 Welcome to the Bogle Heads chapter series. This episode was hosted by the pre and early retirement life stage chapter and recorded April 6, 2022. The topic was documenting financial information for surviving spouse or executor. Bogle Heads are investors who follow John Bogle's philosophy for attaining financial independence. This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as personalized investment advice. This meeting is for informational purposes only, should not be construed as personalized investing advice. And it's also not legal advice. And we're not telling you, oh, you should do something this way. We're just presenting you with a pretty long list of things that you should go back consider. This is gonna take, it's a lot of things to consider is gonna take you a while. Think about how you wanna do this. How do you wanna document this for your... So what this meeting is, it's a lot of times in the Bogle Heads world, especially there's one partner, spouse, person in particular that handles a lot of the finances, not all the time. Sometimes one person handles investing, one person handles bill paying, sometimes one person handles everything. So you wanna make sure if you were to unfortunately pass away, you wanna make sure that the surviving spouse knows where to find accounts, all your assets. And we're gonna go over all this passwords, things like that, important documents in your house. So basically what this presentation is, discussion is, is what you can do ahead of time to make things easier for your surviving spouse. And when I say that, it's also gonna apply in situations where you become incapacitated and you, a power of attorney, it's also useful in that situation where the power of attorney is gonna take over. And to a certain extent, when you're the last spouse to die and your executor has to take over, but it's best mostly geared towards the surviving spouse or power of attorney. So we're not gonna tell you, this is how you should do something, we're gonna present some options and you're gonna go back, do some, do your own research, think about it, make your own decisions. And also we wanna be a little bit, oh, sorry, careful to, especially with things like passwords. You know, if you're not the surviving spouse, you wanna be real careful about when you're gonna use that information to log in. You don't wanna go start making transactions. You wanna, we're gonna say, take care and consult an estate attorney before taking any kind of action like that. And then also this is by no means a complete list of what needs to be done after death. Although we are gonna mention a lot of things. It's mostly, like I said before, to prepare in advance before you die to make things easier for your spouse. So it's not really like a complete list of everything that the spouses should be doing after your death. Okay. Okay, so the first thing is things you can do now to make things easier later. So the main thing you wanna make sure all your estate planning documents are in order that includes your will, your part of attorney, there's a medical, there's a financial medical directives. There's probably seven or eight, 10 different documents. And if you visit an estate planning attorney, they will have a whole packet of documents for you to fill out. And you wanna make sure all your accounts are titled the way you want and that will work in conjunction with your will. And if you have a trust set up, you may have to re-title things in the name of the trust. And you just wanna check all of your accounts, including your 401ks, your bank accounts, your insurance, all that kind of thing. And then also check all your beneficiary areas as well as the contingent beneficiaries. Everywhere you have an account that has a transfer on death, payable on death, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, insurance policies, you wanna check all of those. The other thing you can do is you can simplify and consolidate accounts when possible. I know I need to do that. Somehow my husband and I both ended up with like literally three or four different Roth IRAs here and there. And there's no reason why they can't be kind of consolidated that'll just eliminate or reduce the number of actual accounts, which will just make things a lot easier. A large part of this discussion is gonna be, we're gonna call it a book or a binder. I'm just gonna start calling it the book. And it's gonna have a lot of documentation that you're gonna leave for your surviving spouse. And we're gonna, that's what the rest of the discussion is gonna be about. And then also, once you create this book, you wanna kind of go over it with your spouse, let them know where is the book, what's in the book. And then should you pass away, they'll immediately know all I need to go to the book and it's gonna have a lot of information that's gonna be very helpful. One of the things I've heard people suggest is, if you've been managing your own investments and you think your spouse is the type that probably is not gonna wanna, either not gonna want to or not have any interest in managing, you may want to leave the name of a trusted friend or relative or some people actually pre-select a financial advisor. Even if you don't already have one now, they're gonna say, okay, if you decide you wanna financial advisor, I recommend this person make a list of two or three that you would recommend, of course, at our low fee and fiduciary and whatever you choose. One thing that I've heard of is you should establish separate credit cards in each spouse's name alone. It used to be you could have a joint account, I hear that they're going away from that and you can have a primary person on the account and an authorized user, but I've heard of situations where when a person dies, those credit cards are just gonna get shut down. Even if you're an authorized user and you could be left with no credit card. So, that's definitely something you wanna think about is establishing at least one preferably Clark Howard always says you should have two or three accounts which is true because my accounts are constantly, oh, there was, we detected some fraud, we're gonna shut this down and you don't wanna be left without a card. So ideally each spouse should have two in there which is kind of a pain because to keep them active, you gotta do some charges and then you gotta pay for credit card. That's what I do, pay for credit card bills every month but in the end it's gonna work out I think. You wanna make sure there's gonna be some cash available to pay for immediate expenses, particularly funeral bills. If there's a house, obviously household bills, that kind of thing. And there's several different ways to do that. Obviously, if it's a joint account, it's not gonna be a problem but if it's not a joint account, you could consider leaving life insurance to somebody, adding somebody as a co-signer, putting somebody right away as a transfer on death, payable on death and those bypass probate immediately go to that person. Of course you have to trust that person to be able to use that money to pay your bills. There's an issue about the safe deposit box. I worked as a probate paralegal for a while and we had cases where the persons will, either they thought there was a will to save the deposit box but nobody had the key so you actually have to get a court order to drill open the box or whatever. Even if you had the key, you had to get a court order to open the box if the person's name, if nobody else's name was on the box so you wanna consider making sure for your spouse's son there and we actually put my adult daughter on ours to just make things easier later on. Of course you always wanna declutter your paperwork in your house because if not somebody's gonna have to do that after you're done. Consider purchasing cemetery plots and the headstones my parents went as far as purchaser on headstones. They had everything engraved except the date, it's installed, it's ready to go and they're still doing great but they wanna make things easier. So they had that done ahead of time. If you have an HSA especially with the large balance you wanna consider whether or not you wanna leave a balance or you wanna start spending that down as you get, you never know what's gonna happen but you wanna consider what's gonna happen with your HSA and then you wanna review the book that you make and you wanna review it annually and update is needed. So does anybody have any kind of comments on what they did to handle any of this kind of what you can be doing now to make things easier later? Just feel free to, oh Jim I forgot to do your little zoom tips but hopefully people know how to click on the raised hand icon to raise their hand. Go ahead Lady Geek. Yeah, okay a couple of things. First save your chat on the zoom thing. I will be saving it and posting an anonymized version with nobody's names in it. Student wants to tomorrow or next day to make that available. One thing, let me back up a little bit and give a bigger picture here. We're talking about power of attorney. Power of attorney only exists while that person is alive. Once that person passes all power of attorney cease to have any authority whatsoever. It becomes part of the decedent's estate. So when people are clear about power of attorney be very sure you understand that fact that POA just stops. You have no authority after the person dies with that document. A couple of minor things is that if you want power of attorney for a bank that you probably all you need to do is take that person with you into the bank say I wanna give this person power of attorney. They'll find sign of form fight and have a small discussion five minutes later you have POA on that account. That is a very big thing. It's a very big financial help to have POA when the person starts to get in your death and becomes unable to have cognitive understanding of things going on. You can step in as POA with the bank immediately. In fact, I'm doing that. Well, I have POA. In fact, POA is good before they pass because they say there's a big area where they're not quite passed away. They're on their way. They have a medical condition and that you need that power of attorney while they're alive. I'm actually doing that for my mom right now because she has some issues and I just signed a legal contract on her behalf to have an aid be with her inter-assisted living. That needs to be a legal contract. They need access to the bank account to do ACH transfer. So welcome to that. But I did all of that under POA fully legal. Oh, also upon death, as soon as you take everything to the funeral director, the funeral director is required to notify social security of the death. This is for fraud prevention. So once that the funeral director files the form, every financial institution is notified. So