Life Happens

April 19th, 2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning everyone, and we hope that you are prepared,
or at least you will be if you keep listening
to the show. I'm Lupiro, your host for this morning
from Pierre O'connoran Strauss, and we are live in studio
to bring you information, ideas, thoughts to plan your future,
your future, the family's future. How do you make sure
that you have a solid retirement, that you are preparing
yourself for all of the eventualities when life comes your

(00:23):
way and throws you that curveball. And we are in
baseball season, so we get thrown curveballs, folks, every day.
How do you prepare yourself? How do you plan? How
do you make sure that if that curveball comes, you've
got the right attitude and you can hit it out
of the park. Well, life happens in so many ways.
We're going to talk about it today and talk about
the things that happen when that curveball gets by you.

(00:45):
What happens when you swing and miss and all of
a sudden, you and your loved ones are in a
situation that you never dreamed possible. Sometimes this is by accident,
by injury, by illness, by diagnosis, Life happens in so
many ways, and today to pull it all apart, put
it all back together for you. I'm live in studio

(01:06):
with two of the new associates at Pierre O'Connor and Strauss.
To my left mister Brent Stack, who is an attorney
who has experience in litigation. And good morning Brent, Good
morning Lou and let's introduce. Have you introduced yourself to
our listeners of life happens?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, I work with with Aaron connor and our litigation division,
I guess you would call it, yeah, and we are.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
We step in when things go wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
We get involved in in hotly litigated court disputes unfortunately
involving trusts and estates, and when when people are at
their worst, at their lowest, that's when we step in
and uh, you know, just encourage people in those situations,

(01:55):
just stay the course and let us let us handle
it the best we can. The situations do become very
emotional for families, unfortunately, and hopefully we can get to
an outcome that everybody's somewhat comfortable with.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
And your background is working with a group called Mental
Hygiene Legal Services, a state agency, and that puts you
in the middle of a whole host of controversies dealing
with people that have issues in court. Just talk about
that experience. How long were you there at MHLS.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I was at MHLS for about ten years, and yes
we did. I did a lot of guardianships involving people
who are either mentally disabled due to whether it be
traumatic brain injury, whether it be mental illness, you know,
along the lines of schizophrenia or mostly with dementia, Alzheimer's,

(02:53):
that sort of thing later in life, mental illnesses and.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Autism, certainly autism.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
A topic that's in the new use today. Oh yeah,
going on in Washington with our health Human Health and
Human Services Dirt Commissioner. So all of those things come
to court in a crisis.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Situation, and yeah, it's never a never a good time.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Never a good time, and the controversies that arise people
with different positions fighting it out in court. If you
listen to the news just now, there's court battles going
on all over the place in a whole different host
of different forums. But what we're talking about is families
in court, right, and when the families go to court, Brent,

(03:34):
they get they get put under such enormous stress and
it very often fractures the family forever.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Oh yeah, yeah, these these things are life changing for families. Certainly.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
You know, you hope you can, like I said, navigate
to a a result that everyone's somewhat comfortable with. I
mean a lot of times we're settling, which means people
are compromising, which means nobody walks out with everything they want.
And that's something that we encourage folks to keep in mind,
is that you know, there's there's justice and then there's

(04:09):
the real law, and sometimes you don't. You don't leave
a courtroom with justice. You leave with a compromise.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
And in many cases, everybody walks out of that courtroom
unhappy because, you know what I'm saying, you've all given
up something that you thought was dear and that was
your values and your beliefs, and all of a sudden,
well the court says, no, it isn't going your direction.
On the other side, well no, it isn't going your direction.
It's going the judges direction exactly. That what their mind

(04:39):
says and what they think. And when you have a
third party like a judge, they're trying to do it
down the middle and to give a fair result to
all parties, right, But in most cases that's not a
just result to almost any of the parties when they
leave the courtroom.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, you have to keep in mind that you're you know,
you're checking some of your rights at the door, or
when you come into a courtroom, the judge is going to,
like you said, probably cut it right down the middle.
So your expectations need to be tempered by the time
you come to us and you say I want to
take so and so to court, You're gonna need to

(05:17):
check some of your expectations at the door.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, I checked my ticket to the courthouse a long
time ago. I used to do a lot of litigation.
I used to go to court, and it just to
me the unfulfilled nature of that process. I would rather
do the planning and keep my clients out of the courtroom.
That's what we do, and that's what we're really good at.

(05:42):
But in your case, you have to have the ability
to represent people when things go awry, right, And I've
been in many guardianship trials where I represented one side
of the family, other attorneys represented other sides of the family,
and at the end of a two or three day trial,
the judge said, well, none of you are fit to
be guardian. I'm choosing the attorneys sitting over there in

(06:03):
the corner. Mister So and so, you know, step up
and I'm gonna name you as guardian. Have you ever
seen that happen?

