Pets, Probate, & Planning
by SGL Financial
Our 2 Cents – Episode #265
Pets, Probate, & Planning
We’re back with another fresh episode of Our 2 Cents! Today’s show covers everything from quotes and happy pet owners to money conversation questions and the ins and outs of being an executor of a will. There’s a lot packed into this episode and you won’t want to skip a single minute of this one!
- Quotes of the Month:
- “Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut that you used to get for five dollars back when you had hair.” – Sam Ewing
- “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.” – David Lee Roth
- Cats Versus Dogs:
- Do cat owners or dog owners have better retirements?
- Is Steve getting a new pet?
- Financial Conversation Questions:
- Talking about money can be difficult, but sometimes the right question can get the conversation started. Here are a few worth asking.
- The Role of an Executor of a Will:
- Explore the financial responsibilities of an executor of a will and how the role can impact an estate.
Request Your Free Consultation Today
847.499.3330
Podcast Transcript
Announcer: You are listening to Our 2 Cents with the team from SGL Financial, building wealth for life. Steve Lewit is the President of SGL Financial and Gabriel Lewit is the CEO. They’re here to discuss all the latest in financial news, trends, strategies, and more.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, hello everybody. Welcome to Our 2 Cents. We hope you’re doing great today and gearing up for a wonderful weekend. It is Bears football season. It is the start of hopefully… Well, I guess it’s all football season, but I’m saying Bears football season here. And we are ready to have, I think, a winning season and a winning show here for you today. Steve, what do you say?
Steve Lewit: I think we will have a winning show. I’m not sure the Bears will have a winning season, and I’m rooting for the Giants, so there you go.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, that’s your team to choose, and hopefully they have a good season as well. But if they play each other, I’m hoping the Bears win.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, I am rooting for the Bears. I actually think they could have a good season. They were very fortunate last season because they won so many games in the last minute, but it’s going to be exciting. It’s going to be exciting.
Gabriel Lewit: You’re right. They’re just going to beat everybody by multiple touchdowns every game this year, so there should be a lot better.
Steve Lewit: Yep, absolutely. They got a good team. They got a good team.
Gabriel Lewit: They do. Well, again, we’ve got a lot lined up for you here today. We’re going to start off just for a little bit of fun with a couple of lighthearted items here, a couple quotes of the month that we want to share just to get you to chuckle. And also, if you’re a pet owner, we have some interesting data for you about what’s better, cats versus dogs when it comes to retirement happiness. So stay tuned for that. And then we’re going to talk a bit about estate planning and what it means to be named as the executor of a will and a couple of things related to that. And then we’re also going to talk about here today just some general things with regards to questions about retirement planning and what it might mean about you. And it might just help you thinking about retirement, could help to make it a better retirement, and that’s going to be the focus of that theme as we go through those questions here today. So that’s what we’re going to cover. Steve, anything you would add to that?
Steve Lewit: No, let’s dive in. The water’s warm and I’m ready to swim.
Gabriel Lewit: All right. So let’s talk about a guy named Sam Ewing, who I don’t know who he is, and I forgot to look him up, who was our quote of the month, one of our picks here for this month’s quotes. Maybe he’s an older guy. I’m not sure. I should probably look him up. But he wrote here, “Inflation is when you pay $15 for the $10 haircut that you used to get for $5 back when you had hair.”
Steve Lewit: I do like that. Sam’s got a good sense of humor.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Inflation’s when you pay $15 for the $10 haircut that you used to get for $5 back when you had hair.
Steve Lewit: When you have hair is the best part. I bet there are a lot of folks that are listening that could relate to that.
Gabriel Lewit: Perhaps, perhaps. The last one, again, didn’t look him up just like the quote. Usually I look these folks up just to see who they are. But David Lee Roth, other than he has a good last name, Roth for Roth IRAs and things of such like that, but says, “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.” Yeah, I guess you have to have a lot of money to buy the yacht and perhaps that’ll get you a little bit of happiness, maybe, maybe not, but it’ll certainly hit you in the wallet having a yacht.
Steve Lewit: For sure, for sure. But at least you got something to compare to somebody else and make yourself feel better because someone doesn’t have as much money as you do.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Well, in the world of yachts, you’re just kind of who has the biggest yacht contest egos, I guess, and someone always has a bigger yacht.