if they decide, if they notice that, they will lock that account. Usually what you do is you call in and say, somebody died and they want the copy of the death certificate. But in the meantime, they already know. So you might as well be up forthcoming about it and do whatever you need to do before you get to the funeral director. The funeral director gets it. Let's see what, oh, the other thing I wanted to mention is, if you're gonna do websites, didsafe.com, I'll put the link in the chat because people who designate as trusted people, they have to know where the documents are before the person passes, fitsafe.com. I know a lot of some people who do that. I'm kind of delinquent on signing up myself. It's run by Fidelity, but you don't have to have a Fidelity account. It is designed for beneficiaries to be active after the person passes. So you put everything you want up in that site, it will be securely stored online with them. So I think I covered enough. I'll consider purchasing cemetery plots and headstones. Bear in mind, the funeral director, if you pay a price and the price increases, I hear that they can charge for the difference. So, okay, I'll stop on that. Okay, Joel, go ahead. You've got your hand raised, Joel. Sorry, took me a second to unmute. Oh, okay. Lots of great ideas. What I do, one tool that really worked for me is Quicken, not Quicken, the wheel maker, has a great form for recording all this kind of information and things that you would not have thought about like your Amazon library, if you're a Kindle reader. So I found that alone worth the price of wheel maker. And I use that quite a bit. The other thing that I do is I do more electronic forms rather than a binder, is a binder is not as safe or secure. But I do make sure that my wife is able to access the, it's on my computer, it's on thumb drives. You can take an image that's encrypted in AES 1024 and leave it in a drop box of my daughter and has access to that as well. And that's updated at least once a year. So I find doing it electronically a lot more efficient, especially because my book would be probably 300 pages. And I had a weird thing happen. I was perusing YouTube and there was a little video on how to break into the safe that we bought. So those of you who have like a century safe or buy one from Home Depot or Costco, one of the lower end saves, it's fairly good for fireproof but he was able to break it in one and a half seconds. And it's pretty amazing how easy the safes are to break in. Given that book is your whole finances, I didn't feel comfortable just having it all printed out. So that's my little bit. Right. Yeah, I think it's totally up to everybody how they want to do it. And it's also based on like, I don't think my mom would be able to figure out how to, like she'll type an email and I'll call my dad, you know, would you send the email? Like, I don't think, but anyway, so it's all dependent on how comfortable you feel. And like you said, yeah, you don't want to put it right out and open where Robert Berger would come in like, oh, there's their, you know, so it's all up to you and how you think, Miriam, go ahead. What do you have to add? Yes, one thing about the power of attorney that many have found that the banks will not accept, many banks will not accept a regular power of attorney that is drafted by an attorney. And even if it's notarized and signed and I think that Vanguard does not, they want you to use their own power of attorney forms. And with Vanguard, the form is the full agent authority form and you can also have limited agent. But if you have that with Vanguard or the similar with Fidelity and the other bank, your other investing companies, then you can just, it's easier to get in at that time. It's not, you don't have to deal with them not accepting the power of attorney. And I know that in Florida now they have a clause that is put into the power of attorney form that says, banks, if you don't accept this, then we're gonna, you know, get really mad and you're going to pay the price. But whether this really works or not and who wants to take the chance, just go to the bank and get your own power of attorney with the bank. Okay, very good. Thank you, Miriam. Keith, go ahead. Yes, good evening, everyone. I was just, had recently gone through this with my mother and a lot of great information on here, maybe just a couple of things that I would wanna emphasize based on our experience is bring, if you're gonna bring somebody and whether it's a child or a trusted friend, bring them in early, at least so they know where everything is at, whether it's in a safe, whether it's online, whether it's printed out and saved somewhere. So they're aware of where things are. My parents passed away about four years apart, but mentally their progression or regression happened at different paces. And so, you know, one spouse, one half might think I'll give all the information to the other, you know, to my spouse and they'll be able to take care of it when they go. And then a few years later, it turns out that that other spouse might be, you know, progressing with something where their mental sharpness is going away and starts to forget things. So I would suggest starting earlier rather than later. And based on our experience, my brother and I are both redoing our estate plans. We're putting together, you know, the binder with documentation and where things are at, account numbers, passwords, 800 numbers, you know, things like that, because when my father did it with us and then he passed shortly after, then we had about four years where we were in charge of our mother's financial affairs. And if our father had not reviewed those things with us, we would not know where things are at. We would not have been able to find whether it's tax returns, other information that we needed, insurance policies that we needed to include with the claim form. So I would suggest doing earlier rather than later, and you can always update it as you go if something changes, but do it while you're younger and sharper if you can, so that it's as accurate as possible and then just go in maybe once a year and update it. And I will also say on the cemetery plots, my parents were both planners. They literally bought their headstones and their headstone and their plot probably close to 30 years ago and they prepaid it. So when I walked in to do this with the cemetery, he looked at me and he said, wow, he goes, your parents were really smart. It would probably be three times what they paid if you had to pay today's prices. And that's a significant sum that we did not have to pay out from the state. So it is a smart thing to think about that ahead of time. Some people don't like to do that, but if you're thinking about who you're giving the money to and what you're giving and how much, it's smart to prepay ahead of time so that they don't have to worry about that. And if there's a significant increase in price, it's already been locked in. Thank you. Very good, thank you, Keith. Henry, go ahead. Yeah, so it's really important for anybody who moves from one state to another that the laws with all of these estate planning documents are really state specific. And in terms of how many witnesses you need, how it has to be notarized, if there are certain magic phrases that the state wants to be in there to have it be honored when the time comes. And even if there are ways to kind of do workarounds, you don't wanna be having a mess with this in circumstances where the documents are actually being applied. So it's something that you may have all your documents and you're all set and you may figure, well, everything's good whether we're in the state where it was done or where you're moving to, but it's just something you wanna check out. Thank you, Henry. Jim, go ahead. I just wanted to say something that Keith mentioned. Besides the planning of that cemetery plots or whatever the issues are, I think it relieves the family of anguish of what mom would have wanted or what dad would have wanted or whatever. And it may even save a family fight. So anyway, that's all I'm gonna say. Right, right. Okay, we're gonna go to the next slide. Oh, there it is. Okay, so this is all talking about the book, whether it be a paper book or online, or it could be both. Like what I do is I type it online, I mean on my computer and then I print it out and put it in the file cabinet with a little color sticky. Okay, so I'm just gonna let you know ahead of time what the different categories are gonna be. Location of a rich, you know, sometimes you need the original document or you need to know where it is as far as a document or a key. So we have a list of those. Kind of a discussion on passwords codes which can go a lot of different ways. What to do first in the, you know, what your spouse should, or your surviving spouse should do first in the event of death content. You wanna list all the contact info for professionals. Of course, a big category is listing all your investment financial accounts, your entrance information, another big category is pain. You wanna make sure all the bills get paid, tax returns and then some kind of household and miscellaneous. So we're gonna go ahead and just start on those. So that's basically your table of contents for your, or suggested table of contents for books. Okay, so like I said, you don't necessarily put the original documents in the book. You can or you just say, you know, where they are. Like here's where my passport is. Here's where my social freedom card is. So of course you want a very important is all your state planning documents. And in texts, we have, in texts, we have something called a memorandum of wishes that is referenced by the will. And what that is, it's a list of something that could, like all your little, your dishes, your silverware, your kind of sentimental items that might not be of huge value. And that, you don't wanna put that right in the will because that could change pretty often. You don't wanna be changing your will very often. So you wanna put, if you have something like that, you wanna keep that with your original will. And there's different trains of thought on where you should keep your will. My boss, I just said I was a paralegal for an estate plan attorney, he said, put it in a plastic bag and put it in your freezer because that's the last thing that's gonna get burned in a fire or put it in a safe. You can, some people put it in the safe deposit box, but then there's the issue of getting into it once you pass, you might be able to get into it. So there's kind of different trains of thought where you should store your original will, but wherever you do, let somebody know, document in this book where it is. Of course, copies of any trust if you have those, where your passports are, where