Planning on Going From We To Me – Episode 023

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, we have my bestselling financial author and co-host Kim Butler with us. Hi, Kim. Hello, Todd. Totally looking forward to bringing some value to our listeners today. We have a great discussion that will be helpful to everybody. Got it. So today’s, the name of today’s show is planning from going from we to me. And you can take that in a lot of different ways.

[00:49] But lately in my own personal life, I’ve been going through a divorce, which means separating finances that have been together for 28 years. And I’ve also been helping some of my clients who are, you know, maybe have one spouse who is terminally ill and dealing with a lot of sicknesses. And that particular person happened to be in charge of the finances for 40 years. So there’s a lot of reasons that we need to be equally or at least equally knowledgeable about our finances and thought we’d take advantage of having Kim Butler with us today of maybe, maybe making some suggestions and telling us how we can prepare for things that may potentially happen in the future so that we don’t face these crisis

[01:38] situations. Well, it is an interesting time for sure. And again, regardless of what is making it occur, going from we to me and I’ll suggest that we use the word strategizing on going from we to me because you really can’t plan stuff like this so often just in your lap all of a sudden. But it is so much easier to do if there has been some discussion ahead of time. And as a matter of fact, our family just literally yesterday, which was Father’s Day, we’re recording this in what are we June of 2015, had a three hour planned or strategized discussion around a particular home that at some point in the future, everybody’s going to have to make a decision on. And right now, everybody’s healthy. Everybody’s married and everybody is mentally capable.

[02:34] But at any point in time, that could change. And so not that we finalized anything, not that we made any specific plans or put any actual paperwork into play, but just a meaningful conversation was had. And one of the suggestions that we’re going to give you as we wrap up our podcast today is a website that is valuable in sparking meaningful conversations. That’s their tagline, sparking meaningful conversations, because that’s the hardest part is having the conversation. And so many times you don’t even know what questions to ask. So you can’t even begin the conversation because nobody knows really where to go with it. So having a list of questions is very, very valuable. And we actually reached out to another advisor that we know that deals with a

[03:28] lot of elderly clients. And she gave us a list of questions that we’ll put into a blog post on our printed blog here in another couple of weeks that really sparked the conversation and enabled a lot of the back and forth that was necessary. So the biggest, most important first step is to have a conversation. And hopefully we’ve caught you at a time when you can have the conversation with, with everybody alive and still married. But as we know, sometimes death and divorce do occur. And then the question is what now? So let’s, let’s begin first having the meaningful conversations, hopefully before any of the big D words come about. What do you think about that? Absolutely. So one of the resources would of course be www.partners.

[04:17] The number four prosperity.com would be a good resource for you. And then the other one is it, is it www.torch.com? I believe it’s thetorch.com. Okay. So T H E T O R T H.com would be another resource that we would recommend for you. Um, and again, you know, I don’t know that there’s necessarily anything wrong with one person paying the bills or something like that, but both people should really be knowledgeable about what your assets and liabilities are. Step one. Absolutely. And so just to pick up on it, it’s the torch, T O R C H.com. Well, the way that you said it made it sound like you were using a different letter, but who knows, maybe the spelling was right. I won’t judge, but, um, when the conversation can happen, whether it’s

[05:15] because of the torch or because you listened to this podcast, and then if there can be paperwork involved, in other words, here’s the checking account and maybe this is more online than paperwork today. Here’s the savings account. Here’s the mortgage payment. Here’s how the online bills are paid. Here’s, as you said, a list of assets. So these are things that you own and it can be as simple as just something scribbled out on a yellow piece of paper. It can be upgraded to something like quick books. You know, a lot of people use quicken, which is a great check book account, an accounting program for checkbook, but we, in our personal family life use quick books, which is generally a business tool, but we

[06:03] actually treat our entire household structure as a business account using quick books instead of quicken so that we can have a proper list of assets and liabilities. So again, assets, things that you own and liabilities, things that you own, OWN versus OWE and the liabilities, of course, are going to be the credit card debt, the car loans and the mortgages and that kind of thing. And so whether you do it in quick books or whether you do on a yellow piece of paper, or you might even use something like ment.com. Now, of course we’re not affiliated with any of these various companies and we’re not affiliated with the torch either. However, the torch was done by a client of ours who’s of course since become a great friend.

