 to our presenter, Ariel Siner. Hi, everybody. Welcome. I'm really excited to be here with you today. I am going to share my screen so we can say OK. And here we are. OK, so welcome. My name is Ariel Siner. I'm happy to be here. I am an estate planner. I have been an estate planner for going on five years now. I work at Hope, Benton, Jones, and Nappel. We are mainly located in San Jose. We also have offices in Pleasanton and in San Mateo. We are a full-service law firm. We provide a state planning, trust administration, tax planning services, as well as real estate, business litigation, corporate governance and formation, family law services, employment law services, and IP and data and privacy services, as well. So what that really means for the purposes of today is I am an estate planner, and that's what I'm going to be talking about. But if any other issue comes up in any other legal field, almost any other legal field, I have a colleague down the hallway that I can call to assist. So we are really able to provide our clients with assistance and really any legal issue they may have. So that has helped me in my experience as an estate planner and has helped me help my clients as well. So without further ado, let's get to estate planning. It's important for me that you all understand the basics of an estate plan, the purpose of our presentation, to give you an overview of what an estate plan actually is, why it's so important to have one. And my goal really is to have you leave this presentation with a bit of a background on estate planning so that you can consult with an estate planning attorney without really going in completely cold so that you will have some kind of background to really engage with the process. Because you'll see that estate planning is very personal, and it's very important for you and for your family. And we do a lot to make sure that your plan is going to work for you. It is very much an audit one test, but it's all kind of scenario. So it's important to understand what the different pieces are and how they'll work best for you. So first we'll start with what is an estate plan? It is first and foremost a plan. It is not just a document. It's not even a stack of documents that you have to sign. It is a framework for the management of your assets during life and the succession of those assets after death. There are four basic parts to a basic estate plan. They are the revocable living trust, the poor over will, durable power of attorney, and an advanced health care directive. So each of these four I'm gonna go through, kind of explain the main aspects of each one, how they work and kind of the different flavors that you may come across. And then kind of the second half of my presentation, I have a hypothetical of a family and we will see how each of these four documents come into play in kind of a typical real life scenario for my little made-up family that we'll get to later. If you have any questions as we go along, please throw them in the chat. Our lovely people with the library are gonna be monitoring those and I will be taking questions at the end. I will get through as many as I possibly can. Please keep in mind that we want it to be what's gonna be best for the group if you have specific personal questions. I probably won't be able to get to those during our presentation. My contact information will be at the end if you would like to contact me directly with any further questions that I didn't get to during our presentation today. So let's jump right in. So we will start with the revocable living trust. I call it the centerpiece because it is kind of the main focal point of the estate plan. It is pretty much the main management of your assets is governed by the trust and it helps with all the other documents. They're kind of ancillary to what the trust does and what the trust provides. So a little bit of vocabulary background for a revocable living trust. Each of those pieces revocable living and trust are all important. The trust can be revocable or irrevocable. Revocable means that the creators of the trust can revoke the trust obviously and terminate it and make it go away or they can also modify the trust. You can amend your trust as long as you are able to do so and that means that you have legal capacity to know what your affairs are and to understand kind of the documents that you're signing. A revocable trust becomes irrevocable at death and that's something that we'll get into with the hypothetical on how that works. There are other types of trusts that are used for more advanced tax planning that I won't really get into here that are created as irrevocable trusts and they can be very powerful for as I said, tax planning, business succession, charitable planning, but that's a little far beyond what we're gonna deal with today. But just know that there's a revocable trust and an irrevocable trust and different things govern each. The other things to note are the creator of a trust is called a trust store or a set lore. Those terms are kind of used interchangeably in both federal law and state law. Most of what we're gonna be discussing today is California-based state law, but it affects federal taxation. So those two things work together. The manager of the assets, the owner of the assets in a trust is called the trustee. The trustee has a fiduciary duty to manage the assets on behalf of the beneficiaries. The beneficiaries of the trust are who the trust is created to benefit. So if you create a trust, if you are the trustor, you are also your own trustee because you would transfer your assets to the trust and you would manage them yourself and you are also your own beneficiary because they're your assets and you manage them on your own behalf. So while you're alive, your trust, you wear basically three hats as trustor, trustee and beneficiary. And those things change as if you lose capacity and then once you pass away as well. And again, all of this will be illustrated, I think a lot easier in our example that we'll get to. So what does the trust control? How does it work? The trust controls any asset that has title. So that would be bank accounts, brokerage and investment accounts, business entity interests, like if you own shares of a corporation or a membership interest in an LLC or a partnership interest and real property. And all of those things, you can