Steve Lewit: Always. There’s always a bigger yacht.
Gabriel Lewit: Maybe Zuckerberg has the biggest or something like that, but somebody always has the biggest yacht.
Steve Lewit: That’s not a yacht, that’s a ship.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Zuckerberg likes to cruise his around. It’s gigantic, right? It’s like an aircraft carrier or something.
Steve Lewit: It is.
Gabriel Lewit: But anyways, so hopefully you enjoyed those there. Just a little bit of fun to kick off our show here for you today. Now, let’s talk a little bit about cats and dogs. All right. Now you might have a leaning one way or the other. You may have a cat, you may have a dog, you may have both. The question as posed by David Blanchette, who is a researcher of retirement things, he’s actually a good researcher. I like his stuff. But the question is who has a better retirement, dog people or cat people? What do you think, Steve?
Steve Lewit: Well, I was surprised when I saw Blanchette doing this article because he’s like statistics and economy and retirement planning methodologies, and all of a sudden we got this article on dogs and cats. So it was very compelling.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, I think just like us, he’s got to try to have a little bit of fun. If you write content for a living or if you do podcasts frequently, if you’re not having any fun, you’re not going to have any fun and you got to have some fun to want to stay with something for a long enough time period.
Steve Lewit: And it gets boring if you keep doing the same thing over and over again. So when I saw the headline, I said, “I’m not going to read this, I’m just going to guess.” And I actually guessed cats would make people happier than dogs.
Gabriel Lewit: You thought so, huh?
Steve Lewit: Yeah, because cats are like peace of mind. They ignore you, they kind of do their things. They’re always there. They cuddle with you. They’re more like independent people and dogs are needy and rough, rough, rough and they got to go for a walk and then the middle of the night that you get upset. I thought cats definitely would have the superior emotional outcome than dogs. And guess what?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, you were wrong.
Steve Lewit: I was wrong.
Gabriel Lewit: But the good news is they are close. So the general gist of it folks was that pets as a whole, first of all, the pet ownership declines as people age. That’s maybe not entirely surprising. You might have more pets when you have kids in the house, and then maybe when you’re in retirement you want to travel and pet ownership doesn’t work as well. But there’s a lot of possible reasons for it. But generally speaking, most people here that had a dog reported a slightly higher outlook than just a cat. And essentially what that proves is that dog people are happier with their life outlook than cat people. And that was about the extent of the study, but there’s not a ton to say about it other than just we thought it was interesting. And if you’re a cat person, you might feel that we’re wrong, but it wasn’t our data and statistics here, folks, just to point that out as this is sophisticated, real research by people not named Gabe and Steve, concluding that cats helped make life better, but not as much as dogs.
Steve Lewit: So what I was wondering, Gabriel, what is it about dogs that makes people feel better? And I was thinking, well, you can really talk to a dog and it’s really hard to talk to a cat because they ignore everything you say, but dogs actually listen. So I’m wondering if people feel better because, especially if a spouse passes away or you’re living by yourself, I wonder if they feel better because they have somebody to talk to even though it’s a dog.
Gabriel Lewit: You could be, could be. Nobody will know for sure. But at the end of the day, there’s good news is that both are good for your wellbeing and both can be very advantageous to your happiness levels. But if you’re trying to min-max this thing and just eke out the highest levels of happiness advantage, you might have to both add a cat and a dog or just a dog to the mix.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, I was surprised at the number of people that actually had both a cat and a dog, quite a number of people.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m thinking about getting a dog sometime soon. The kids are getting a little older. I think they can help us a little bit more. So that’ll be something that might be on the horizon for our family here and maybe next year. We’ll see. We’ll see. We’re trying to work through those details.
Steve Lewit: All right. Big step for the Lewit family.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, it’d be a lot of fun. Well, we had a dog. He passed away three or four years ago, I think maybe even four years ago now, but I think we are on place to maybe grace a new one here. We’ll see. We’ll see.