[06:50] Lenore Vassal owns the torch and it’s a super helpful tool, but ment.com is a very well-known online system where people can keep track of things and at a minimum, if you just started with those things and a conversation, let’s say between two spouses, then that would give you a really good foundation for which to go forward if something did happen to somebody. Wow. We’ve got a great question that just came in and that’s that if that one person who’s taking care of the bills and you bring up this conversation and they really don’t want to bring you into the conversation about what the assets and liabilities are, my first impression might be, you might be closer to the one of the D words than you think.

[07:36] What’s your opinion? Yes, it is always interesting to me. And sometimes of course, there’s a good reason for say one spouse, not wanting the other spouse to know what’s going on, but in most cases, the reason really should be overridden by honesty and forthrightness and dealing with the problem. So I’m going to call it a problem. Maybe some people don’t consider it a problem, but it’s interesting. I’m reading a Thomas Jefferson book these days, one of the founding fathers, and this is actually written by an attorney who is a big fan of his and has gone through all of his writings and redone them in current language and he has these tiny little chapters that are fun to read. And one of the things that he talks about is honesty and how you can

[08:28] get yourself out of any problem, as long as you’re honest with yourself and you’re honest with those that are involved. And so if you do feel like you’ve got some financial skeletons in the closet, shall we say, it’s an okay thing. All of us have dealt with that and you will get best results by pulling those skeletons out of the closet and putting them on the table, so to speak, whereby everybody that needs to know about them can deal with them. So this might be credit card debt. It might be gambling debt. It might be IRS bills. It might be tax returns that are not filed. It might be just poor bookkeeping. So you don’t even know what you owe and what you own. All of those things can be fixed with honesty.

[09:20] So that’s a toughie. I know, but I encourage you if you’re coming from that place to put it out on the table and get those spouses involved, our clients make the most progress when both spouses are involved with the finances, even if only minimally. So even if there’s just, let’s say we’re doing five meetings and one spouse is on for two of the meetings and not the rest, that’s fine. Let’s say that spouse maybe looks at the documents once a year or something like that, that’s fine. But I encourage you to take the step to have the involvement. And I promise you, you’ll get good results from it. Oh, and I think you brought up a good D word this time. And that’s documents. Boy, they really need to be kept together.

[10:06] Don’t they? Yes. So we have two bad D words, D for dog in divorce and death. And we have a good word in document and dog. I think dog should be a good word too. So, um, when you have documents, you can make so much more specific progress and backed up progress. And our world is getting better, I think at transparency these days and documents cause transparency. They enable good discussions to happen. And of course it’s much easier to go and find things when we have documents. So yes, thank you. Definitely good D word. Got it. And then that brings us to yet another D word. Um, and this is another one that things that we’re dealing with in our family. And of course that is death and preparing for death.

[10:58] Um, certainly it’s better to do some of that before you get closer. Um, you know, the farther away from that, that you can, and certainly that’s one of the things that we teach the most would be preparing for death in the sense of ensuring your life. Yes, it is interesting for as much as I talk with our clients about life insurance, I rarely talk with them about death and preparing for death. And it’s just a fact that life insurance is for the living and it’s called life insurance, not death insurance. Now, of course, term insurance is death insurance, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but we should do a better job here at partners for prosperity of helping our clients deal with preparation