change from aerial signer to aerial signer as trustee of the aerial signer revocable living trust. And that is how assets are put into the trust and titled in the name of the trustee. So I like to call a trust a magic box within the instruction manual. My name is Ariel, I like Disney. Magic works for me, whatever metaphor works for you. But the magic box, you put all the assets, you title them in the name of the trust, put it in the box, and then when the trustee changes, the box gets passed to the next trustee. And that is the living part of revocable living trust. It's a lifetime transfer that you're making into the trust so that the transfer of ownership is not made after your death because that avoids probate, which is a lot of the kind of goal of pretty basic estate planning like this is to avoid probate. Probate is a court supervised process that can take months and sometimes years. It has statutory fees based on the gross value of the estate, which means, for example, if you own a house that's worth a million dollars, but there's a $900,000 mortgage, the fees are a percentage of one million, not on the equity of 100,000. So it can be very expensive and there's not a lot of way to mitigate that and it takes a lot of time because the court has to take control of your assets and change them from your name after you pass away to the names of whoever your property passes to. So that needs a court order to do when you have the trust. The trustee takes those assets, follows the instructions in the trust and distributes them out of the box into whoever it passes to. So it avoids that court supervised process. And there are three basic stages of the revocable living trust, particularly for a joint trust. That would be if you're a married couple, typically you would have a joint trust for your community property assets. It also can control your separate property assets. If you're unmarried or if you have significant separate property as a married person that you want a separate trust for, it would be a soul settler trust and it would be set up with just the single creator. So for a joint trust, three stages are when both creators are still living, after one has passed away and the other still survives and then third stage is when both passed away. And all of this will also be illustrated in our example coming up. But that kind of keep that in the back of your head that there are those three stages and the one document controls all three of those stages and what happens with the property and how it's managed in each of those three stages. So it is a pretty powerful document. It does a lot of things and it has a lot of impact on exactly how things are gonna be managed and how they're gonna be passed on. So the next document we'll talk about is the will. Now, just because you have a trust, you also need a will and that's why I say, pop culture gets it right. You do need a will, even if you have a trust. The will covers anything that is in your probate estate. And now what is a probate estate? I thought that the entire reason you would have a trust is to avoid probate, that is correct. But as I also said that the trust only controls things that have title. There are a lot of other assets that don't have title. There are also a lot of assets that may not be funded into the trust during lifetime. So the probate estate is anything that is not in the trust and anything that is not in joint tenancy, which means typically it'd be real property or a bank account titled specifically as joint tenancy. That property passes by law without the probate court process. To it passes the property to the survivor automatically. So that's not part of your probate estate. It also would not be transferred into the trust typically. If you wanted to keep it in joint tenancy, we tend to recommend against that. If it can be titled in the name of the trust, it should be. Other property that does not pass through the probate estate does not go into the trust. Anything with a beneficiary designation. So that would be life insurance, annuities, 401ks, other kinds of retirement or pension accounts like that. Those pass under the contract that goes with that account. So the company that's managing those assets will distribute them to whoever is listed on that beneficiary designation. And that you could name the trust so it passes into the trust or it can be just a person and they get a check from Charles Schwab or whatever else and that avoids that probate process as well. So then the probate estate is left with anything else. So it could be, for example, a savings or brokerage account that you have that you just forgot to change the title into your trust and it's just kind of hanging out there somewhere. If it's not in the trust, it would require the probate typically and it would require that it passes by intensity and that is the statutory kind of scheme that says if you have not actively set up in a state plan that says where your property goes, the law will tell you where it goes. So to avoid that, we have what we call a poor over will, a poor over provision in your will. And that says that any property that is outside of the trust and in your name at your death, it goes into the trust. So that way everything is distributed in the same way and you don't have random assets hanging out there that don't go in with the rest of the plan. So the poor over provisions are very important. I also have a note here about executor versus trustee. You may have heard the term executor that's typically if the will does go through the probate process, if you don't have a trust or if there are reasons otherwise that you would need to go to court, the person that's named under the will to manage that whole process is called the executor. Typically we would have the executor and the trustee be the same person, it just makes everything a lot easier but they're not always the same person and depending on if they're acting under the power of the trust, they're called the trustee, if they're acting under the power of the will, they're called the executor. Another really important part about a will in California, if you have minor children and you want to name a guardian for them, that goes in your will. You would name in your will who you would want to essentially raise your children if you pass away and are unable to raise your kids yourself. So guardianship