Speaker 4 (06:08):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Absolutely, yeah. I mean you have a family that they're
they're so at odds that, yeah. I mean, courts have
the ability to a point, a third party guardian happens
all the time, somebody with just who appears to have
the clearest head.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
And that's been me in a couple of cases. And
believe me, that's not what I wanted, not what I
asked for, and it's actually a conflict of interest because
I represented one of the parties, but the judge appointed me. Anyway,
you're right and that's not where you want to be.
We also have with us this morning Dylan Newkirk. Welcome
Dylan Morton lou And Dylan has joined us from uh

(06:44):
just passing the bar, taking the bar and then being
admitted in January. He had worked with our firm as
a law clerk from Albany Law School for about a
year and a half and now has been with us
post graduation and yesterday spent the day with me in Hudson,
New York doing things like planning. So we sat with
three new clients that signed up yesterday and talked through

(07:06):
the issues of how do you put in place the
right people, the right legal documents, the right plan so
that you don't end up in that courtroom, so that
you make the choices and folks, this is all about you,
your preferences, your choices, your plan. As I like to say,
when we do a plan, when we do a legal plan,

(07:28):
there are several documents and you put them all together
and that's the script for the rest of your life
as to what happens if I get Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, What
if I get in a car accident, what if someone
in my family dies before me prematurely? Now I have
to fill in a lot of blanks. And Dylan, we

(07:50):
had some great consultations yesterday. And you've been doing this
now for about three months. So what are your experiences
in the realm of planning and what do you see
just coming into the field the law. Yep.

Speaker 5 (08:01):
So I think a lot of our discussion here about
the troubles of court and how we kind of try
and avoid it and it you usually end up in
court when you get that curveball, and from the planning
side of things, you're just kind of trying to stay
ahead in the in the count. If you stay ahead
in the count, it makes it a lot harder for

(08:22):
that curveball to come your way.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
Ready to keep that baseball analogy going, I like that.

Speaker 5 (08:27):
Yesterday, for example, we had a lot of discussion around
who is the correct agent for you. Some people they say, oh,
I've got two or three kids. I'm not sure really
how they're gonna gonna take this. But kid A, for example,
is they've got a much clearer head, and I think

(08:49):
that they do a lot better at when that curveball
comes of sitting back spraying it to right field instead
of you know, swinging out of their shoes and completely missing.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, and when you look at choosing people for these
different offices, we work very closely and talk through this,
and as you said, you see the eyes start to
look up and say, oh, no, that wouldn't be the
right choice. Well, no, that wouldn't be the right choice.
And they start thinking through the two scenarios, and one

(09:23):
is healthcare. Who is going to be your healthcare decision maker?
Which is part of the guardianship, you have guardian of
the person. If you haven't done this, folks, some judge
is going to decide who's crafting your future and writing.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Your Yeah, really think about that.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
And that's healthcare. You know, where do you want to live?
Are you going to a nursing home prematurely? Do you
want to make a plan that's going to keep you
at home and have people that will fight and advocate
for you to keep you at home as opposed to
placing you in a nursing home. Just one of the
many decisions that goes through this healthcare decision making process.
And so we talk that through with clients, and a

(10:01):
lot of clients say, well, you know, she's the oldest,
he's the oldest. I'm just going to go down and
they kind of punt, Yeah, just do it by age.
But that's not always the best way to do it.

Speaker 5 (10:11):
No, it's it's not always the best way to do it.
And if you just go by age, you might not
be choosing One kid might be a genius when it
comes to healthcare, but they don't care about financials whatsoever.
So is that really who you want to be making
your financial decisions when it comes time, and the.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Other is the property in a property guardian. And if
you don't have a power of attorney or better yet,
a trust, then the judge is going to write the
script on how your assets are going to be dealt with,
who's going to have control of them, how they're going
to be used, and that's not where we want to be.
So how does that power of attorney work? And appointing
agents here can be a little different because you can

(10:53):
have more than one.

Speaker 5 (10:54):
Yeah, so that power of attorney what you've got to
look at really is for stuff. Who is going to
be able to sit down and look at finances and
understand them. And two, if you can appoint multiple agents,
it's not always the worst idea because if one person,
for example, can't help you that week or that day

(11:16):
they're on vacation, it's always nice to have a backup.
And you really have to make sure that they get along,
because if you have two different people with two completely
different philosophies trying to manage your finances, that's when you
start to get into trouble and having arguments between your agents.
And if your agents can't get along, it's not gonna work.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
And we're gonna come back to that in a minute.
I'm gonna take a short break, and when we come back.
If you listened to last week's show, you'll know that
Hugh Johnson was our guest, and Hugh talked about the
current economic situation. He was one of our most noted
economists in the Capitol region and nationally. He appears on
CNBC Bloomberg and talks about issues like taxes, Tariff's GDP,

(12:01):
and what the Fed is doing in terms of adjusting
interest rates and managing our economy. And Hugh made some
statements and predictions last week that came true in a
big way. When Jerome Powell made his own statements and
kind of echoed everything Hugh said, the President immediately said
I want him fired. I want him gone immediately. And

(12:22):
when we come back, we're gonna have Hugh Johnson for
a reprise of last week, and we're gonna talk to
Hugh about what's going on, what the Fed does, how
it works, and what would it mean if Jerome Powell
was ousted. We'll be right back after this short break
with Hugh Johnson. Two one two.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Let me tell you how it will be.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Ah, Yes, who's gonna tell us how it will be
that is this question. Not a judge, maybe a jury,
but right now, who is gonna tell us what's happening
with our economy? Where is this all headed? And for
that I'd like to bring back and reintroduce to our listeners.
Hugh Johnson, Good morning, Hugh, good morning. Thank you for

(13:10):
joining us again. And you know, it's amazing how in
one week all of the things that you said were
in the news in headlines, and it's just I just
want to get your take on it and what Jerome
Powell came out and said, which is really just what
you said, which is the facts, Here is what this means,
and here are the likely outcomes. And for that he

(13:32):
was ostracized severely.

