Читать книгу The Living Trust Advisor - Condon Jeffrey L. - Страница 11

I am an estate planning attorney. I am in the business of putting together inheritance plans. In the old days, you would have set forth your inheritance instructions in a will. Nowadays, those instructions will be set forth in a Living Trust. In effect, this makes me a Living Trust lawyer.

I learned this business from my father, Gerald M. Condon, who, in the early 1970s, was perhaps the first lawyer in the United States to conduct Living Trust seminars. This was a real homespun family operation. I manned the check-in table, my father gave the talk, and my mother made the brownies that the attendees devoured during the break.

About a decade after my father conducted his first seminar, Living Trust seminars became ubiquitous. They were seemingly everywhere, offered by attorneys, insurance companies, real estate firms, banks, and brokerage firms. You could not open your newspaper or mailbox without receiving a solicitation to attend one.

In the 1990s, the market for the Living Trust business had become farmed out. It was dog-eat-dog for the same potential pool of clients. Living Trusts became so cheap that reputable attorneys advertised their Living Trust services for as low as $499.

You get what you pay for in this world of ours, and the Living Trust consumer often experienced firsthand that old adage. Some Living Trust attorneys offered a good price, but at the expense of customer service. Practices became about volume. People never met the attorney who purportedly prepared their document. Instead, they saw paralegals who rushed them through the draft reviews. People felt like numbers instead of clients, and were too cowed by the manic process to ask questions. Ultimately, they signed their Living Trust without any meaningful understanding of the effect and function of the document and were politely shown the door. Next!

At his seminars, my father consistently gave what I believe, in my less-than-objective opinion, was the best presentation on the Living Trust since the world was a ball of molten lava. But the Living Trust world had changed, and we had to change with it. The client base for Living Trust business had been tapped out, and people were weary of being bombarded with flyers, advertisements, and seminar invitations for low-cost Living Trusts.

As a result, our Living Trust seminars became “Family Inheritance Planning” seminars. Instead of talking about Living Trust mechanics, we focused on the human side of inheritances, such as how your children can share an inheritance when they could not even share their toys, and how you can prevent your surviving spouse from losing control of her money and property if the children are grasping for an early inheritance. Eventually, this new emphasis on the human and personal element in the inheritance arena comprised the theme of the first book my father and I co-wrote in 1996, Beyond the Grave: The Right Way and the Wrong Way of Leaving Money to Your Children (and Others), which has since become the most widely distributed inheritance planning book in American publishing history.

Financial Advisor Alert

In connection with the marketing of the book, my father and I appeared on more than 100 radio talk shows throughout the United States, where we answered hundreds of questions from listeners about a wide range of inheritance planning issues – from succession of the family business, to protecting a widow from her own children grasping for an early inheritance, to leaving money to the family dog. Yet, of all the questions asked by callers, 90 percent of them were about the basics of the Living Trust. What is it? How does it work? What does it do? Why should I have one? What happens to it after I die? Where should I keep it? Why does it have so many pages? Moreover, these questions were asked by callers who informed us that they have Living Trusts that were prepared by lawyers!

So.. consider presenting an inheritance planning seminar for your present and prospective clients with an experienced trusts and estates attorney as the guest speaker. By doing so, you will provide yourself with the opportunity to press the flesh and enhance your reputation as one who takes the time to make available information that the attendees will find absolutely invaluable.

I have been conducting Family Inheritance Planning seminars on my own for about 15 years. Although my style is certainly more freewheeling than my father’s horse-sense suffer-no-fools approach, I proudly walk in his footsteps to offer invaluable information about family inheritance planning to audiences around the country. And as they did years ago, folks come up to me after my talks with their Living Trusts in hand, pointing to certain pages and asking me, “What the hell does this mean?”

And if you think there is a lot of ignorance out there with lawyer-drafted Living Trusts, don’t get me started on the misconceptions and misinformation that arise in Living Trusts that are prepared without lawyers.

Too late! You got me started!