appointments are very important to make sure that your children are placed in the hands of people who you trust who are going to raise your kids the way that you hope that they will be raised again if you are unable to do so. Wills are also really important in California because the law is very slow to evolve. So even though we use trust for all the important things nowadays, trust are a lot less formal than a will. The will is still important and still needed for all the reasons that I discussed but it is not notarized, it has to be witnessed and there are all sorts of requirements to do that. It's very easy to mess up and so that's also why we always recommend do it with an attorney, do it under an attorney's supervision so you make sure that it's all executed properly because some of those things are not very user friendly sometimes. So you want to... I'm sorry to interrupt you. We have a comment in the chat. Would you speak a little bit slower? Oh, I'm so sorry, yes. No worries, thank you so much. See, that was a helpful interruption. Sorry, I sometimes forget that not everybody knows how all of this works the way I do. I worry that I'm taking too much time going into too much detail but I will try my best to slow down and take things a little slower for everybody. But that is essentially how the will works and how it works in conjunction with the trust and why you need both of them. So the next two documents that we will talk about are the Durable Power of Attorney and the Advanced Healthcare Directive. These two are very similar in the way that they work but they are for different purposes. The Durable Power of Attorney is something that takes effect during your lifetime. And it means that if you lose capacity, you are unable for any reason to manage your own affairs. Sometimes it's due to issues of old age, dementia or Alzheimer's or you just get a little confused, a little slower and just it becomes a little too much. The Durable Power of Attorney is super important because it allows your attorney in fact to take on those management and control of your assets for you. So basically because everything is hopefully in your trust the trustee is the one who manages that, your successor trustee if you're unable to manage it yourself. But there are still things that you as an individual need to be able to sign for that the authority of the trustee is not sufficient. So that would be things like signing your tax returns. You don't sign your tax returns as trustee you sign as yourself. So things like that are really important. Often banks prefer to deal with an attorney in fact under a Durable Power of Attorney rather than just a successor trustee even if the property is held in the name of the trust. Sometimes not all as I said not all assets are transferred to the trust. So it's important to have the Durable Power of Attorney to make sure that if you are unable to manage your assets that things are taken care of for you. If you don't have a Durable Power of Attorney to have someone appointed to be able to manage property on your behalf you would have to do a court supervised conservatorship which similar to a court supervised probate can be very expensive, can be very time consuming and you are left to the discretion and authority of the court which is probably best to be avoided if at all possible. I go to court a lot I like it but it's my job and it's not for everybody. Another thing to note about the Durable Power of Attorney there are two ways that it can work you can have it be immediately effective. So as soon as you sign the form whoever you've named as your attorney in fact has the power to be able to take control of those assets and sign on your behalf. This is really useful when you're traveling if you are God forbid in an accident and you're in the hospital and you're unable to get somewhere that you can sign something. The alternative is what we call a springing Durable Power of Attorney and that means that it's only effective upon incapacity and that requires at least one doctor note that says aerial signer does not have capacity to manage her own affairs. That is an incapacity declaration and then the power of attorney would take effect after that. Requiring that incapacity does protect you from somebody taking advantage of you and of your property because they have that power but it also can make things a lot easier if you don't have to go get a doctor's note before these things can be taken care of. But again, like with most things it depends on who you're going to be naming, what your situation is and everybody can make that decision for whatever works best in their situation. And the fourth of our documents is the Advanced Healthcare Directive. And when I first started giving this type of presentation it was about a year ago and so Advanced Healthcare Directives were the talk of the town. Now it's still very important but there's much less of kind of a panic around healthcare than there was a year ago. But Advanced Healthcare Directive even not during a pandemic is extremely important. And the Advanced Healthcare Directive does two main things. First, it allows you to name an agent for healthcare. This means that you can, that when you are unable to communicate with your healthcare provider that your agent is the one who is getting access to your medical records and giving consent for medical care. The other thing that the Advanced Healthcare Directive does is it allows you to state your wishes for things like end of life. Do you want someone to quote unquote pull the plug or do you have very specific requests for pain management? Are there religious beliefs that need to be taken or do account for things like autopsy or organ donation? So all of that, not a fun conversation to have with your loved ones but if it's written down in a place where they know where it is, they will know what your wishes are and they don't have to guess if they're in that circumstance where they have to make those decisions for you. So it's important that your healthcare providers are made aware of your wishes that your family and your loved ones are made aware of your wishes so that things are taken care of for your medical care in the way that you would want it to if you are unable to make those wishes known. So Advanced Healthcare Directive also very important also takes effect during your lifetime