Speaker 4 (13:35):
Yeah, he certainly was. The president attacked him pretty severely.
And this is not news and it's not even new
or novel. He did this during we'll call it Trump
one or the last time that he was president when
he attacked the Fellow Reserve, and he did so again
this time. And of course he's done that with others.

(13:56):
He attacks other people when they really don't conform to
what he wants to see done. He's accused, among other things,
he accused Chairman Powell of playing politics. And if there's
anything I could possibly sort of say, it's that the
President is really playing politics, trying to get Chairman Powell

(14:18):
to reduce interest rates the way the European Central Bank
has reduced interest rates seven times, but trying to get
Powell to reduce interest rates. Now, obviously the President is
a little bit concerned, rightfully so that we're going to
have tariff's terarists will increase, the will increase the rate
of inflation, will probably put downward pressure on the economy.

(14:39):
And I guess in some ways you could justify it
by saying he's trying to get ahead of the game
by getting the Federal Reserve to reduce interstrates and therefore
avoiding what's now becoming a fairly substantial fear among economists,
and that is that the economy will not only slow
in the months ahead, but also will have a recession.
So he's a accused Powell of politicizing. Powell would answer

(15:04):
quite simply that he's not politicizing the process. He's simply
trying to make good decisions based on the day. You'll
hear the Federal Reserves use the expression often that their
decisions are data dependent, they're not dependent on politics. And
he's actually done that over the course of his as
reign as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and done

(15:25):
a really good job. It has not been politicized by
the Federal Reserve chairman. He's done a really good job.
It's not political. The President might be accused of trying
to turn this into something political, but not the Chairman
of the Federal Reserve.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
So I want to come back to two things. One,
you mentioned a word in the last week's show which
I haven't heard probably since the nineteen seventies, and that
is stagflation, and I want to come back to that.
But before I do, the European Union has lowered interest
rates seven times because their economy is not even close
to what the United States is, and their GDP is

(16:00):
not close to what the United States is. So aren't
there different parameters and different data sets that they're basing
their decisions on.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
Yes, that's absolutely accurate. And their economy is not doing
nearly so well, particularly if you look at countries like Germany,
they're having a real problem in keeping economic activity propped
up or alive, and that's a result of that they've
reduced interest rates seven times. Yeah, the conditions in Europe
are entirely different than conditions in the US. And then

(16:29):
quite frankly, if you look at conditions in the US,
I mean, we have reasons to be concerned about stagflation,
as you rightfully pointed out. But nevertheless, even though we
have those concerns, those concerns, we do have an economy
which is expanding. As I do the numbers, it'll probably
continue to expand slow, but expand in the first quarter

(16:49):
of twenty twenty five, and the rate of inflation has
been coming down continuously and it's at two point four
percent based on the consumer Price index numbers we just saw.
Point four percent is down from nine percent. So the
Fed's done a really good job at bringing the rate
of inflation down but keeping economic activity propped up or

(17:11):
shall we say positive, And that's something that has not
really been accomplished over quite frankly, the history of the
Fellow Reserve. And you've really pulled it off so far.
You came, but now there are deepening concerns about the economy.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
You've come on this show now for a few years
and given us your annual report in January and a
couple of years ago was well, we're coming out of COVID,
is there any way to engineer a soft landing for
the economy, And most people thought no, that we're going
to end up going into recession then, And it has
been kind of an artful dance to get the economy

(17:45):
to where it was with GDP growth, low unemployment, lowering,
as you said, the inflation rate from nine to two
point four percent. The FED is dealing with data and
reality and putting in place policies and lowering interest rates
went appropriate. Just talk a little bit about what the
Fed's role is in their independence from, as you said,

(18:07):
the melue of politics.

Speaker 4 (18:09):
Yeah, they have a really tough job, and their job
really is essentially is to try to bring down inflation
to a level that's a livable, shall we say, a
very sustainable low rate of inflation. Two point four percent
from the consumer price index is a good number. And
at the same time, although they bring inflation down sometimes

(18:29):
they have to do that by raising interest rates and
slowing the economy. They don't want to slow the economy
so much that labor market conditions deteriorate, or people lose
their jobs or we have not only a slow down
in the economy, but we also have a loss of employment.
They've been able to pull this off. They brought the
rate of inflation down, they brought it down steadily. It

(18:51):
has gotten down, as I mentioned, a two point four percent,
a good number. The economy has continued to expand. It
continued to expand in twenty twenty three and twenty four,
much to the surprise of many economists, but it did
continue to expand. So they pulled it off. They bought
it down, and they bought it down by managing interest rate.
So I think they've done a really credible job. And amen.