Steve Lewit: You had a beautiful golden noodle that was.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, he was a big boy, big boy. We’ll see about getting a smaller dog maybe this time. Okay, so let’s see here. So our topic number one today, our main focus and main topic number one I should say for today is conversation starters, questions about retirement, things that make you ponder. As we were researching some ideas for today’s show, I thought these were very interesting and in a sense reflective and they can help you identify things that you maybe didn’t even know about yourself if I was trying to talk this up here a little bit. So let me lead right in with an example here. So here’s the prompt and then we’ll pause and we’ll give you a second to think about this before we start talking. So for each of these prompts, I’m going to read it twice and then I’m going to pause for a second and just give you a moment to think and then we’ll dive in.
Okay? So prompt number one, picture yourself retired. It’s 10:45 on a Tuesday morning. What is it that you’re doing? So again, picture yourself retired. It’s 10:45 on a Tuesday morning. What do you envision yourself doing?
Steve Lewit: I’m envisioning this clearly in my head, Gabriel. This is very interesting what I’m envisioning.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah? Which is?
Steve Lewit: Yeah. Well, so I’m envisioning sitting in the city at a coffee shop watching all the people go by and just sitting back and having coffee with a friend maybe, but just so relaxed and people watching. I love people watching, so at 10:45 I might be doing that.
Gabriel Lewit: Cool.
Steve Lewit: What did you get?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, for me, at the moment I was thinking I’ll just be sleeping in.
Steve Lewit: Oh, you need sleep.
Gabriel Lewit: It’s been so long since I’ve had the ability to sleep in between kids. Even on a Saturday, they wake me up at 8:00, 7:30 maybe for breakfast. So yeah, I would love to just sleep in with nobody to stop me.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, I get that. I get that. So I wonder what other people think. Some people might be thinking, I’ll be out in my garden or I’ll be volunteering at the hospital or the park or somewhere, but that gives you an insight to where you are today. You have no time to sleep today, so you’re envisioning in retirement, “Oh, I can get that time. I have no time to sit and watch people walk by or very little time. I do it every once in a while.” So that’s kind of informing you about your current state of yourself.
Gabriel Lewit: I think the concept is whatever pops into your head first can be a good indication of what might be meaningful for you and help you really identify things that might be something you want to focus on for retirement, whether you’re thinking ahead of for retirement or maybe you just entered into retirement and you’re not sure what to do. Well, what’s the first thing that pops in your head? That could be a helpful driver for you. Okay, well, let’s look at the second prompt. Number two here is if I was a financial genie, me, Gabriel Lewit, financial advisor, what three money problems would you wish for me to solve for you? You get three money wishes or problems for me to solve. How would you answer those? I think I could guess how people would answer those questions.
Steve Lewit: You can?
Gabriel Lewit: What do you think the most common financial problem wish that somebody would want a financial genie to solve would be, Steve, if you had to guess?
Steve Lewit: I need enough money to sustain in my lifestyle for the rest of my life.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, it might even be simpler. Yeah, I just want more money probably would be what people would just say. I want more money.
Steve Lewit: My wish is to win the lottery, Genie.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, I think the first question would be, give me more money, right? Well, what is that typically good for? Well, usually spending. Money, if you have it just to have it doesn’t really do as much for you, but if you have it and you can spend it. So I think many people are really looking for the ability to feel like they can spend more confidently perhaps or with less stress, which is really at the core of financial and retirement planning.
Steve Lewit: All right, so that’s number one.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, that was just one example. I don’t know what questions people are really going to ask for me to solve as their financial genie because I’ve never actually been anyone’s financial genie, but that was just a hunch that people would say, “Give me more money, Mr. Genie.” Because in all the movies where there’s ever a genie, everybody just wants more money usually, right?
Steve Lewit: Typically, yeah. So what would be the… Yeah, more money I think is obvious. So if you were my genie, what would I ask you next? Well, I want more money. I want to leave money to my kids.
Gabriel Lewit: Maybe. Yeah, I don’t know. Well, that’s really a question for you to think through there, Mr. and Mrs. Listeners of ours. What questions would you want your financial genie to solve? And then realistic ones, let’s say you were to strike out the one of just concoct imaginary money in the year. Let’s say that’s obviously not a real thing that a real advisor could do, but what other problems could you have an advisor possibly help you solve? I think what comes to mind first on those are the areas that you want to focus on. If you said you want to have better tax savings, maybe we focus on tax planning. If you just want more income, we talk about income planning. So it’s a way of indicating where you may want to focus first with your finances. That would be my thoughts there.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, I actually agree with you, Gabe, here.