and allows your agent for healthcare to make those decisions knowing what your wishes are. So that is the overview of what an estate plan is and how it works. So I thought the best way that we can really illustrate that is what I call planning and practice. So I'm going to introduce you to our blended family. So Ruth has three children, Zoe, Beth and Tara and Harry has two children, Catherine and Graham. Ruth and Harry have gotten married and between them they have five children they have no joint children of their own. So they come in to do their estate plan because they want to make sure that each of them can benefit their children to in the ways that they want that things are taken care of on their behalf in the way that they need it to be and that all their kids are taken into account when they're determining how things are managed as I said during the joint lifetime when one has passed and the other survives and when they're both gone. So all four of these documents are going to come into play and we will go through and kind of talk about each one how it works for Ruth and Harry and their family. So the first thing to keep in that we'll discuss is the structure of the trust. I didn't really touch on this much when I mentioned how the trust works but it's really important to determine especially for a joint trust well, essentially only for a joint trust what the structure of the trust is going to be at the death of the first spouse. And there are a few different ways to do this what is going to work best for Harry and Ruth is what we call an A-B, A-B-C structure and I have a diagram that shows how all this works if you're a visual person. So what this does is at the first death it will segregate each spouse's assets. So all of Harry's half of his community property and all of his separate property goes into one bucket and all of Ruth's share of the community property and all of her separate property go into another bucket. So this allows kind of the his and hers split we call it and it allows Harry's property to benefit his children and Ruth's property to benefit her children without having to worry about who's getting what it's all very easily laid out. It creates irrevocable trust which means that it locks in the distribution. So whatever Harry and Ruth's determined is gonna happen for each of their shares of their property when one of them passes away the other one can't change that. So if Harry passes away first and Ruth gets remarried she can't take Harry's property and give it to her new spouse. So it really does ensure that Harry's property is gonna benefit his children in the way that he wants it to. Another thing that this structure and these irrevocable trusts do is for tax benefits. There are ways of doing tax planning around the state and gift tax exemption which has been discussed a lot in the news recently there may be changes to it. Currently each individual has an $11.7 million exemption from state tax. So that means that during your lifetime or at death you can give away and transfer up to $11.7 million tax free essentially. So anything above that currently under the estate tax rules is taxed at 40% before it can be passed to your beneficiaries and that is federal estate tax. There is something called portability that we have had since 2013. And that means that your spouse if due to tax planning and things that I'll discuss in just a minute you don't use your full exemption for the year 2021 it's $11.7 million. Your surviving spouse can then take your unused exemption and use it at their death. So you can do it so that there's no tax due at the first death and you have 22 million plus as an exemption from a state tax to use at the second death. Before 2013 that was not something that we could do. And there were all sorts of different other tax planning things that we were taking into account. There have been a lot of talks under the Biden administration that those numbers are going to change that the way that these tax planning situations work is going to change. So part of the fun of my job is things are always changing. We never really know how things are going to turn out until the law is passed. But the way things are right now we have 11.7 million exemption and we have portability that allows for the surviving spouse to use that unused exemption from their previously spouse. So for Harry and Ruth, that's going to help them. I'll show how the tax benefits work as well as their bigger goal of making sure that their property benefits their children. So as I said, they're protecting what is mine versus what is yours versus what is ours and making sure that they have that their property benefits their families ways that we can do this. I have what's called a statement of intent. So in Harry's situation his son Graham has not made very good choices in life. He is very estranged from the family and so Harry wants to disinherit him. So what we would do is to kind of help prevent that being surprised, help prevent litigation in the future saying, oh, Harry didn't know what he was doing, this isn't valid, et cetera, et cetera. We put in what's called a statement of intent saying that laying out the reasons why a person is being disinherited so that everybody in the family is aware that this is what's happening and so it doesn't come as a surprise. We also keep in mind in this structure and in the distribution provisions what is going to be best for each child's needs and abilities. So there are ways that you can set up a trust for your children that can terminate at any age or be there for their entire lifetime. And sometimes it is best to have property managed for the child's benefit and not just given to them outright. Sometimes it is better to just give it to them outright and to avoid the complication and expense of an ongoing trust. All of this will be demonstrated right here. So this is a pretty typical diagram structure that we like to use in our office to explain these things about how this trust works. So we have up here, I think, hopefully my mouse is visible. So we have Harry and Ruth create their trust. They transfer everything into their trust and we have over here the will with the poor over provision. So anything that is in either of their names of death pours into the trust. Harry share, let's say Harry passes first, we'll just say. Harry share gets allocated over here. The