(19:11):
The most important thing I said, which is they've done
it by being data dependent. They've let the numbers tell
them what to do, and they've done it, and they've
done it successfully.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
And we opened up the show last week, and if
you haven't heard Hughes Show last week, you can hear
it on Spotify. Go to Life Happens Radio on Spotify
and you can hear the whole hour analyzing the tariffs,
the taxes, the tax bill, the debt, the deficit, all
of the economic factors that we're going to live with
for the next however many years, we're alive and this
is life happening folks all around us. But tariffs, who

(19:43):
are not evil in and of themselves, they've been reality
for a very long time. But tariffs used as weapons
has created a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace.

Speaker 4 (19:55):
It certainly has. And if you ask business people or individuals,
but business people around the country, what is it the
problem that they're making and making decisions and moving their
businesses forward, they would say it's the level of uncertainty.
Because when we're talking about tariffs, remember we've had this
play out over the last two or three two or
three weeks, really, but it also played out in twenty

(20:18):
eighteen nineteen or the first trade War, and it's an
on again, off again thing. We talked about reciprocal tariffs,
which could be fairly substantial. That's now been put on
we'll call it pause for ninety days. And we're also
talking about universal tariffs or ten percent across the board.
And some days it's on, some days it's off. Their
negotiations going on between the many countries that are being

(20:41):
tariffed and the federal government in Washington or the Trump administration,
and again it's on again, off again, it's a high
level of uncertainty, and that creates a tremendous amount of
uncertainty among business people and it's very difficult for them
to make decisions and to keep the economy moving forward.
That's why we've gotten numbers, particularly the confidence numbers well

(21:02):
from businesses as well as individuals that have declined fairly sharply.
And they have declined sharply in large part because of
certainly a lack of confidence, but certainly the uncertainty that
surrounds the on again, off again politics that we see
coming out of Washington.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, and it's hitting home. You have to kind of
read not page one, but page four to see the
factory in Indiana laying off three four hundred workers and
to talk to We sat yesterday with a client who's
a businessman who has goods coming in from China. He's
got a container coming in from China right now, and

(21:40):
it increased the cost of that one container by forty
three thousand dollars. And he said, if this continues, if
the one hundred and forty five percent tariff continues, he's
out of business. He's just going to pull the plug
because it's not worth it to him. To operate on
those thin margins.

Speaker 4 (21:58):
It absolutely isn't, and he's going to pay the bill.
If there's going to be a teriff, the tariff is
pay now. You know, the administration wants to impose tariffs
because it wants to collect revenues, and it wants to
collect revenues to offset the loss of revenues as a
result of extending the twenty seventeen Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,

(22:18):
which sunsets in twenty twenty five. They need the revenues.
But you're right, this guy is going to close down
his shop. He's not going to make his businesses and
consumers that pay the tariff bill. That's the important thing.
And if they pay the bill, you know what that's
going to do to business people and the decisions they make.
You had a real good example of it, and it's

(22:39):
also what individuals will do in response to paying higher prices.
A lot of the increase in retail sales that we
saw for the month of March, and some of you
may have paid attention to that number is pretty big number,
was in anticipation that prices on automobiles is going to
go much higher. So everybody's going to try to beat
the rush buy cars now. But then after that that

(23:00):
all occurs, then you're going to have a slow down
not only in business spending, but also spending by individuals.
And that's when you start to see layoffs. And that
starts to get at all of us sort of its own,
a momentum of its own, and it's a very hard
thing to reverse or stop.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Hugh, we have about thirty seconds till we have to
break for the news, and you kind of brought it home.
What should people be thinking about our listeners? What should
they be thinking about? It's hard to digest all of this,
but what should people look for? What should they be
doing today?

Speaker 4 (23:31):
All right, I'm going to say very simply, this is
that I spend a lot of time spending time looking
at models or what's happened in the past and trade wars.
And the first stage of the trade war, I divided
it into two stages, is usually not very good. That's
when you see higher inflation. That's when you see interest
rates edge higher. That's when you see stock prices go down.

(23:52):
That leads to business conditions which soften tremendously. In the
second stage, you see a slow down in business. Generally,
the economy slows. It certainly shows up in exports, it
certainly shows up in imports. It's not just the US,
it's the global economy. But after that, we see interest
rates coming down, a stock price is going going up.

(24:13):
You've got to be patient. Buff your seat, everybody. These
things all end. And it's not in stage one. We're
still in stage one. We'll get you stage two.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
And we got a break for the news. We'll take
that home with us. Thank you. This is a real
song the lawyers, guns and money. So welcome back to life. Happens.
That was you Johnson, our noted local economist who is

(24:42):
giving us his insights into what's happening in the economy.
It's in the news now on a daily basis, and
it will be, I think, for quite some time. And
as he said, the storm will pass. There. There's going
to be a storm, but it will pass. So sit tight,
stay disciplined, keep an eye out, and we're going to

(25:03):
focus back now on what you can do in terms
of planning your own individual future. All of these economic
factors are going to hit you, but you want to
make sure that you have the right plan in place.
And one of the things that we talk about here
is healthcare, and healthcare is not being talked about enough
our healthcare system. And I'm in the healthcare system, and

(25:24):
I have some of my own horror stories going on
right now, just trying to get appointments, trying to get scheduled.
I have a procedure that I need that they're telling
me I'm in danger because I don't have the procedure
and I can't get it till August eighth. So and
I'm in the United States.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
How badly do you need it?

