under needed legal document ever devised by lawyers.

Jeremy Thornton  

That’s that’s saying something.

Ken Moraif  

So, yeah, so what does it not do? Okay, number one is it does not save you one thin dime of income taxes. And the reason why is because a Living Trust basically has your social security number. It is you basically in absentia. Okay, so it doesn’t save you any income taxes. It doesn’t save you any estate taxes either, because the very same things that save you on estate taxes, ie creating new trusts that separate property and all of that kind of stuff. You could do that with a will, so you don’t need a living trust to do that. So it doesn’t save you. It can save you on estate taxes if you have that language in it, but you can have that same language in your will, so you don’t need a living trust for that, okay? And the other thing that it doesn’t do is it doesn’t protect you from lawsuits or liability or divorce or any of those other things. Again, because it’s you, it’s your social security number, it’s your persona in the form of this, this trust, so it doesn’t do any of those things. So if anybody sells you on you’re going to save on income taxes, or, say, Save on estate taxes, or it’s going to protect you from lawsuits or whatever else, right? It doesn’t do that.

Jeremy Thornton  

Yeah, that’s very interesting. Okay, so I’m guessing there is a way to kind of save yourself on those things, yeah?

Ken Moraif  

And that’s a different kind of trust. Yeah? You know, as I say, with estate planning, there’s a trust for everything, just like there’s an app for that, well, there’s a trust for that. So if you want to state, if you want protection from those things, then that’s a different vehicle than the living trust. But the living trust doesn’t do those three

Jeremy Thornton  

things. Okay, great. Well, I think that pretty much covers beneficiary,

Ken Moraif  

yeah, yeah. So it’s, I hope that people got from this that how you determine your beneficiary designations should not be you check a box on a form when you have your IRA, or you’re opening up an account, or whatever it may be, what you don’t want to do is have the preset form do your estate planning for you. Yes, you don’t want some brokerage house in New York that created this form that you check boxes to be your estate planner. You know, you want to be proactive about it, think through it. And there’s a lot more to it than maybe people thought, but I think it’s an important it’s an act of love. You know, all of this estate planning is an act of love. I mean, you’re not doing it for yourself, yeah, right? You’re going to be gone, right? Not there anymore. So you’re either saving them time, you’re saving them effort, you’re saving them money. You’re hopefully preventing, you know, a family war, which nobody wants. I don’t think so. All those things. It’s an act of love and making sure that you have your bene designation forms done. It’s probably the number one mistake that people make when it comes to their estate planning, you know, and I’ve seen hundreds of estate plans that people we review them, yeah, and it’s probably the number one mistake I see is the beneficiary designations.

Jeremy Thornton  

Very important stuff. Love it.

Ken Moraif  

So thank you for watching this podcast. As I said, I hope it finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. I hope you had more fun than a human being should be allowed to have when talking about all this stuff, because I know we did, and we’ll talk soon, retirement planners of America, rpoa.com, you.