I Love Them EnoughYou Might Think a Will, Trust, and Medical Documents means you're finished... but you MIGHT be leaving behind a mess you won't be around to clean up.
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I Love Them EnoughI Love Them Enough
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The Three Biggest Problems I See1. Not Having an Estate Plan and Other Documents
2. Having Documents, But They’re Out Of Date and the most insidious problem: 3. Having Everything Handled… but they’re wrong. 1. Not Having Estate and Other Documents If you know you don’t have documents, I’m pretty okay with that. You have a situation. You know what the situation is. You probably have at least SOME idea what to do about it. You’ve just chosen to not do it for whatever your own reasons are that satisfy you. Maybe you'll do a Will soon... or a Trust... maybe both. Maybe you'll get to the Medical Documents and get your affairs in order. Or maybe you won't. At least you know your situation! 2. Having Documents, But They're Out of Date This second one… I’m a little less okay with part of it. This is where you might know you have “something.” Maybe you’re not totally sure how long ago it was. You might not remember quite what it says. It might be a Will or Trust you did years ago when your oldest child was little and you were married to your first spouse. Or before you owned this house, or these cars, or lived in this State... Worse, you might not know where the documents are. The old documents may or may not be legally effective… but if no one can find them, it ends up being a lot like not having them at all. Again, at least you know you have a situation and you update or don’t update for reasons that satisfy you. 3. Having Everything Handled… but they’re wrong. This last one… this is one I hate. I hate it. I hate it when people have been as responsible as they know how to be… and they rightly believe they have it all taken care of … but it isn’t. They think they have a Trust, and it is absolutely powerless. They think they did a Will... but does it actually do what we want it to do? In one case, a single wrong word completely changed what happened... When someone does everything they know is their part, I like it to be “done.” But real life teaches us that sometimes we just don’t get the result we expected. In almost every area of life, is that happens, we can fix it. If it made a mess, we can clean up. If it wiped something out, we can rebuild. Even if it’s too late for one thing… we can do another. Life lets us troubleshoot. Life lets solve problems. Life lets us pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try again. Not with what happens with our stuff when we die. Not with our medical instructions. Not with any of the things related to this particular, inevitable part of life. With this kind of thing… we NEVER find out there was a problem. The people who find out are our heirs and beneficiaries. The people who find out who have sat with me in my office and asked “how do we fix this?” And I have to give the hard truth... “We can’t.” Please Get the REPORT... please. |
The Most Obvious |
More Useful Than I Might Have Thought |
Of course, we're talking about "what happens to my stuff when I die" and other "estate planning" issues. In this generation, we are about to have the biggest transfer of wealth in human history. We are also on the cusp of having more estate problems ever in human history.
I love them enough to make sure that I'm not part of the problem when I become part of the transfer. More Important For Me, PersonallySetting everything up isn't just for after I die. It's for my latter years. If I'm one of those whose physical and mental abilities limit what I can do for myself, it would be helpful if I had everything already set up for others to help me. If some accident or illness strikes that takes me down for even just a month or two, how easy am I to help?
I love them enough to be easy to help when I need it. |
When you set things up the ILTE (I love them enough) way, it's not just useful for illness, injury, and end-of-life. It's useful for travel, for being stuck out of the country (or even just stuck out of town!), or quarantined somewhere, or unable to get home for a while for any reason. I might need things handled at home whether I can be there or not.
I love them enough to be easy to help when I need it. Making Myself Easy to LoveWhen we say someone is lovable, we mean that just who they are inspires others to love them. They're easy to love. We want to be easy to love. Think of time, energy, and brain power like money. If I ask you to spend your money on me at $1000 at a time, you can help me so many times. If I only need you to spend $100 at a time, you can help me much more often, much more easily. If we do that with the time, energy, and brain-power of those we ask to love us with help, we help them love us by being easy to love.
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In almost every other area of life, if it turns out we made a horrible mistake or overlooked some critical detail, we can fix it... except here by the time anyone knows... it's too late.
All the Tools You Need to Succeed
We're going to have an adventure together. How much of an adventure is up to you. I Love Them Enough has some free and/or cheap for you to have you ready for the very basics. These are things you might have already heard from others, but hearing it from a lawyer gives you that much more comfort.
Or we can just adventure through something just a bit more sophisticated with a bit more detail to make sure you don't make some of the most common mistakes I have seen over more than three decades as a lawyer. That's worth a bit more of an investment, and a bit of thought, and a few conversations. There's some information I've seen suddenly getting popular that can cause problems later on, and we'll address some of that, too. I hope you'll at least join me for the I Love Them Enough course. I recently took a series of courses. Overall, I think I heard from more than 30 estate professionals, and while they covered a lot of really important LEGAL information, I still didn't hear them talking about solving some of the more common problems I actually see. We'll address those. |
Paperwork is just part. Practical needs are just as big and just as important than the paperwork, and a LOT of lawyers deal with very little of it. In fact, some won't deal with ANY of it - and that's perfectly professional. It's not their job.
Then there's the Personal. That's definitely not the lawyer's job. So you could have had a brilliant legal team put together a brilliant estate plan and all the right paperwork, and I would bet you a full-refund you will already get information in the Paperwork part that you'd like your lawyer to put into your documents. The Practical and Personal? I'd be shocked if even any but the MOST prepared people had even half. What if the course isn't enough? We have a more personal touch for you if you feel it a needed, worthy investment. We hope to build a community with all the people who walk through I Love Them Enough to take care of our families and ourselves. It's an Ohana - a family. I am the author of The Ohana Way 2.0 based on the Hawaiian principle of Ohana. Because I want to help a whole generation avoid the biggest disaster in generational asset transfer in history - and I can only do it if you talk to other people about what you learn in this program. |