your original social security cards, original birth tickets, marriage, certificates, divorce decrees, your original Medicare, medical insurance cards, very important, your safe deposit box keys, because of course, if you lose those, they have to like drill it out or so I've heard, it's kind of a big hassle. And now lately, last couple of times I went, they have a pin, you have to have a pin number to go with your safe deposit box. The actual original vehicle titles are helpful to have, they can always get replacements, but it's helpful to have the originals. If you have extra car keys nowadays, the car keys cost literally what $200 to have a keypad made or whatever. So you wanna note the extras of those, house garage keys, mailbox keys, and some people sub paper savings bonds. If those are not, you may have your safe deposit box or you may just have them store away. You definitely want to document where those are. So this is kind of a list of originals of something or little keys that need to be kept track of. Does anybody have anything that they can add to that? Henry, is your hand up from last time or do you have something for this? Jim, go ahead. That has something. Sorry, I'll take my hand down. Sorry. Okay, I'm sorry. I don't know your name, P-J-P-A-T. P-A-T. Okay. Go ahead. There's an electronic binder of this stuff that you can get from online. I posted it in the chat where the website is. Great. And it's like $25 or so, but it goes through a lot of these things on gives you guidance and whatnot to store and let your successors know what you wanted to do. Great. Thank you for that suggestion. Joe? Yeah, just all of the originals that you were talking about are great. My only thought would be make sure you can scan as much of it as you can. Good idea. But at a time as well. Yes. Just in case you can't look at the originals, then you have a copy that's better than nothing. Right. Great idea. Miriam? Yes, this is a story from a friend of ours when his father passed away. He and his brother were going through everything and they were going through his file of cabinets. His father was a lawyer and had all these file of cabinets and they were going through file of cabinets in the house and they had all the kids going through the file of cabinets in the house looking for things. And they came across some very beautiful pieces of paper that were actual original stock certificates before the days when you were with Merrill Lynch or a brokerage and the brokerage company held the stock that the father had actually original stock certificates and that's all they were. And they were in the file cabinets and they were worth quite a bit of money. And our friend had said, what if they had just tossed them out and not looked at what they were? Not saying everybody would have original stock certificates but your parents may have things you don't know they have. Very true, very true. PJ, your hand is still up. Do you have anything to add or? Okay. Okay, we're gonna go to the next slide. Okay, this is a big area and like I said, I don't wanna give advice on what you should do cause there's different ways to handle things to what have a disclaimer here. Obviously you wanna have your passwords documented like Lady Geek was saying for your par of attorney if you're incapacitated they do have authority to I would believe log into your accounts and handle your accounts for you. And in a lot of cases your surviving spouse is also on the account and would have authority to log in but other than that if somebody passes away you want to be really careful about using passwords to log into the account we wanna say, check with your estate probate attorney before you do that. So that said, there's many different ways to handle you could just hand. One time we had somebody in my job as a paralegal we had somebody die we went in their house and they just had right on their desk they had this handwritten list. Well actually it was printed out list of passwords and accounts but then a lot of things were like scratched through and they changed the password to put the time and scratch through. So someone that worked. You could keep it in a computer file you could use a password manager and I don't I haven't used them myself but I hear my dad uses one. I hear there's like GlassPass, Dashlane one password bit warden and those are from what I understand they're very secure and they're very, very helpful because you just have to remember one password and then all the rest of your passwords are very, very secure. Like Lady you can mention earlier there's Fibsafe I haven't used it myself but it's a free service from Fidelity to securely store documents if you wanna create this book binder online and then be able to store it with some trusted people your children or other people like that. You can also give specific documents to only certain people and you could also I know I don't know how you did this exactly but you can grant access to somebody after your death. Now also there's the whole issue of secret questions and answers. That could be also another sticky situation where you don't really wanna be careful who you give that out to but might be helpful in some cases. And then there's also the issue of I found a thread on this on the Bogleheads two factor authentication where they send some code to your email or your cell phone. So you may wanna include your swiping pattern or your code or whatever to get into your cell phone in case that's helpful. There's also you can also have make sure you're surviving a spouse like for say for example your Vanguard or for your Fidelity account. You can also of course access the join accounts but you can also set make sure that your sort of spouse has their own login to a lot of the accounts. You can have a whole separate login where they have their own set of passwords and that way they don't have to use yours. That's just one option. There's other household passwords. There's wifi password, garage code, home security code, home safe combination and it's kind of up to you how you wanna handle that but these are all just things to think about. And one thing I do is I have kind of two passwords. I have like a base password where I have one that's used for just whatever I don't care about. My some account that I don't care about and then I have one that's for financial. And then what I do is for each account I add a bunch of like some characters at the end like pound 62. So in my document, I don't actually have the actual password. I say it's my financial password plus pound 62. And then when I print out the document that's when I write on the actual like the base password. I mean that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to like say you have your very important password manager password you could give half to one of your relatives and give the other half to the other one and say, you know, and then in my death you can get together and you'll have a whole password or something like that. There's many different ways to handle things but these are just all things to think about. Does anybody have any input on how they handle their passwords? Anything like that? I know it's kind of a complicated situation. Nope. Maryam, go ahead. I just wanted to ask if anybody had ever had any problems with this when they were dealing with their relatives passing away. Was there ever any problem with pass codes and passwords and account numbers falling into the wrong hands and being used? Well, I had the other problem is I couldn't get access to my late wife's email and she passed and that caused no end of havoc. So definitely important. After the Boglehead's threat I did shift to one password and I've been very happy. Seems like a really, I'm an advocate for a password manager, especially like one password where you can also store copies of files and scams and stuff. So it becomes a much bigger repository than just passwords. It's sort of where everything is. I was just wondering if we were overdoing the concern. I think it's probably not overdoing but you might be able to navigate through some of it but I could not get, for instance, Google to get me access to my wife's account even with a copy of the death certificate. The other thing I would add is many password things require two factor and you better know your passcode if your partner's phone or have access to their fingerprint or facial recognition which could be obviously problematic but you may not be able to get into certain accounts. Okay, that's a good point. Alan, go ahead. Yes, I don't know about other email programs but Gmail allows you to set up a trusted contact that would be notified if you have no activity on your account after a certain period of time and would grant them access to your Gmail account. I presume, you know, iPhone and so forth probably have similar type of abilities as well as other social media, whether you're on Facebook and other social media to possibly have designated trusted contact. It's great to know. A Bostonian? Oh, no. I was wondering if anyone has done a Dryden so you have a, let's say a solid plan together and then you say, all right, assume that I'm dead. Can you try and get into everything? Can you try and get access to everything? Execute the plan like you would if I were not around just to see if the whole plan works. Do people do that or do you do your best when you hope? Are you saying like test, pretend like you're dead and just test it out to see if people, is that what you're talking about? Right, right, so if my partner's gonna do it. I am not here now. You try out, like we have a plan together and if something fails, better know now than later. That's a good point, yeah. That's something I think about. Someone told me once where they forced their spouse to do the books or numbers once a year so that they have to exercise their way through the checkbook, the brokerage accounts, whatever. That's not a bad idea at all. Probably something, that's a good idea probably, yeah. Doug, go ahead. I was going to, I guess third what the other previous two people said is training and what sounds right twice a year? Does that sound good to go through from start to finish pretending like you're dead? But I think that's too about right twice a year. Twice or maybe once a year might be enough but yeah, twice a year is good. Depends on how long it takes I guess. Okay, I'm gonna go to the next slide. Okay, so this is a list of the information that's gonna be helpful pretty quickly. There's some things you can wait on but there's some things you wanna do the first couple of weeks. So first of all, you wanna have a list of people to call and contact. My parents have, a lot of this book is actually based on what my dad put together and they have a whole list of people. I think that they have their email addresses and