Speaker 1 (25:41):
How badly do I need it? Yeah? Okay, So if
I die in the meantime, it's your fault. You didn't
get me the appointment. And I know that we deal
with clients and say, oh, I called up, I tried
to find a new primary care physician. They can't see
me till October. What do you do in the meantime?
How do you navigate healthcare? Well, the one thing that
we talked about in the first half of the show,

(26:01):
you always want to have an agent there if you
can't advocate for yourself. So if you fall into a
situation where you need someone to be your advocate in healthcare,
you need to have a carefully drafted healthcare proxy. You
want to have a living will. In conjunction with that,
you want to have the right people there that can
advocate for you when the time comes, and we talked
about that in the beginning of the show. I also

(26:23):
want to give you a heads up that we have
a couple of programs coming up. We do a Medicaid Monday.
Medicaid is a program that we're going to talk about
a lot on this show, and Medicaid Monday is coming
up on May twelfth, from noon to twelve thirty pm.
Frank Hemming, Aaron Connor and myself be joining me to
highlight all of the things going on currently both in
New York State and nationally with regard to the Medicaid program.

(26:46):
May twelfth, noon to twelve thirty pm. That's a webinar.
We get usually two fifty three hundred people that attend
the webinar, Many of them are professionals, many of them
are consumers, and we would encourage you to sign up
on our website Pierro dot com. So May twelfth, noon
to twelve thirty pm Medicaid Monday. It's an enlightening thirty

(27:07):
minutes where we cover a lot of the in depth
information that you need to know in order to plan
your future, because healthcare, without health, what good is wealth?
And so we're going to talk about that on the
twelfth of May. Right now, I'm going to turn back
because I have with me two Crackerjack attorneys from Pierre

(27:27):
O'Connor and Strauss, Dylan Newkirk and Brent Stack, and we're
talking about controversies, courts and how to plan to stay
out of them. And Brent, I want to come back
to you. You've had some interesting cases of late, and
we talked a little bit about guardianship, but it doesn't
always end when you die. Those controversies can stay with

(27:50):
your family for years and years and years, and we
have litigation that's going on literally for five, six, seven,
eight years. So what are some of the things that
you see mistakes people make and that traps that they
fall into.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
I think you're right in terms of appointing the right agent,
and not only for you know, in terms of while
you're living, in terms of a healthcare proxy and a
power attorney, but appointing the right people to manage your
affairs once you once you pass. We see too often

(28:26):
parties will make this the same mistake of appointing two
siblings or family members that are at odds even even
while everything's going well. And so how could you think
that that situation is going to work out well when
these two people have kind of the same role, the

(28:47):
same authority, and they're already at odds. When things go wrong,
those people are going to become even further apart. And
that's when things just go terribly and it rips families apart.
They want completely different things, they have different different goals,
and ultimately all the money gets divided between the two

(29:11):
attorneys on the two sides.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
And I said before, when when parties walk out of
a courtroom, they're almost all disappointed, right, and then the
attorneys go to lunch and high five each other. It's like, oh,
look that case went great. You know, we all get paid.
It's it's a win for us. Who wins. Yeah, the
lawyers win. Not that we complain about that too much,
But that's not what we're that's not what we're here for.
We're not here to milk clients in litigation cases. We're

(29:37):
here to say there's a better way. And one of
the things that we see and Dylan and I on
the planning side. See this, I've seen this. I've been
practicing forty two years, started when i was ten, but
I've been practicing for a long time, and I've seen
this time and time and time and time again that
as people get towards the end of their life and

(30:00):
their capacity and their ability to not that they're incompetent,
but they're unable to resist pressure. And when children start
to put pressure on them, it's oh, well, mom, you
need to do this, or I'm not coming to visit,
or you're not going to see your grandkids. Those people
should be shot, but they're all over the damn place.

(30:24):
And at the end of life, people get whipsawed. And
whether it's the second spouse and the kids from the
first marriage, or the first, second, third spouses, or any
family members where one child, oh, Mom's coming to live
with me exactly, and then they take mom to their
own lawyer and mom does a new power of attorney

(30:45):
and a new healthcare proxy and changes the will to
leave things to that child that now has undue influence.
How do you see that and how does that play out?

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. You see that all
the time. It happens. It happens, like you said, right
towards the very end, nobody knows about it. And then
you know, the documents come out when you go to
probate and oh my god, there's a brand new will
and everything has changed. I guess I would recommend you know,

(31:15):
do it early, do it while you're able, do it
while you have your all, your all your facilities and capacities,
and you know, do it with a reputable firm that's
going to keep your documents together, keep them safe.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
And I'm gonna flip it over to the planning side
for Dylan. So you know, sometimes you need a good bullpen.
You need you need people to come out of the bullpen.
You're the starting pitcher, but you need somebody to come
in and retire the other side so that you can
win the game in the long run. And when people
start influencing and trying to coerce their their loved ones

(31:54):
into things, we go back to our fundamental documents, the
healthcare proxy, the power attorney. But we are tremendous advocates
folks of utilizing trusts. There are many reasons to use trusts.
This is one, and this is one of the most
compelling because as I said earlier, you can write the script,
or you can have a judge write the script for you.