exemption amount, so that would be if Harry passed this year 11.7 million it changes every year. That amount gets allocated to what we call the family trust or the B trust. Sometimes it's called the bypass trust or the credit shelter trust. Many different names for the exact same thing. And that is held over here. Anything that Harry owned at his death beyond that would transfer into what we call the marital trust also called a Q-tip trust. And that stands for qualified terminable interest property. And all of this is kind of for tax planning purposes that I won't get into. It's a little beyond the scope of what we're doing. But that exemption amount and that portability that I discussed, all of that happens here. So Harry share passes into these two trusts or maybe just the one depending on what the exemption is at the time of his death. Ruth shares the surviving spouse goes into the survivor's trust. And the survivor's trust is a revocable trust. Ruth can make any changes to it that she wants because this is her property and she manages it and she can decide what happens to it. The family trust and marital trust are irrevocable which means that Ruth can't make any changes to those trusts once they've been established and once they've been funded with Harry's property. So when Harry and Ruth are setting up their estate plan what they've decided is that Harry's share is going to go 75% to his daughter Catherine outright and then 25% is going to be split between a few charities that he supports and his son Graham has been disinherited. Ruth's property, she wants to have an equal shares to her three children. And as I said, it is a revocable trust and that means that she can change it as time goes on if things change with her kids and she makes different decisions on what would be best for them. So we go along and few years past, they don't really make any changes to the estate plan and Harry gets it. So Harry is in the hospital, he's having surgeries, whatever else is going on. So Ruth under the durable power of attorney is Harry's attorney in fact. So she can manage everything on her own for her property and for his. And because Ruth as Harry's wife is his agent under the advanced healthcare directive, she is the one who has access to his medical records and she's making the consensus and decisions for his healthcare. But then when something should happen, let's say Ruth gets into a car accident. She's okay, she's not completely incapacitated but she is in the hospital for three weeks. So bills need to be paid, things need to be done. Maybe Ruth doesn't have a smartphone and online banking. So her son Tarek as her successor attorney in fact because maybe Harry's named first, Harry is unable to manage things obviously at this time. So Tarek manages things for Ruth and because Ruth is unavailable, Catherine manages things for Harry. So they're the successor's name. This is why we always have people name at least one or two successors in case their first named agent is unavailable. And similarly Zoe, Ruth's daughter is a nurse. And so Ruth has named Zoe as her agent for her advanced healthcare directive because Harry as I said is unable to make those decisions for her, Catherine is Harry's successor. So she can make those decisions for her father while he's sick and while Ruth is unable to make those decisions. Time goes on and Harry passes away. Ruth's all healed from her car accident, she's doing fine. So at Harry's death, the property is divided into those subtrusts. So all of Harry's separate property, anything that's passing under the poor of her will and his half of all of their joint community property is allocated to that family trust and that marital trust. And Ruth's separate property, her half of the community property gets allocated to her survivor's trust and that is revocable and she can make any changes that she wants because Ruth is able to manage everything. She is the surviving spouse. She is typically would be the sole trustee of all of those trusts. But sometimes when we have a blended family situation like this to protect these irrevocable trusts to make sure that the surviving spouse is not making distributions that they shouldn't be, sometimes we'll have a co-trustee from that the pre-deceased spouse family be a co-trustee and kind of, so they'd have to make those decisions together. So maybe Catherine would be the co-trustee, oops, I'm sorry, co-trustee of the family trust and marital trust. So because Harry has passed away and he was named as co-trustee, he was named as the executor under Ruth's will and as attorney in fact under the durable power of attorney, agent under the Advanced Healthcare Directive, he's passed away. So rather than just relying on those documents and having the successor take over, she would instead amend all those documents, have new ones drawn up to reflect the fact that he's passed away and that she has other people that she's going to name for those roles. So this is what things look like after everything is funded and allocated and so forth. So Harry has passed away, he had let's say $6 million in his share. They were doing great. And so because it's under that exemption amount, there's only one trust that is set up and Ruth's share goes over here. And after Harry's death, Ruth has changed her mind about things that she wants to do with her share. So she's decided that instead of it equally going to the three kids, she wants 40% to Zoe and 40% to Beth and those in trust, maybe they're not very good with money that it would be more of a burden than a benefit to just hand them their money, cut them a check after their mother passes away. So that will be in trust for their benefit. And then 20% of Ruth's share goes to her son Tarek and that will be outright. Tarek is good with money, maybe he's an accountant and he's perfectly fine managing everything for himself. Again, all of this could be changed as long as Ruth has the capacity to do so. Harry's share because this is an irrevocable trust and it cannot be changed. It stays exactly the same and that distribution is locked in. The reason that Harry's share does not automatically go to his beneficiaries at his death is because typically most of what would be up here in the original revocable trust is community property. That would be things like your personal residents, you know, bank accounts, things