their phone numbers. I'm sure they would call everybody personally but another way to do it would be to actually type up a list of emails and then mail that list to your spouse or whoever and then they could use that at the time to either copy and paste individual emails or do a whole blind carbon copy where you just have to send that one in. It kinda depends on if you're good friends with that person, if your spouse or child who's taking over knows that person they may wanna write a little personal note but if they don't they may not wanna have to do this a hundred times and send out a hundred different emails or phone calls, whatever you wanna do. And as Alan you mentioned earlier in the chat you could pre-write your obituary and my mom did this and the reason she did this she's like, you're not gonna know like my dad had military service you're not gonna know the dates and when he went to Korea and this and that and what his unit was. I'm not gonna know that information. So she kinda put together and she may have made sure all the relatives names were listed correctly with the spouses and made sure all the, a lot of times you list like your educational information, military information and a lot of times you don't know details of that kind of thing. So you may not wanna write out the entire obituary and say how great of a person you were but you may wanna list some details that though the people may not know. So you definitely wanna list your wishes as far as burial, cremation, church service who you wanna be your efficient favorite hymns that kind of thing. Whether or not you have a prepaid funeral policy whether or not you have a either you already have a cemetery plus purchase or you have a preference for this particular cemetery this particular kind of headstone all that kind of information is very useful of course. You may wanna collect military benefits as far as and I'm not real familiar with this but my dad, he was a Korean war veteran and he said there's some kind of special medallion that you can order or you get it for free and you put it right on your headstone. So I knew something about that and you may be eligible to be buried in what is it called VA National Cemetery is it in Arlington or? Yeah, Carol, my father-in-law passed away he was a Korean veteran also and he chose in advance the military ceremony so they had an honor guard it was really nice, really, really nice and he was interned although he was cremated they have both in the ground cremation and above ground and in these columbariums it was just beautiful ceremony he would have really liked it. The other thing we did, which I recommend is we wrote a personal obituary that we had people fill in paragraphs this was not for the newspaper this was for internal friends and family that included funny stories and vulgarities and all sorts of things that you could never put in the newspaper you didn't want in the newspaper so it was actually two versions of the obituary. Nice, nice, very nice. So one of the things you probably want to do right away is inform and collect on the life insurance because that's usually pretty quick from what I hear you can get that pretty quickly assuming of course you're going to document later who all the beneficiaries are and what the name of the company is and that kind of thing. Inform Social Security, of course the funeral director would do that if there's any pension you want to inform them and from what I understand if Social Security will take back because they always pay on the first of the month and if you say if you died on the second they'll take it back is from what I understand. So just be prepared for that. You want to obtain multiple death certificates from what I understand 12 or even 20 is not too many because a lot of places are going to want originals and you don't have to do this like right away usually but you may want to consider going ahead and contact a probate attorney and start the process. There are certain deadlines. For example, nine months if you want to elect the estate tax portability from what I understand there's a nine month deadline after the death to do that. And then also if you're not the spouse and you don't have access to the house and things like that you probably want to go ahead and start that process pretty soon. You also want to transfer and collect any accounts that the surviving spouse was named beneficiary of for example IRAs, 401ks and I don't know enough to know the details but I know there's a certain way you have to title the IRA to be able to have the full benefits of extending the RMDs and things like that. And I did put a link in there on how to title the IRA as you transfer it over. And then also there are certain required minimum distribution deadlines that even after a person dies from what I understand you have to meet those or you have to pay it's like a 50% penalty. It's a very large penalty if you don't take out the RMDs when you're supposed to. I think even after somebody dies. Of course one big thing is you want to continue to pay monthly bills and we're going to have a whole page on that later. And then these are kind of things we're now we're getting to be a little bit later where after the accounts have been transferred you want to check on you're going to have to name beneficiaries because it's going to be in your name now and you want to double check all your beneficiaries. You're going to want to notify credit bureaus and a department on a vehicle. So they know your driver's license so you don't have identity theft. Even after your death you can have identity theft. Then the surviving spouse is going to want to check their existing state plan documents. Sometimes they'll still be okay if you took care the first time to name all the contingent beneficiaries. It still may be perfectly fine as long as you have like usually people put their spouse and they put one of their children as contingents for like the power of attorney and things like that. So that may be perfectly fine. You may not have to redo that but you just want to check on that. And if you've left emergency contact information for example, doctors you want to get that changed and then you also want to think about your spouse may want to attend a group support group. If you happen to know of any you may want to go ahead and have that contact information handy for them. Does anybody have anything to want to add? Jim is your hand still Jim? Your hands up Jim. All right. Okay. Lady Geek. Oh, interesting. Brings back a memory of some interesting experience. Well, first, when you say death certificate the only original death certificate is the one filled out by the medical person at the person at the time of death. Everything else is a copy of a death certificate. I had a problem where my father passed away before a medical person could, he was at home but the hospice nurse didn't arrive in time. So he passed away and she says, I can't sign off on the certificate because I wasn't there when he passed. I ended up calling Philadelphia 911 explain the situation to have someone have a EMT guy sign a death certificate. And then he called the medical examiner because they didn't know that it's police coming to the house that this guy was there a crime involved. So I actually had a copy of the doctor's report a few days ago saying he was in terminal stages. So they say everything. So when you say you get a copy of a death certificate they say there's one original filled out by the attending physician or medical person. They're not present. The funeral home will not accept the body. I had a week, two hours and get all this stuff straightened out with the facility EMTs before they would even come and take the body. So just somebody passes make sure they're in a medical facility. But the other, the other, yeah. Okay, yeah, hello. The other thing was interesting. I don't know if anyone else would experience but only a vocal head would do this. When my husband passed. Well, I said I made arrangements for cremation for his funeral while he was in the nursing home. We made arrangements. The guy was an insurance agent. He sold me a funeral insurance policy. Like I said before, they can increase the costs and you will have to pay for it. So he signed, I said, I talked to him. Are you an agent? Oh yeah, you're getting a commission for this. Yeah, I was gonna like put it 30 bucks. Okay. So I signed it and I checked my account online. My husband passes. I look at the value of the policy. It increased $60. The value that, so he's gonna get paid $60 more than what he charged me. So I go in, I go in with the policy copy and I needed some death certificates. I horse traded. I showed him the policy. He said, yeah, you know, your policy is like $60 more now. Can I have it in cash? So I negotiated with the guy to get three copies of the death certificate. The prices are set by the state in Pennsylvania. It's $20 per copy. So I got in exchange for that, I basically negotiated three free death certificates because of the life insurance policy. So I just felt I got something out. I just had fun in negotiating, but at your husband's death, but it was just bugging me that because of the insurance. So I just read that. How many do you typically need? How many did you end up using and do you need? Oh, that's nothing. My husband was also an Army vet during Vietnam and stuff, but there actually is a VA cemetery within commuting distance from our location. But we chose cremation to say I could have opted for a free VA funeral in burial, but we didn't go that route. I usually set like 10 and also the VA will supply free copies of the death certificate by the buy. So they said, how many will they give you? They said 20, send me 10. So I still have a few extras. So I'd say, but we had no complications, but I thought 10 was a minimum number. And half the time they just wanted photocopies anyway, like Vanguard or whoever else I was doing it with. Oh, and social security, they gave it back to me. Yeah, also a file for the social security death benefit to $55, $255, it's something. So, okay, that's why I just wanted to relay that interesting story that, yes, I'm a vocal head and I negotiated at my husband's death over an insurance policy. Okay, thank you. Okay, PJ, go ahead. Yeah, I had a recent experience after my mother passed. The beneficiary IRA was held at Franklin Templeton. And then in the end of 20, I moved it to other ones in Fidelity, but somehow the RMD was forgotten as part of the going over. And then it wasn't recognized until a week ago when I was doing my taxes that I didn't have an RMD. So I wound up having to go through three people at Fidelity and they actually have a group that does this. And it all got worked out and the penalty is 50% of the tax. But there is a, you can request a waiver of the tax