(32:16):
And with a trust, it gives you a great deal
more security that your wishes are going to be carried
out versus the wishes of the child who's gone rogue.
And a lot of times it's not even the kids,
it's their spouse, the evil son in law who needs
money to fund his business. I can't tell you how
many times I've had that case who wants to now

(32:36):
get the inheritance early so he can fund his new business.
And really, a business is going to go bankrupt anyway.
They're just going to siphon the money out. And the trust, Dylan,
gives you a great deal more chance at success.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
It does.

Speaker 5 (32:52):
And for one, for one thing, when you use the trust,
you take a lot of the uncertainty of court proceedings out.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Of it day out of probate.

Speaker 5 (33:01):
That exactly, that's the biggest thing is you stay out
of probate, You stay out of the probate courts, and
you don't have a judge saying, oh, I don't like
that provision, I'm going to interpret it a different way.
What you get with the trust is you get to
have your wishes carried out exactly how you said you

(33:23):
wanted them, versus someone interpreting it a different way.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
It also saves on time.

Speaker 5 (33:31):
When you get into probate and you get into the courts,
you're talking about being locked up for roughly a year more.
And that's yeah, that's.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Good, that's a that's an ideal estate that gets out
in a year very.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
And not the judges are bad. I don't know if
any judges are listening, but that's not what we're saying.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
It's just they I don't care. You have to thank you.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
They just and you can't blame them. But they don't
really care about you. You mean, let's be honest, they don't.
They don't have no, they don't have the they don't
know you.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
They're judging it based upon what they see, not fifty
years of family history exactly, and it's impossible, it's an
impossible job to try to ferret out all of the
facts and all of the motivations. Oh well, mom, when
I was twelve, did really right. And I'm sure you
hear that.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
All the time, and you just to tell our clients listen,
it's not that the judge doesn't care about you. It's
that the judge doesn't really care about anybody here. They're
doing a job just like just like we are. They
care about justice exactly. They want to find the right result,
and it's not about you or you or you. It's
about the person if it's a guardianship in front of them,

(34:43):
or the beneficiaries of the estate.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
And then it's trying to interpret what was real, what.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
Was it and standards, standards and goals.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
They can't have a case going on in their courtroom
for too long, so they encourage swift settlement, and again
that eliminates the personal.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
I've heard this line several times. That's why I don't deltigation,
mister Piro. I suggest strongly that you go out in
the hall with your council, with your opposing counsel, that
two of you work this out, because if you come
back before me, this is not going to go well
for you.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
I can't tell you how many times I've heard that.
And so you go out and you resolve it. You
try to hash it out and settle it the best
you can, but your your client is in there saying, well,
what about exactly, and the judge just wants a result
that takes into account all of the competing interests, and
competing interests are just that they're in competition with each
other and it's not going to go one way or

(35:35):
the other. In most cases exactly, the judge is going
to try to compromise it to a point where the
parties say, I give you, no, I don't want to
pay you anymore, let's settle. And it kind of comes
down to that. But Dylan, when we use the trust,
one of the keys to a trust is funding. And
when you have assets hanging out there, you got your
brokerage account, you've got all of your different assets, your home,

(35:57):
title to your home. When you have it just in
your name or even in a joint name with with kids,
it's susceptible to that power of attorney. But when you
have a trust and you have all of your assets
titled in the name of the trust, and you become
the trustee if it's a revocable trust, or you choose
the trustees and control who they are in an irrevocable trust,

(36:19):
that gives those people a great deal more ability to
follow your.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
Script, yes entirely.

Speaker 5 (36:27):
And then with those trusts, another another big thing with
the trust that we have not mentioned yet is earlier
we touched on you know, the evil the evil son
in law or the evil daughter in law and the spouse.
One thing that we can utilize in that through one
trust is sub trusts for your kids where you can

(36:51):
prevent that evil son in law or that evil daughter
in law from taking it, even if they threatened to,
even if they divorce them and they try to take everything,
they have a separate pod that can't be touched by
anybody else but them and for their benefit, which at
the end of the day, if you do that, you're

(37:12):
going to keep your kids out of court because that's
an asset that no one else can even attack in court.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
And in most, not most, many of the cases that
I have where clients have children, they have grandchildren, and
for many grandparents, oh, I'm taking the grandkids on the trip.
I'm going to their baseball games. They get so much
more involved with their grandchildren's lives, and they say, well,

(37:39):
you know, the kids take it or leave it, but
I want to make sure these assets are protected for
my grandchildren. And if you want to protect the children,
I don't have grandchildren yet, but I want to protect
my children, and I don't want it to be put
at risk. So one of my favorite topics and one
of my favorite discussions with clients is how can you
during your lifetime be secure, but upon your passing have

(38:02):
a seamless transition of wealth to your kids. And when
I say wealth could be just a house, could you
know fifty thousand dollars to a child is a big deal.
If that's what you have, protect it. And so we're
gonna come back after a short break and talk about
next generations and how to keep your children out of
court and how to keep them out of court with