Gabriel Lewit: Really? Just this once.
Steve Lewit: Wow. Right on target. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. It’s like if you ask the genie for help, well, that’s where you need help. That’s what you should focus on.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. This next one’s a fun one. It’s a variant of if you had all the money in the world and you didn’t have to work, what would you do every day?
Steve Lewit: I would be sitting in a cafe downtown watching people.
Gabriel Lewit: He’s doing the same thing when he’s retired. For some people, it would be very different. And the idea of this question is to try to figure out what you would want to do for a career. I think it’s used a lot for younger kids doing career planning. If money wasn’t an object, what would you do for your daily work? And it’s supposed to lead you to something that you’re passionate about. Well, if you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space, which is one of my favorite movies, there’s a guy that essentially just answers that and just says he would just do absolutely nothing. I would just do absolutely nothing. Maybe that would be your answer, folks. Maybe you’d just sit there and stare at the walls. Maybe you would go to a cafe, but maybe you would be a volunteer. Maybe you would go be a coach, maybe you’d be a bus driver. I don’t know about that one for me, but some people, they think through things differently if money were not going to be a problem for them.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. I was thinking about this just now, Gabriel, and what I was thinking is that if I had lots and lots and lots of unlimited money, I’d really support. I’d love to support the arts, singers, dancers, musicians, because they really need help in this hard way to make money. So that’s the first thing that came to mind for me is that I would be very involved in the art community and find ways to donate or support people that are interested in that kind of a creative life.
Gabriel Lewit: See, I think that’s a very good insightful thing about yourself that you just concretely put out there into the world, Steve. And that’s the idea behind this exercise for our listeners is if you actually go through these questions and answer them, you might find that you’re not doing something that perhaps you really do want to do.
Steve Lewit: And you know what I was thinking too, is that I’m saying to myself, “Well, if I had all the money in the world, I would do that. Well, I don’t have all the money in the world, but why don’t I do that with whatever I can do that?”
Gabriel Lewit: Well, that’s what’s funny. In the movie Office Space, he’s talking to his neighbor through the walls when he’s coming to this conclusion where if he had all the money in the world, he would do absolutely nothing. And his neighbor said, “Well, shoot, you don’t need all the money in the world to do nothing.”
Steve Lewit: Exactly right.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, that’s an interesting one, right? Okay. Next question is, knowing what you know now, and we all have gone through life experiences, knowing what you know now, what would you have done different financially in your financial past?
Steve Lewit: Oh, my goodness.
Gabriel Lewit: What would you have done differently?
Steve Lewit: I have a rule about money is never look back.
Gabriel Lewit: That’s hard not to do, right? We all have those things, we say would’ve, should have, coulda.
Steve Lewit: Would’ve, should have, could’ve, is that right? What would I do different? What would you do different, Gabriel?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, I don’t know if I would’ve done a ton of things different other than buy Bitcoin when it first came out. Crystal ball would’ve been good for that one, but me and a lot of other people would feel the same really about any stock. You buy Apple when it first came out or anything when it first came out. No, I don’t know. For me personally, I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job as far as my finances go. I mean, we all have those trades we’ve made that didn’t work out that we’d like to undo. We all have those, perhaps somebody gifted money to somebody that they didn’t feel appreciated for. I’ve heard a lot of things from clients. A lot of it’s about trades they wish they didn’t make, having been more conservative before a market loss. There’s things, but the good news for me is I don’t feel like I’ve made a ton of substantial financial planning mistakes, and maybe that’s a luxury of the career choice that I’m in, so eat a little bit of my own cooking.
But I know there are folks out there that they can list mistakes, and I think the value in listing those is to try to avoid making them again. I’ve had people that have said to me, “Gosh, I wish I didn’t lose so much money in 2008.” And I know that this is quite a long time ago now, but those echo still today, some of those past mistakes, we can learn from those and be better positioned for the future.