and have to provide a letter of a reasonable cause. And mine was that it got transferred and got missed. So this was the first year that Fidelity added. And it got, you know, I called them on Thursday night, I talked to the retirement specialist Friday and it was executed on Monday. And now I just had a draft letter to include with my income tax submission this year. So even though it was all done right, it got screwed up when you tried to consolidate into everything at Fidelity. Okay, thank you. Jim, your hands up. I just wanted to point out on the VA stuff, one more thing is I know somebody who in turn the cremation remains or crema, I forget what they call it, cremains, I think they call it, five years or 10 years after the death of the person. So the other thing that they do is they provide the wife or husband or partner can also do that. You'd have to find out from them, but they'll put two names on the headstone. So the person who served to be on the front, it'll say, you know, Korean War and on the back could be the spouse. Good to know, good to know. Joel, you have your hand up? Yeah, boy, I just had a brain thing. I'm trying to remember what I was gonna say. You made a call on Lady Geek and then you can go next. Yeah. Okay, ladies, just go ahead. Okay, just from what the Jim reminded me of, because my husband was a vet, he was entitled to a free earn and a free flag. It's part of part of the funeral director. And so he gave that to me. I mean, the earn was, he said it was worth $300. Okay, the nice wouldn't earn. I did something else with the ashes, but they were scattered elsewhere. But yeah, I sound like I'm making this fun, but it was a horrible experience to go through. And when you're upset and angry, you tend to just be very vocal and just expressing yourself. So I say, yeah, it was a really bad time for me, but I guess just by negotiating with the guy, I was just kind of letting myself vent. And also by the way in hospice, you do have a bereavement counseling. I did go through that process and that was actually very, very helpful. So if anyone is on hospice, please take up, take them up their offer of bereavement counseling. And that can be done while the person is alive because it's a process that's about to happen. So please take advantage of that. It is free, supplied by the hospice and for a period of 13 months after the death for close family members. So, okay. Very good. Thank you. Good to know. Joel, did you remember what you were gonna say? I did, I did. Sorry about that. So as part of the estate plan, what I do is I keep a spreadsheet that's sort of tied to my automatic updates that splits out every account by the beneficiaries. So they can easily, whoever manages my estate, my wife or daughter, can easily sort of see at this point in time, Joe gets 10%, Frank gets seven, Ismerelda gets 20, charities get this. They can see a spreadsheet that's real time with all of that information. And then I also gave sort of instructions for each of the inheritors on how to assume the account. So like I would want my wife to make the IRA her own. Whereas my daughter is gonna have a 10-year stretch and here's the suggested way of going out to get it. One 10th in the first year, one ninth in the second year, one eighth in the third year, and so on and so on. And I'm not sure if that's gonna be helpful or not, but I'm a little ADHD in terms of planning. It made me feel better. Okay, very good, thank you. Keith? I was just gonna add something to document for the person that survives if you pass is reoccurring charges that are either happening on your credit card or maybe being taken out of your checking account. We had several of those when we went through it with my mom and dad and it was hard to get those turned off. They wouldn't accept that. We were calling to say they needed to be turned off. They needed death certificates sent to them. Sometimes if it takes a while, you can be charged for something that's no longer necessary. So if you're putting together a list of things for your surviving spouse or whoever beneficiary to take care of, that's something that they wanna understand what needs to be turned off immediately after you're passing and how they're able to do that. Because that can be hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. It can be anything from Netflix to an antivirus program and anything in between that person that passed away was being charged for that's no longer needed. So you wanna make sure that you document those things so they're not sifting through your charge card looking for them and also that they know how to turn them off. Okay, great. Doug, oh, you're muted. I don't know if this is the right time to talk about this right now or if it's gonna come up later. But what do you do in the case of elderly parents who aren't doing any of this due diligence? I'm not sure they have any planning at all. And you know, you may not have that much longer. You're gonna be faced with a big mess to clean up. Does anybody else have that problem? Somebody, I don't know if you could have, can you, somebody submitted that as a comment on RSVP? And I don't have a slide for that. However, I did put in quite a few links on different articles, books, podcasts and that kind of thing. So let's talk about that when we'll talk about that. If anybody has any suggestions, I don't personally but when that slide comes up with the links, we'll talk about that. That's definitely an important thing to talk about. Okay, thank you. Sure. Okay, let's go to the next one. Let's see. Whoops. Okay, this is a real short one. Just a list of contact information for professionals. Well, on the first slide, we had contact information for friends and family, that kind of thing to inform them. But this is people that you may have to work with. Your supervisor may have to work with. Probably an attorney, the one that drafted the wills. And then it may be the same or different attorney that you recommend. You may have one picked out that you want to probably the estate. And then any kind of other attorneys use, like if you have a real estate attorney, a business attorney, anything like that. If you do use a tax preparer or a CPA, you want to obviously have that contact information. Financial advisor if you have one. Or if you don't have one, but you may, you want to have one listed for your surviving spouse if they feel they need one. And any kind of insurance agents. Is there anything I left off this list as far as contact information for professionals? Does anybody think Keith? I just wanted to add again, based on personal experience, my parents had worked with an estate attorney for many years and also had worked with a CPA for probably 20 to 25 years. I literally became a family friend. And when my mother passed and we had to sort everything out, we leaned on them pretty heavily for a number of things, whether it was documents that the attorney had in his files or the CPA that was able to help out with things because of the knowledge that they have. So just from my experience, that was a huge help and well worth the additional fees that we had to pay for their consulting or whatever you want to call it. I think it would have taken us probably twice as long to get through everything. And we might have made some, what could have been costly mistakes without that help. And that caused me to say that I wanted to have something similar because I'm the one that handles the financing. If something happened to me, I want my wife to be able to have somebody to call to say, can you help me? I don't understand this between her and whoever is helping her to do this. So I think, although I know bogled heads typically like to do everything themselves. They don't like to pay fees and expenses for other people when they can do it themselves. I will just say from my experience, it was very, very helpful and well worth the money to have these folks involved for a lot of complicated questions and help that would have taken us a lot longer. Okay, great. Thank you, Keith. All right, let's go to the next slide. Okay, this is kind of a big topic. Of course you want to list all your investment on financial account accounts because if you have more than just a couple of years your spouse may not know where everything is or of course, you know, power of attorney, agent or anything. And I'm gonna say a disclaimer, you know, take care, do not perform any transactions after death without consulting in a state attorney. Like I said before, someone suggested to me once that you should pick a trusted relative or friend to kind of help your spouse in addition to like any of the professionals that your spouse may need. Sometimes they just want a point of first contact and this could be like a trusted friend if they're just totally lost. Like I don't even know what to do first or I'm totally overwhelmed. You want to, it's a good idea to have a trusted relative or friend picked out to kind of help your spouse with your spouse with that. One thing that's good is to just have a print out of all your accounts, your net worth just so that your spouse knows, oh, here, you know, just get an overview of all your different accounts. Then of course you want to list, you know, every single account, bank accounts, online banks, safe deposit box, whose name is on the box, which physical bank branch, you know, where the key is, we mentioned this earlier, the PIN. And also you may want to kind of list what is in there, you know, do you have saving spons, card titles so that person knows, oh, if I want to get the card title it's in the safe deposit box. Of course you want to list all your investment brokerage accounts and it's not a bad idea to print out maybe once a year, just the recent statement will have all the, you know, list of the assets and the contact information for the institution on there. Of course all your retirement accounts, IRAs, Roth IRAs, 401Ks, if you have an HSA, list of saving spons. Some people may have saving spons paper. I know I have paper bonds and a treasury debt account, which of course, very hard to get into. People can't even get into their own accounts much less somebody else's, right? Pension, if you have any college accounts, 529s, Coverdells, listing real estate, of course your spouse is going to know, but just you may want to have a copy of the deed in the mortgage, your primary home, a second home, rental homes, land, mineral leases. You may want to actually list. And if you don't have a mortgage, you may want to list, I think I had some other stuff, but you may want to list that because you may assume there's a mortgage on all of the trying to find it, oh, but it's paid off. So you may just, you know, make a note if it's paid off. If you want a business, you know, I don't know anything about this, but you