like that. There may not be enough in Ruth's one half of all of that to support her for the rest of her life. So because of that, the assets of the family trust would be available to the survivor for things like medical care for standard of living to be able to pretty much pay the bills, keep the lights on to benefit Ruth for her lifetime. She's not buying Lamborghini or anything, she's paying Hygiene. So that is available to her during her lifetime, but then whatever's left over at the end then goes to Catherine and to the charities after Ruth's death to ensure that she's taking care of for the rest of her life. So a few more years pass and Ruth loses capacity. She's diagnosed with dementia, she can't manage things on her own. She doesn't know what her trust is or anything about it anymore. So at that point, the survivor's trust becomes irrevocable because she no longer has the capacity to amend it. So TARC takes over as successor trustee of the survivor's trust. Catherine takes over as sole trustee of the family trust because Ruth is no longer able to manage it and because the family trust holds her as property. So his daughter Catherine is the one who would manage that. And TARC also is gonna take over as attorney in fact and healthcare agent for his mom. Maybe Zoe's moved out of state. And so it's easier for TARC who lives locally to be able to manage things for his mom because he's right there. Also something to consider is having people local. Nowadays with everything being remote that we've learned over the last year or so that's less vital than it used to be. But it still can be pretty handy to have someone who can just run to the hospital, run over to mom's house without having to jump on a plane. So after another year or so, Ruth passes away and we have the administration of those trusts. So for the family trust, Catherine distributes it exactly as it says. The family trust goes 75% to Catherine. So she writes a check from herself as trustee to herself individually or transfers title to real property, whatever those assets may be. And 25% of the family trust goes to those names charities. For the survivor's trust, TARC then would be the one distributing everything. Ruth never amended the trust again after she did that first time after Harry's death. So 40% go into trust for each of Zoe and Beth. That could be for a number of years, it could be have stage distributions. A lot of times we see people say maybe at 25 years old my kid can get half of everything and then at age 30, 35, the rest of it goes outright. Something like that. So those trusts are managed by TARC as successor trustee and he pays distributions to his sisters as needed for whatever they need while the property is in trust. And then at age 35, let's say, whatever's left over in those trusts goes outright to them. It's their property, they can do what they want with it. And then 25, 20% of the survivor's trust at Ruth's death goes to TARC himself outright. There is no continuing trust for his share. And at that point, both of the trusts have been fully distributed, they terminate and the estate plan has served its purpose. The property has been managed during Harry and Ruth's joint lifetimes after Harry had passed away and Ruth survived and then after Ruth had also passed away. And so the estate plan did its job and everything's all done. And that's how it works. So at this point, we have, it looks like a little less than 20 minutes left and I am happy to take questions. I believe Leah and might be asking whatever questions there may be. So I will throw up this screen. Here's my bio and all of my contact information. So if we don't get to your question, feel free to email me. I'm happy to answer questions later. So that's all I've got, questions. All right, thank you, Ariel. So one of the questions that came in is, will you charge if they email you? That is a good question. It depends on what your question is. I will not send out a bill to answer an email, but if your question is something that will involve us having an attorney-client relationship, we'll go through that process if you want me to be your lawyer. But if you just have a simple question, depends on what it is, I may or may not be able to answer it without that attorney-client relationship. But general questions, no, I'm certainly not going to charge. Thank you. The question from Dave, what does the phrase pour over mean as in pour over will and pour over provisions? What is the difference between a will and a pour over will? So a pour over will is used when you also have a trust. The pour over provisions are basically the part of the will that says anything that is in my estate at my death gets, we call it, poured over into the trust. So it's just kind of our shorthand for the type of will that has that provision in it that says that anything in my estate at my death goes to my trust. A will without pour over provisions just a will by itself. If you don't have a trust, you should at least have a will for the reasons I described. It prevents intestacy, which is the state sponsored estate plan that says that everything goes equally to your spouse, children, depending on separate property, community property, all sorts of good stuff. But essentially if you want to direct where your property goes, you need to put it in your will if you don't have a trust. If you have children, you name your guardians for your minor children in your will. So also an important thing to have. Thank you. The next question is, once a trust becomes irrevocable due to death of a settler, are heirs listed under trust then notified and given a copy of the trust like they would be in probate? Yes. So it is probate code section 16061.7. And it says that when a trust becomes irrevocable by reason of death, the trustee is required to send the notice that the trust is being administered, who the trustee is, how to contact the trustee, if there's an attorney handling the administration. All of that goes to the named beneficiaries under that trust and to all the heirs at law. So in the example that I provided, Graham was disinherited from the trust and was not gonna be receiving anything. He still by law gets a copy of the trust that says he's being disinherited and here's why. And so that's why we like that statement of intent because the disinherited persons, if they are heirs at law, would