[11:44] for death, because if it is strategized or planned, if you will, it is going to get better results. And one of my favorite tools, I guess we’re just full of all kinds of online suggestions here these days. Um, but there is a website called the five wishes.org. And I believe it’s just five wishes, F I V E wishes, W I S H E S.org. And it is a document. It’s not approved in all 50 states, but even if it’s not approved in your state, you can still use it. It is a document that helps you think through the end of life issues beyond the living will. So everybody knows that they should have a living will with their trust or their regular will. A living will is the pull the plug thing, but the five wishes documents

[12:30] handles the time prior to the pulling of the plug decision whereby hospices involved or care or any of those literal last, maybe, you know, it could be a year, but typically the last maybe three, six months or something like that. Now, of course, what we hope for everybody is that they just die in their sleep and there’s no need to deal with the last few months of an aging body, but, um, that’s not always the case. And so we can be wise and again, be prepared to the best that we can by looking at the five wishes.org document and having each one of our members fill that out, each one of our family members, you know, this is not something for 80 year olds only literally every single person, including clear down in the teenagers should have a five wishes document

[13:19] and updated every three or four years or so, so that everybody knows what that person’s wishes are for their last few days or weeks of their life. One of the, uh, the things that makes my heart feel the best is for those, uh, those of our clients who do have their life insurance taken care of as they near that end of their life. Again, whether that be 60 or 105, the fact that they have this permission slip to take those assets that they have left to give them to people that they care about, to go on trips, to really create some valuable memories with the assets that they have left because they do have that life insurance in place to take care of their estate or whatever debt or anything else that they have because they have

[14:16] that life insurance, it allows them to take the assets that they have now and use them. What do you think of that idea? Absolutely. This permission to spend idea is something that we have worked with for many, many years. And it’s always interesting talking to say a 40 year old about what they’re going to use their life insurance for when they’re 80 and 90. And obviously it’s a long ways away and people have a hard time getting their arms around it. So we have prepared a special report. And if people are interested in that, that is called permission to spend. And it literally helps you understand how to use the death benefit of your life insurance while you are living. And it is available at ProsperityPeaks.com.

[15:01] That’s P-E-A-K-S, ProsperityPeaks.com, the permission to spend report. And it’s a valuable tool to enable you as a 40, 50, 60, 70 year old, realize how much better you can make your own assets perform for you in the job of sending you an income when there is a life insurance in place on your life. So this time we’re talking about life insurance on your life and the permission that it gives you to spend all your other assets. If you own life insurance on somebody else’s life, this permission to spend idea is not as effective. Super. And then I know we’ve given you guys a ton of resources, but Kim, I understand you even brought a little something, a little gift for our listeners today. Yes. We have a ebook called Financial Planning Has Failed and it is at

[15:58] partners, the number four Prosperity.com slash ebook, E as in electronic. It’s about 60 pages of a PDF. It’s about an hour long read. And we just got the audio version available. So especially for our podcast listeners that like to listen instead of read, we have the audio version available. And so again, partners, number four Prosperity.com slash ebook. There is a download there. And by the time this recording makes it to you, there will be an ebook, uh, audio version as well that you can get at the same place. Super. And so many of our shows come from things that are happening in our lives, things that are happening in our client lives, and especially the questions that our listeners send in.

[16:46] So I really would like to encourage all of you to send in your questions. Um, again, you know, we don’t have to address your name or anything specific, but we can create a show around what’s going on in your life so that, uh, we can try to make sure that we’re getting your particular questions answered, because I guarantee if there’s something happening in your life, there’s another 10,000 listeners out there that are going through the exact same thing that you are. Anything else you’d like to say before we wrap up, Kim? Well, always how grateful we can be to have family members and know that we can provide them value if we ask them to do the tough things like five wishes or like getting a will or a trust done or like having a meaningful

[17:30] conversation about where their documents are. So always that’s something to be grateful for. And that’s a good place to both start and end. Super. Well, this is No BS Money Guy Todd Strobel for the Prosperity Podcast. Once again, thanking our, our bestselling financial author and co-host Kim Butler. Take care, everybody. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast to take control of your money and have it work for you. Visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.