know, I have certain business documents that you may want to include information there. And these are some kind of newer things, digital wallet services that have a balance. I mean, you could have $500 in your PayPal account, Venmo, Cash App, that kind of thing. I don't know nothing about this, but cryptocurrency, you may have a cryptocurrency wallet somewhere that has a lot of money in it. Like I said, you could, you know, maybe print out a statement or at least download it to a place in your computer that's referenced, you know, statements or at least where they are. So they have a general idea, you know, what's in the, oh, did I accidentally, and there's a reference to a thread later or I think maybe it's a wiki page or a thread investment policy statement, just kind of like a rationale. This is, you know, this is my, this is our asset allocation. We've got 60% of stocks and 40%. And then you may want to kind of explain why. So that when you're, if your spouse say, for example, they may employ a financial advisor, this would be a good thing to have. We've always done it this way and this has worked for us, you know, and then maybe you're playing to change your asset allocation as you got older, that kind of thing, just your rationale, but how you've been doing your withdrawals, your withdrawal policy, that kind of thing. Let's see. And then location on your, any location on your computer, or files that might be helpful, you may have, like I have a file where I have all my dividends that are coming in from different places. I have every quarter, I have a list of dividends and that way your spouse knows, oh, I'm going to expect a dividend in a month and that's going to be helpful for me to have that cash flow, that kind of thing. Just any kind of spreadsheets you had, you may have estimated tax spreadsheets, network statement, something, you know, just put the location of the file on there that might be helpful to them later on. Joel, do you have an input on this side? Yeah, we did a Wiki for a quarter retirement policy statement that kind of takes it one level above an investment policy statement that kind of describes how retirement's supposed to work and what the goals were and how the money flows, how you get paid every month. That might be a useful thing. Perfect, yeah, that's the kind of thing that the surroundings also want to take to the, if they decided to hire a financial advisor, that's exactly the kind of information that would be very helpful, like for that kind of purpose. So anything else, this is a pretty important as far as it's so easy to miss a little account if you don't document all of them, your spouse very well may not know and then you may never get anything in the mail if you're on paperless system, it may be going to some email somewhere and they may never know, even if you may have your tax statements going to paperless, you may never get anything in the mail. So kind of important to document every single account, even if it's even a small, you know, a couple of hundred dollars or whatever. Joan, did you have, no comment is your hands, mayhem they still be up. Lady Geek, go ahead. Just one thing, financial mortgage and also car title. Do you have a car title, let's say or a car loan? Right, yeah, I did not mention car loans. That's a good point. Yeah, you definitely want to list debts as well as, I think I have mortgage is in the bill, there's a whole section on bills, but I didn't actually put car loans, but the mortgage is in the bill. Actually, if you lose a car title, a notary will get you a replacement. So it's easy to find. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's go to the next slide. Okay, you want to document, of course all your insurance information, you know, list all the types of policies you have, whether it be homeowners umbrella, you may have a boat policy, of course auto, you may have several different life insurance, you may have one from your employer, hopefully you have one or if you had one at the time when you were younger, you may not need insurance in life insurance when you're older, one outside of your employer, so you may have two or more, you may have long-term disability, long-term care, several different types of medical dental, Medicaid, Medicaid supplement, prescription, those all those kind of policies, annuities, I guess, kind of insurance, and of course prepaid funeral agency, you just want to list what types of policies you have, what's the insurance company, agent name, contact information if you have that, dollar amount on the policy, if there's, you know, for life insurance, that type of thing. Of course, who the beneficiaries are is important for life insurance, that type of thing. Gauri, go ahead. Thanks, I have nothing useful to say, but I wanted to share a humorous quote from Charlie Munger, which is all I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there. That's very funny. Doug, go ahead. Well, I think part of the final instructions ought to be to have the surviving person log into your email account at least once a week after you're dead. Good point. Because you're gonna have stuff for the next year probably, once a week for the next year, because you're gonna have stuff coming there, regarding insurance and who knows what else, brokerage information. That's a very good point. And if you don't log in, eventually, after like six months, they could actually delete the whole account if you don't log in. Yeah, that would be going down, right. To log in periodically. It's kind of the same thing like you're getting your mail, but nowadays a lot of times you don't get mail, so you got to check in the email because there could be some very important, you know, tax forms or all kinds of things and coming into the email. Lady Geek. Okay, back to bank accounts. If all the person is still alive and you have a joint account and the person passes, do not close that account. It depends on the bank that each bank follows the uniform commercial code for the state and it's up to the bank to decide, but you can deposit checks may to your deceased spouse if your name is on that account. It's legal. And the way you endorse the check is for deposit only. That is a legal endorsement. You do not have to, you never have to sign a check actually, unless you want to cash it. For deposit only is a legal endorsement. So if they make it account to like every once a year, I've been getting a couple of dollar checks because my husband's had something that spits out a dividend like for a couple of dollars and I can't kill the thing. I can't get rid of it. That's another story where I have to file probate. I didn't file probate in this one county in Western Pennsylvania for some royalty thing and they have to have the file in that county. It ain't worth it. So, and it's at least below the amount that you have to pay taxes. It's like a couple of bucks, but the thing is it comes in his name. I say for deposit only goes into my joint account and it's his income. So they say, but it depends on the bank, but that's why I have a local service bank. They do that for you. So that's very important. Otherwise you'd have to set up an estate checking account, which is a whole nother thing that I can go through. On life insurance, a lot of times you don't know if you're the beneficiary. You don't know if this person even had a life insurance policy. How the heck, believe it or not, insurance companies want to find beneficiaries. When a person passes, they really do want to try very hard and give you your money. So if I have a wiki, I put a link to the wiki's life insurance article in the chat. I did it earlier when I was talking about it, but in there, there's a way that you, there's a search that you can do for free how to find if this person has a policy. It is well worth it to go through that process. Additionally, you don't know if that person has any unclaimed property. You know, they say unclaimed freight or whatever, but one thing that actually that policies, if the insurance company cannot find the beneficiary, that money goes to the state as unclaimed funds. So, and also other things go into there, like somebody sent you a check like 20 years ago, they couldn't, it was never cashed. That goes to the state's unclaimed property. I've got a couple of bucks that way too. They're searching for my own name. So search unclaimed property for yourself first and then for this person who's deceased next and you might get hit. You never know, you never know. So I just wanna say something about life insurance. Okay, I'm done. Very good, thank you. All good suggestions. Okay, let's see what the next slide is. Okay, this is an important one, Bill's, because of course, especially if you're living in a house, you definitely want your spouse to be able to keep the electricity on that kind of thing. So you wanna know, let them know, obviously if they don't know where the checkbook is and the, if you have a whole box of spare checks. I don't know where those are. You wanna list all the bills, how it's normally paid, whether or not you get something in the mail or you get something from the email, which is usually the two ways that you pay bills or sometimes they're automatically paid, but you usually do get an email notification of the amount or whatever. So the types of bills you wanna list, of course, credit cards, utility bills, insurance bills, mortgage and if you wanna state, if you don't have a mortgage because somebody might not know, might be looking for your mortgage when you don't have one. Property tax, cell phone service, cable streaming services, digital subscriptions, home security, fitness center gym, any other online services. And there are some that you would wanna, you can let your spouse decide, but if you were in a genealogy and you had your spending all this money on answissure.com, they probably, they may not want, they might wanna cancel that right away, but they may not wanna cancel the cable service to streaming the Netflix or whatever. So they can decide, but you should at least list them. And then if you've forgotten a few, they can, it'll probably show up on the monthly bill and then it's be like recurring expense. One thing I was looking at today was if your spouse just seems overwhelmed with the thought of having to pay the bills and figure out this out, there is something called a daily money manager and this is a nationally certified professional. I've never used one, but there's a website you can go to to find one in your area and they are certified to be fiduciaries and they have to have certain amount of education and exams, so that is an option. They basically can pay your bills, organize all your finances, get together your tax information, that kind of thing. If for some reason your spouse is just overwhelmed and just can't deal