(38:22):
their spouses and a divorce proceeding, and how to protect
them and those dear grandchildren that you love so much.
We'll be right back after this short break as the
what you wanted to be the basic welcome back. I'm Lupiro,

(38:44):
your host this morning. We're going to close the show
talking about trust planning, and trusts, to me are the
ultimate implement of success in an estate plan. What we
use trusts, I call it the Swiss Army knife of
a state planning because we use trusts to protect assets
for medicaid purposes. We use trust to protect assets from

(39:05):
predators during lifetime from creditors. We use trusts to protect
assets from lengthy court proceedings that are going to drain
those assets, and so they become a tool. And if
you know how to use that tool, you can build
yourself a castle that is impenetrable. And so when we
talk about this topic, I think of stories where people

(39:28):
didn't have even the richest people and you can you
can out outwit the wealthy by having good counsel. And
there's a case that I've talked about on the air
a lot, and it was a public case, and that
was the case of brook Aster. The Astor family, I
don't know one of them was on the Titanic. They
were a very wealthy aristocratic family during the Gilded Age,

(39:50):
the Astors and brook Aster was one hundred and two
years old living in an apartment and had an eighty
year old son who was using a power of attorney
to pill for her estate. And Elizabeth Lowe, who's a
good friend of mine, was the district attorney in New
York City that started the elder Crimes Unit, and she
prosecuted the son and the son's lawyer for all of

(40:11):
these different crimes and got convictions and sent both of
them to jail, and it came up Brent from a
guardianship because the grandchildren were not being allowed to see
their grandmother. And there were testimony that the son she
had an original monet hanging over her sofa and that's
where she spent her days and looking at the monet.

(40:32):
And there was testimony that the son came in, stepped
on the couch next to his grandmother and next to
his mother's head, reached up, took the monette off the wall,
turned around, handed it to his third wife who put
it into a brown shopping bag, and they carried the
monette out of the apartment. And this was all testimony
in open court. Liz has been on the show and

(40:54):
talked about her experience trying that case. But when you
have assets that are owned by a trust and a trust, Dylan,
those kinds of things are much less.

Speaker 5 (41:03):
Likely, Yeah, because at the end of the day, only
the trustee has a right to move those assets, to
touch them, to manage them. At Sometimes you know, a
beneficiary may have a right to some of those assets,
but they are not the ones who can go to
the bank, who can sign the check. It is only

(41:25):
the trustee. And in some of the trusts that we use.
The trustee is yourself. You wrote the trust. You're the
only one who is allowed to amend it in any
way unless you appoint someone else. And at that point
you you're probably choosing someone who you trust and who's

(41:46):
going to act by who's going to do right by you.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
And the trustee brand is a fiduc I think that's important.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
I was just gonna say when you when you place
a fiduciary in place, you know somebody's accountable, and you've
got beneficiaries who can request an accounting at any time.
And I think as litigators we use accounting. That's a
very important tool for us.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
A lot of times in a trust, you don't get
any information. You don't get any information, so you demand
that account at any time. We can commence an action
to compel on accounting, and that gives the court, you know,
once once you're in court on accounting, and that's how
we get the court. A lot of times, the court
can replace the fiduciary, The court can undo transactions that
were done incorrectly, can do any number of things to

(42:35):
get back at the intent of the trust. Why that
trust was created to protect what assets and for whom,
And I think that's something that people should keep in
mind when considering a trust, is that it's protected for
the purpose that it was created and those those beneficiaries.
And if you're going to serve as a trustee, you

(42:55):
better be aware of what a fiduciary exactly, and that's
serious going to be held accountable, and you can be
held liable personally for breaching your fiduciary duty. So this
concept of fiduciary representation in the law is powerful.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
It has teeth very much.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
And unlike people running around with a power of attorney
who may or may not be held under a fiduciary standard.
Some courts will some courts won't. You have a trust
and a trustee and a clear line of instruction in
a trust document that if the trustee doesn't follow those instructions,
they're going to be held personally liable. And in some

(43:34):
cases we use corporate trustees because they're professionals and they
have a staff that does accountings, that does tax returns,
that does all of the work of a trust, and
gives you a professional who has an insurance policy. So
if they muck it up, you can go after that
trustee and there you have a party that is accountable,

(43:56):
unlike most cases where the assets are gone.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Right, it is it is truly protecting assets. When you
put them in trust, you are protecting them.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
And so this fiduciary standard, this fiduciary concept. Dylan choosing trustees,
and we talked about this earlier. Choosing a healthcare agent
critical decision, Choosing a power of attorney critical decision. In
a trust document, we actually have a lot more ability
to be creative in how we structure trusts and trusteeships.

(44:27):
And in my case, when my wife and I aren't around,
I have three children, and if I'm not able to
manage my trust, I want each of my three children
to have a say in the management of that trust
and to have input. I don't want any one of
them to be able to outvote two, but I thought
about it long and hard. I don't want them to

(44:48):
have to be unanimous because they're all strong opinions, and
if two out of three agree, I think, for me,
that's my personal choice. So I have them acting by majority.
You can construct that in a trust. You can't do
that in a power attorney because if they go to
bank with that power of attorney, they're could just get
laughed at. Yep.