receive a copy and would like to know, I'm sure, why they're being disinherited. Thank you. The next question is, this person is asking if do it yourself services like Susie Orman or Nolo Press, quicken email and E-will and trust maker are sufficient? They can be. They are kind of a one size fits all kind of situation, which for anything more complicated than I am not married and I have more than, if you are unmarried, if you have one child, you can do it yourself and it should be pretty simple and it will work. Almost anything more complicated than that, you can run into problems really easily. Another kind of half of my practice outside of planning is interest in estate litigation. I would say that about 90% of the cases that land on our desk for people suing over something or other come from do it yourself kind of things or what we call trust mills, things that happen. It's a form that you fill in some names and you say it's good enough. That's typically where the problems come in because you don't have an experienced attorney really advising you on your powers and rights and some of these issues. So it can be enough, but I as an estate planner do not recommend it. Thank you. The next question is, hold on. Our advanced health care director need to be signed by a doctor? No, it only needs to be either notarized or witnessed by two people who are especially not your doctor or a healthcare provider. There are other types of forms. I believe there's one called POST, P-O-L-S-T or a DNR to necessitate things like that that do need to be signed by your doctor, but the advanced healthcare directive that has these more basic wishes listed and naming your healthcare agent do not need to be signed by your doctor. Thank you. The next question is, does the witness to the revocable living trust need to know the contents of the document or is he or she just there to say the person signing the document is the person who is creating the trust similar to a notary public? So yeah, so short answer. So the trust is not witnessed, only the will is witnessed and you need two witnesses who are uninterested parties. The trust typically is notarized. It doesn't actually have to be notarized to be legally valid. We recommend notarization, but it's not required. But no, the witnesses to your will also do not need to know what is in it or what you're doing with your property. One of the benefits of having a trust is that it is private and you aren't gonna have it as a court document as you would with a probate. And so there's even something we call a certification of trust and it's what you use when you go to change title to bank accounts and brokerage accounts. It's like a short form that it just says here are the trustees powers to manage the property. The trust exists, here's the date it was signed, here's who the trustee is and none of the dispositive provisions on who gets what is in that because the bank doesn't need to know what you're doing with your property. Your witnesses to your will don't need to know what you're doing with your property. So it's a lot more private than just having a will or having nothing at all and going through a probate process. Thank you. The next question is you mentioned that either the revocable living trust or the poor over will have some pitfalls involved if a person tries to create these documents themselves. Can you repeat what you said about that? Sure. So there are often times things that are more complicated than you might think on the surface. So for example, the simplest possible estate plan would be I give everything to my one child outside of trust. So free of trust, when my parents pass away, I'm an only child, everything goes to me, I know that's good for me. But anything more complicated than that, if you have multiple children, if you want to name more than one successor trustee, people will disagree. Estate planning and estate administration is a very emotional process because a loved one has passed away and that's just the nature of the beast. And when things get emotional, people tend to fight about it. People get stubborn, they make emotional decisions rather than rational decisions. So when you do things on your own, you may not have an attorney who is there to tell you what you want to happen, your perfect harmony world where all four of your children get along and are going to decide what to do with your vacation house or they're going to all equally decide, yes, we can split up all this property, it's gonna be fine, or my oldest daughter is going to manage a trust for the benefit of my youngest son. That may or may not be a good relationship and if you try and do these things on your own, you might not have somebody there who can kind of walk you through, we'll hear the pitfalls to this or your wish for your three kids to share your vacation property. If you don't have X, Y and Z in your trust, these are the kind of problems that are gonna arise for the management of that property if things don't go exactly the way you think they're going to. So really estate planning is not only just putting the documents together and putting together that plan, it's the process of engaging with an advisor to kind of help you make the best decision for you and your family. Thank you. How should any updates of revocable trust and or will be valid or legal after the initial setup in a law office, for example, with an executor, a list of assets? Please discuss updates with different lawyers versus updates by oneself or at the trustee. Okay, so any time, so we'll say it's a joint trust, you and your spouse are living and able to manage everything. If you wanna make changes, you can go back to your estate planner, you can go to a different estate planner, as long as you have your original trust, you say, I wanna make these changes, we will do an amendment to the trust. It is typically pretty short and it will say something like, you know, on this date, Joe and Sally created this trust, named themselves as trustees, they reserve the power to amend the trust under this article and they amend the trust as follows. And maybe you're changing who you want to be a successor trustees or you had your trust set up so that it would go to your three kids equally and you're changing your mind, the one's gonna get less and one's gonna get more, something like that. And then it would just be the article