with that kind of a thing, so that's just an option that I wanted to mention. Okay, does anybody have any, Doug, go ahead. Yeah, if you've been doing all this stuff, let's say for 30 years and your spouse has not touched any of it, they will get overwhelmed. So I think this is something that you gotta take over if you're especially getting towards late in life, anytime you touch something financial, drag them to the screen and have them sit in a chair with you while you've logged on to your bank account, and let's say you've gone to the online bill paying area of it and just show them every month, maybe, what you're doing. I mean, now would be the time to include them. If it's been 30 years and they don't care less about anything financial, if you're getting late in life, now would be the time to get them involved instead of just waiting until you hear a set of instructions after you're dead because they're gonna get totally overwhelmed. That's a very important point. I think you're definitely right. And I'm glad you mentioned bill pay because I don't use that myself, but I should have made a point if you log in, I don't even know how you do that. You log into your bank account and then a lot of times you can pay all your utility bills from there, right? I mean, I don't know exactly how that works, but I should have mentioned if it was that you wanna mention that. I'd never send any checks or anything in the mail anymore. It's all done online. Very important, Doug, thank you so much. Lady Geek. Okay, you mentioned Netflix. Let me talk to you about Amazon. When my husband passed, he was actually the primary holder of a ton of Kindle books that we both jointly read. He shared a lot of stuff under the family sharing thing. And also some of the services and video stuff. Everything was under his account. I had my account too, we just shared. But so when he passed, I called up, I actually had to call Amazon, believe it or not, it's possible to call Amazon, explain. They said, I have a death certificate, everything. He said, lady, just keep the two accounts. I asked them to combine all the shared stuff. They cannot do it. Long story short, yeah, but no. So he said, look, it's okay. You can log into his account with his stuff. You just go ahead and do it. We know it's a household, just stop there, no, sorry, no. So I now have two, I actually have two Amazon accounts. What I did do was change his credit card to mine, just make it the same. And then when I read up to Amazon Prime, I did it under my account. So but the idea is Amazon can not combine things that are shared. So just a little FYI, but it was okay to log in with his credentials because it's a family thing. Joe? I appreciate the tip on Amazon, that was news to me. My personal problem was genealogy. I'm glad you mentioned that. My wife was very into genealogy and she didn't leave any instructions on what I should do with all the research that she had done. And it haunts me today that she didn't. I closed the account. I have no idea what happened to any of it, but I had no interest and I ended up with piles of finished English dictionaries and English to Dutch dictionaries and all sorts of weird stuff that genealogists would love, but it was just clutter to me. So this was one area where I kind of thought I failed her memory. If you're into an esoteric hobby like that, definitely arrange for somebody to take it over. Good point, yeah, because sometimes there's a cousin or something like that that might be interested where, you know, usually genealogy, you're either interested or you're not. So that's a good point that you should kind of think all that through ahead of time and maybe link up your tree with somebody else's so that all the information in your trees at least out there somewhere, maybe something like that. So that's a good something to think about. All right, and see what else we have. Okay, taxes. So the important thing is, you know, document how you've been filling it out of using TurboTax, some of the other tax services. Do you fill out by hand? Do you use a tax preparer? Which one, the contact information? And then where the past, you know, 10 years, I guess you only need three but maybe 10 years are stored. Sometimes they may be paper files. They may be on your computer and a PDF that you save from TurboTax, that kind of thing, they may be with your tax preparer. So those could be important. Obviously you want to use the notified that tax preparer in the case of death because there may be some deadlines, you know, like RMDs and that kind of thing. There is actually a deadline on preparing a tax return for the decedent, that kind of thing. Then there's also a couple other things that you may want to document that might be important. If there's a basis to your IRA, it's like say somebody who's been making a non-deductible IRA contribution for many years and never rolled over to a Roth for whatever reason or converted to a Roth. That does carry over to the inherited IRA. So that is important to know, that will save you some money. If you have a gift tax history, if you've given money to your children or above the exemption, you know, the 15,000 or whatever it is per year, you do have to file, you would have supposed to have filed a Form 709. And technically those are important because they get subtracted from your lifetime exemption. If you go above the, of course, not 11 million, but it could go back down someday and a lot of Bogleheads could be going above that amount. So if you had filed a gift tax form in the past, it would actually be important to have those forms. If there's any charities you contribute regularly, especially if there's a case of a small charity that they're highly dependent on you and you would like to continue that as part of your legacy when you die, you can't force your spouse or your children or whatever to do that, if you could make a suggestion, I really want to support this. Of course, you can put it in your will too, but that's just something to think about if you want to support any continue to support charities after your death in ways other than your will. Also think about your HSA if you have a large balance. If it's your spouse, obviously it just becomes theirs. Let's see. There, I did try to look into this top. I actually spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out and there was some information in the Bogleheads Wiki that it's not quite clear if the spouse can reimburse themselves out of your HSA for expenses that you paid before your death. It's not quite clear, but it might be possible. So you may want to have that information doc. Most people, if they haven't reimbursed from the HSA, they have a spreadsheet or something somewhere appears all the expenses that were paid, but not reimbursed. So that's just something to think about. Is anything else? Keith, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to mention a couple of things that you would want to document if something were to happen to you. Are you making estimated tax payments quarterly? You want your surviving spouse or executive or whoever to know whether you've done that or not. And also keep in mind that you'll have a tax return if you've gotten income through half the year and you pass away in July. So surviving spouse is going to need money to be able to pay taxes for you depending on how everything's done. We just went through this with our mother with taxes for 2021. So those are things that you want to keep in mind that need to be documented so that surviving spouse or whoever is able to take care of that and knows kind of the up-to-date information. Very important, Keith. Thank you so much because I completely forgot about mentioning the estimated tax payments. That's very important because how would they know? They'd have to dig through all your bank statements. How would they know that they may not know that you've made a large, you could have made a $10,000 estimated tax payment. And they would know unless you... So thank you for mentioning that. That's very important. Doug, go ahead. Yeah, I'm thinking that like this in regard to estimated tax payments and any other turbo tax, this whole slide here basically and also investment policies, all of that. If your spouse has just not taken an interest in it, I don't think you can document all this. I think you've got to make a transition plan to a professional to take your place after you're dead and maybe talk to them about what's going on and give them this information along. Have a meeting with this professional along with your spouse with the plan that you'll transition to this other person after you're dead, a professional to take your place. Very good point because a lot of us, like I always do the taxes and I've been for some reason, I've always been interested in taxes. So if something in an article comes up on taxes, I'll read it. So I've been just learning about this for 30 years. So it's hard to forget how overwhelmed somebody that knows nothing about it is gonna be when you, like they may not even know what some of this means. Like what is the basis to it? Like I don't even know what that means. I don't even know what, they may not even know. So they may be completely overwhelmed. So I think it's a very good point that... They're not gonna know. And the reason they haven't been interested in it, like you have been and I have been to kind of just out of interest. They don't care. They have other things you're interested in. So you're gonna have to get a professional to take your place is my opinion. That's a very good point. And I don't think it's a bad idea to, even if you don't use a tax preparer, maybe just line one up and maybe just pay for an hour of their time to have a meeting. And then just kind of like you said, smooth the path to where I'm taking over. So that's definitely a good idea. Okay. Anything else on taxes? Nope. Okay. The last thing in your book is gonna be anything important you wanna mention that your spouse may not be aware of about the house itself, the names of like who services to heat in and air? What's the schedule you need to have? Like we have every fall and spring, they come and they service, we have a contract, they service the air conditioner and that kind of thing. You wanna know who does that. If you have any handyman, a lawn service plumber that you like to use, house cleaner, that kind of thing, you wanna have their contact information. What kind of schedule you're on for lawn care, that kind of thing. Any special filter, that kind of just examples of things that you might wanna mention, special filters that need to be changed, anything else kind of that wouldn't be obvious as far as maintenance on your house. And then also as far as contents of the house, some of these things are not specifically financial, but