Speaker 5 (45:08):
And so a lot of those documents, like the power
of attorney or the healthcare proxy are statutory, and so
the legislature has written the law as to how they
can act and be formed and written. With the trust,
your lawyer is essentially writing the law, and you're expressing
your wishes to your attorney, who is going to be

(45:30):
able to craft it however you really want it done. Yes,
there's some legal parameters you have to stay within, but
a lot of it's customizable because it is not statutory.
And so, like you said, you can put in there
that I want all three of my kids to be
my trustees. They have to have a majority, or if

(45:55):
they're locked, they have to go and talk to someone
else who gets to be the tie breaker.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Trust advisor, And we actually carve that role into our
trust as well.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
I think also, Lou, I think some people when they
perceive trust, they feel like, you know, if you put
an asset and trust, that it's unavailable to you. And
I think that I think that's a misconception. You know,
you put your house in trust, you still live there,
you know what I mean. I think that people ought
to know that that in a revocable trust, which is
the trust that I have. I'm the trustee exactly.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
They're my assets. I can go to the bank and
drain the care the grant.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
Or the trustee the beneficiary.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
I can write the checks, I can deed the house.
I can do whatever I want with those.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
As you have no less access to your assets.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
But if I lose capacity, then I have a plan,
and I have successors who are going to step in
and manage it for me while I'm alive, and then
upon my death manage it in trusts. And this is
still in your point, not having the trust break, but
having it divide and having a trust created for each

(46:56):
of the beneficiaries.

Speaker 5 (46:58):
Right, so you get those subject trusts out of that,
and each one of your kids know after you're gone,
after you're unfortunately gone, they.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Have all that money is peruc for the party's over.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
They have there.

Speaker 5 (47:15):
What they're receiving is then protected for them for life.
They don't have to go and amend that document in
any way, shape or form. It's already set for them.
And you've written your intentions and told them how they
can use it if you've put any limitations, and that
will protect it for the rest of their lives until

(47:36):
they've drained it, essentially.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
And we call those beneficiary controlled trusts. And Folks, this
is not that. You can structure trusts for your beneficiaries
in many, many different ways. And I kind of have
a trust meter. You know, what are the needs of
the beneficiary for fight? Do you shary management? Do they
need someone to manage for them? So if you go

(47:59):
all the way to the left, and this is a
dial one hundred and eighty degree dials, you go all
the way to the left, you've got a special needs
trust and you have beneficiary that needs everything done for them.
And that's one hundred percent need of the beneficiary. And
we have individuals that do those, but we also have
a lot of trust companies that will manage a special
needs trust for that beneficiary. If you go to the

(48:21):
other side of the dial, these are kids that but
for the desire to protect them, you would just leave
them the money and let them deal with it on
their own. They're one hundred percent in control of their
own trust and they are the sole trustee of that trust.
They can touch it for any purpose, as you said, Brent,
they can dig into this, they can invest it. They
can go buy bitcoin, they can you know, buy real estate,

(48:44):
they can invest in the market, buy bond stocks, whatever
they want to put in that trust. And then when
it comes time for them to say, oh my child
needs to go to college, that money's available, they write
check to the college. I want to buy a house,
they buy a house. I want to buy a car,
They buy a car. I want to go to Vegas.
It's their money, exactly. They control at one hundred percent.
There is no loss of diminution of control in that

(49:06):
beneficiary control trust.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
But no one else can touch it exactly.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
I think that's an important point, is the accessibility of
the ads of the asset. I think people get nervous
of put it in trust. You know nobody can touch it.
It's not the case.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
So we use acronyms all the time, BCTs. If you
hear us, if you come into our office and you
do a consult and you hear us talk about BCTs,
that's what we're talking about. And I have a whole
handout on this. I wrote it up because I believe
in these. I think that as we look at our
next generations, social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, those programs today are
at risk twenty years from now, thirty years from now,

(49:44):
who knows. So if we can safeguard assets and keep
this nest egg, this little vault of assets for our children,
let them manage it, control it, and Dylan, it then
comes down to who's going to get that when our
child dies. And there are different versions of that as well.

Speaker 5 (50:00):
There are different versions of it. For one, we can
go and do it say bloodline and say, oh, after
my kid passes away, it's got to go to their kids,
or if they don't have kids, it's got to stay
in the family. The other way we can do that
is we can give what's called the power of appointment,
so the child can say where they want their trust

(50:23):
to go upon their death, whether it's to a spouse,
maybe they have one kid who is really great and
one who never saw them.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
And this is all optional, folks. This is a discussion,
a nuanced discussion between you and us as we sit
down and write your script. I hope you come see
us if you need one. And thanks for listening today,
Dylan Newkirk, Brent Stack, thank you for joining me and
taking your Saturday morning here. Happy Easter, Happy Passover, to everyone.
We hope that you enjoy a blessed, holy, and safe weekend,

(50:54):
and we hope that you can join us back here
on Life Happens Radio next Saturday at nine am, and
week here on talk radio w g Y