that's being amended and we would rewrite it to the way you want it now and signed and notarized, boom, done. Similarly with schedules of assets, we love a schedule of assets, it's good to let the successor trustee know what they should be looking for when they're going through all your stuff and marshaling the assets. If you've signed the schedule of assets initially, you typically would need to have a rewritten up and then have it signed again. Typically notarized as part of the trust amendment. Personally, I don't have people sign their schedules of assets because assets can change, you can open a new bank account, close one off. It is perfectly valid for you to just hand write in changes onto that type of page. It is also a very simple process to send in those handwritten changes to your attorney and say, can we update my schedule? Great, type it all out. Your attorney then has it on file, you have it on file, everything's all done that way. And that's pretty much how updates get done. Sometimes more significant updates need to happen. We get a lot of clients come in after six, seven, eight plus years and the law has changed. And maybe the way your trust was initially set up with that maybe that ABABC structure that I talked about with Harry and Ruth, maybe that's not gonna be the best idea for you anymore. And so we then do what's called an amendment and restatement where we have a little preamble that says that the trust was created on the state and you reserve the power to amend it and then we rewrite the whole thing. It's a brand new document, has all the new updated laws and all the changes that you wanna make, but it's retroactive to that original signing date. So you don't have to change title to anything. It all keeps that original title to it and lets you make those kind of bigger grand or sweeping changes. But yeah, an amendment and restatement process can be pretty simple. It can be done as frequently or infrequently as you wanna revisit your estate plan. Thank you. The next question is, can real stock certificates be part of a living trust? Yes. Typically to have stock transferred into your trust, you would need to go back to the company that issued the stock and have the certificates reissued to the trustee of the trust and those stocks would be then listed on your schedule of assets. Is a living trust needed if assets held in joint tenant title or there is beneficiary designation? Separate advanced healthcare directive and separate power of attorney? This is an abbreviated question, sorry. Okay, let me take that one piece at a time. So property that is in joint tenancy or has a beneficiary designation does not need to go into the trust, does not require probate if there is no trust, those things pass by law. Typically if a lot of times what happens in my experience is when a married couple comes to do their brand new estate plan, they have nothing and they want to do an estate plan, oftentimes they'll have property already titled as joint tenancy because it's better than nothing because it does avoid that probate process and make sure that the survivor receives the full value of that property. Typically their house will be in joint tenancy. We can take that joint tenancy property and transfer it to the trust. One of the things at least that my firm does is when we do an estate plan, we make sure that your real property is transferred to your trust, we prepare all of the deeds and get them recorded with the county. It doesn't do anything to your property taxes, doesn't change your income taxes depending on how things are titled. So if you have joint tenancy property, it can be then transferred into the trust. It is no longer joint tenancy at that point, it is trust property. But if it is kept in joint tenancy, it will still pass under the rules of joint tenancy outside of the trust. Thank you. Can you leave assets in trust even if children are not minors? Or do you have to specify an agent which they have access to the funds? No, you can keep property and trust for a lifetime. That will often work especially when you have an issue with a child with special needs if they have public benefits to prevent assets from being counted by the Social Security Administration and having those benefits taken away, you can put them in what's called a special needs trust and it allows a trustee to provide for a special needs child to have things that otherwise would be countable and prevent those public benefits. And that is a lifetime trust, even without special needs. Maybe you have a child who has maybe some trust problems, well, bad choice of words. It was maybe susceptible to influence from others. Maybe they have a partner or a spouse that maybe you don't like so much. You wanna make sure that somebody else doesn't have influence over your child. You can keep that property and trust for their lifetime, the trustee manages it for them, makes distributions as needed and you can keep it in trust for their whole lifetime. Thank you. Can you explain survivor versus family trust? Would that apply to an individual or only spouses? So that's only for spouses. If you are an individual and you have a soul settler trust at your death, things are distributed or sent to other sub trusts, the family and survivor trust that I described is a tax planning mechanism for married couples and it also, with the case of Harry and Ruth, allows for the separation of assets to make sure that his property benefits his kids and her property benefits her kids without the kids squabbling between them for that. So if you are an individual and you're setting up a trust just for yourself during your lifetime and then maybe for your children or nieces and nephews or whoever after your death, those sub trusts are not needed for that purpose. All right, well, thank you so much, Ariel. I wanna be respectful of your time and the library's time as well. So we are at five o'clock and if you have further questions, you can email Ariel Siner. We've posted her email in the chat, which we will save and send to you after the program as well as her slides. And thank you very much for your informative presentation today, Ariel. We really appreciate your taking the time to educate us and we hope to see you again and to all of you in the call. Thank you for coming and we'll see you at the next program. Bye-bye. Thank you so much, everybody.