since we're talking about all this stuff, it kind of goes in with all this kind of stuff. Location of valuable items, jewelry, clink collection, firearms, et cetera. And this is non-financial, but location of important family mementos or sentimental items, family photos. And nowadays, of course, they could be physical photos, digital photos on computer, but they may not even be on your computer, they could be in the cloud. And these could potentially be important photos that some of your relatives, your kids, of course your spouse is gonna want to know where they are. So you wanna document that. Then we have the whole category of social media, it's called the digital state plan. A lot of the companies like Facebook will have something called memorialization settings where you could think about beforehand, do you want your account just deleted wiped out? Do you want it memorialized where it's stated that you passed away, but then leave your page open so people can make comments and that kind of thing after you're passing. So you just kind of wanna think about that and then see if Facebook, the other ones that you're on, what kind of settings they have that you could possibly fill some of that up beforehand and get it set up. Going back to the genealogy, you may wanna just figure out what to do with that information. If there's another family member, if not your spouse, or maybe somehow merge your family trees and with one of your other relatives that you have a place to add on your portion of the family tree. And then of course, a whole category is pet information. If you have any preferences, if it's not your spouse is not there to take your pet, who you might wanna recommend, almost like a guardian for your pet, if they have any special medical need, all that kind of information. PJ, do you wanna go ahead and share on this topic? Yeah, on the prior page, I think we forgot to include is, if the estate has not finished with probate, you have to do annual tax return for the estate too, which it's another thorn in the side. I would always say, if you don't like somebody, make them the executor of your estate. They don't have anything prepared and let them figure out life. So hopefully the estate attorney would be helpful, would be helpful with that and maybe even have a CPA lined up for that kind of thing, if you don't already have one. So, but yeah, that is important. If it's open for more than a year, yeah, you would have one. Yeah, and you have to go through which assets remain in a trust. It goes to the successor trust versus the things that have to be into the person that died, the state. And you don't want to spend $2,000 for an attorney for something that's worth 50 cents. Okay. All right, thank you. Doug? This valuables inside 11 is important. In firearms, when my father passed away, he had a army issue 45 and a valuable German handgun called a Walther. They got there in World War II. When he passed away, my brother and my mother decided they don't want that around the house. So they called up leisure world security that to get rid of these firearms. So leisure world security came over and took them away. I found out later they're worth thousands of dollars. So you can lose thousands of dollars. If you're not aware of the person who's living, you're just not aware that there's some valuables around the house. And also there might be an issue like, I don't know anything about firearms, but there might be an issue where if it's registered to your name and you just give it to somebody else, it's still registered to somebody's name. And then if it's using a crime, is that an issue where you want to make sure that it gets registered to the person that now has possession of it? Is that like an issue? That's a good point. I always wondered what happened to them. Maryam, go ahead. I just wanted to say that home ownership is a lot of work. And I know we've lived in our home. We have a half acre of land and we've lived here for 28 years. And my husband still asks who are our lawnmen? What are the names of our lawnmen? So it is, your spouse, when you pass away, your spouse simply may not be able to take care of the house and may not realize how expensive it is to take care of the house. So it's nice to include them while you're still around as part of the family work, but it may be a big weight on them to take care of a big home. Yeah, but even cleaning out, that's a big job and that's even probably even, you know, big job in itself, either just selling the home or you're cleaning it out and getting it ready for sale. That's either way, either way, it's gonna be a big job. Necluttering all your stuff. Yeah. Okay, thank you, Maryam. Any last call for comments on this page? See how we're doing on time, we're doing fine. Okay, the last page, so that's the end of the, what we're gonna call the book. This is just a list of different, a lot of it, some of it's online discussions on vocal heads and a lot of this is stuff I just ran across when I was kind of trying to do a little bit of research and trying to make all my lists. And then when we post this slideshow, it's a PDF. These links will be live where you can just click on them. You can't click on them right now, obviously, but when you get the, or maybe you can, can you? So when you get the slides, you can just click on these. So this was just mostly vocal heads discussions, a couple of other articles that were along these lines. Some podcasts I listened to that were very helpful. Oops, a couple of books that were mentioned. And then, okay, this last page, this is something that was in one of the, you know, in the RSVP forum, somebody mentioned, you know, how do I get my, encourage my parents to document, you know, cause we're talking about you documenting for your spouse, but then there's also the issue of, if you've got parents that are still living, you wanna make sure they have documented them for when you may be having to be the executive on their state. And sometimes people are reluctant to even talk about it or they may agree in theory, yeah, I'm gonna do it, but this is a huge job to document all this. So it's difficult. So I ran across, there's a lot of articles and some of these were really good. There was a YouTube video, this podcast was really good. The first third of it was talking about this guy telling his story, what happened when his mom didn't have a will and all the, you know, you can only imagine what kind of issues you run across. And then the last two thirds was a woman who had written that this book, this book called mom and dad, we need to talk, how to have a sexual conversation with your parents about their finances. She was interviewed in this podcast about, you know, what, if your parents don't plan and how to gently encourage. And everything that I've read was like, you don't wanna make it about you. You don't wanna be well, you wanna make, you don't wanna be about them making your job easy. You wanna be about, make it about you honoring their wishes and making sure that you honor their legacy and their wishes. You kinda wanna frame it in that, but even then it's gonna be, if they don't wanna do it, it's gonna be hard to convince them. So I don't have a lot of, Keith, go ahead, maybe have some good advice. Yeah, I just wanna add resources. I get the oblivious investor email and there was a link to an article, what you need to know about estate planning from white code investing. And so I clicked on it and it was, it's gosh, I mean, I printed it out. It's a good, I don't know, 15 pages. And it goes over in pretty good detail, a lot of things that you should consider. And because as I mentioned earlier, I'm in the process of redoing ours. I'm using it partially as a guide. I apologize, I don't have the link that I can put into the chat. It was written February 12th of this year. So it's up to date and current and it has a lot of great information on a lot of the stuff we're talking about and kind of a detail where you could, if you want, print it out and have it in front of you, maybe to follow and learn from. So I just wanted to throw that out. There is another resource. Okay, so that was on the oblivious investor blog? It was, yeah, it was the email that he sends out. I probably got it maybe six weeks ago, four, six weeks ago. He references white code investor, you said, or? And it came from white code investors, yes. So probably be on either one of those websites. It was written by a Dr. James Dolly, D-A-H-L-E, white code investor founder. And it's got a lot of great information on estate planning. Great, that sounds very helpful. Okay, well, that's our last slide. So if anybody has any final comments and then we're gonna make sure we save the chat or we're gonna go over how to save the chat because there's a lot of information. Everybody's been entering a lot of really helpful links and information and stuff in the chat. Is there any just final comment somebody wants to make about just wrapping this up overall? Anything we forgot to cover? I actually would just, if I can throw two things out there, just kind of maybe random. The first is at the beginning, somebody talked about when you move to another state, you wanna make sure you update. That's absolutely true. And we were just on a Bogleheads meeting maybe a month, month and a half ago where we talked about moving, relocating and retirement. So that perfectly fits with conversation that a lot of us are having. But I would also add if you have some kind of a change in your life. For example, you have a grandchild that you didn't plan when you written it and when it was developed initially or something else that happened where you wanna make some changes or tweaks to your state plans that weren't in there when you wrote them maybe a year or two or three ago. You start to have things like, grandchildren, et cetera, et cetera that get added and all of a sudden, if you're leaving money you need to make adjustments to that. The other thing I would just mention is to watch about tax changes that happen. For example, there's a change to Roth IRAs for beneficiaries in terms of how they have to be drawn down that's different from what it was before. There's other things that are on the table are being talked about. So think about how tax changes that you read about in the newspaper or wherever you get your news from how that might affect your estate planning or something that you already have written. Do you need to go back and make a tweak to it or a change to it based on something that changed that might affect how you wanna pass your money down or what have you? Because sometimes it can be pretty impactful dollar wise and you wanna make an adjustment to that. So just a couple of things to think about as you're maybe already having a state plan but you need to make adjustments to it.