Steve Lewit: Well, I was thinking, I don’t know if these are mistakes to say, because we make decisions as we go along, and at the time it might not be a mistake in hindsight of mine, but I was thinking, “What would I do different?” And what I did early in my life is I had this ambition to be a professional tennis player, had this ambition to be a professional opera singer, and that set me back financially for quite a long time. So I was thinking, I wonder what it would’ve been like if I had had a job.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, in theory, had you struck it rich as a tennis pro, you could have gone somewhere, but it didn’t go that way.
Steve Lewit: It didn’t go that way. But I was thinking, I wonder what my life would’ve been if I had gotten a job and I got a lot of confidence. I’d probably be the president of a company or something like that and really took a more traditional approach. Would’ve that been better for me, for my family, for you, my kids? I just wonder about that.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, that’s an interesting one because I don’t know what that would have to do with your current state of financial planning or what parallels we could connect there, but it’s still interesting nevertheless. I’ll give another example. A lot of people tell me, “Gosh, I wish I had done a Roth conversion sooner.”
They wish they had more money in tax-free buckets. And what that tells me is, “Well, let’s keep doing them.” As you said, I think it is important to realize you can’t go backwards at the end of the day. You can go forwards, and we can help you ensure that that’s a good decision. Okay. Last but not least, because I don’t want to spend too terribly long on this one here. The last question is, what do you want to cross off your bucket list in the next 10 years that would allow you to look back and feel like you’ve really accomplished something meaningful to you?
Steve Lewit: Well, I just crossed it off because my book just got published.
Gabriel Lewit: So now you need a new one. What’s your next one?
Steve Lewit: No, I’m working on that, but my first-
Gabriel Lewit: Not your next book, not your next book, unless it is a book, your next bucket list item.
Steve Lewit: Well, my next bucket list is actually another book, but that was a big deal. But I kind of don’t think in terms of bucket lists. I don’t know why everybody. And I love when people tell me, like clients come in and say, “I’m going to hike up Kilimanjaro, and then we want to take a trip to Italy, and then we’re going to take a month’s cruise.” And they have this list of things and they’re saying, “Gee, why can’t I do that?” And I don’t operate that way, but I love to get in this-
Gabriel Lewit: You want to sit in your cafe and write your book. That’s okay.
Steve Lewit: That’s my bucket list.
Gabriel Lewit: That is A-okay, Steve. You’ve got to do you in life, and that’s the whole point of these exercises here.
Steve Lewit: Isn’t it great when you hear somebody’s bucket list and all the things they want to do? I think it’s fantastic.
Gabriel Lewit: Absolutely. So folks, hopefully, you found that these aren’t directly about money, but what they can do is really help shape your decisions and your trajectory and your direction in life that does sometimes involve money. So retirement goals, financial problems you’d like to have solved, what would you do if money was an object, looking past mistakes, seeing if we can prevent those in the future or similar ones, coming up with bucket list items. All of these things can really help shape your financial plan and what you do with your money that creates value and meaning in your life. I think that’s really at the root of what we like to do here at SGL Financial and in our financial planning process is create meaning and purpose and value, not just help you create greater wealth, although we like to do both of those hand in hand, of course.
Steve Lewit: Well, it’s right in our slogan. It’s not about money, it’s about life.
Gabriel Lewit: Absolutely.
Steve Lewit: And folks, Gabriel and I really, it’s not just a slogan or tagline, it’s something we really believe, and I hope that comes through in all that we do.
Gabriel Lewit: Definitely. Well, if you have questions on these or you want to share with us what you came up with, you can give us a call anytime at 847-499-3330, or you can email us info@sglfinancial.com or you can go to our website, sglfinancial.com, click contact us if you’d like to set up a time to talk to us. Just let us know and we could certainly help you work through these or any other items that you have on your mind. Now, let’s talk a little bit about estate planning and more particularly being the executor of a will, and that’s going to round out our show here for today. But Steve, I had a client the other day that was an executor on a will, and he called me and said, “What the heck do I do?”
Steve Lewit: Yeah. Oh, you do everything.
Gabriel Lewit: He said, “What do I do?” So let’s talk about that. Maybe you’ve talked to a family member, excuse me, can’t talk, that said, “Hey, would you be the executor of my will?” Sometimes people say things like, “Will you be the executor of my estate?” It’s not exactly the same thing. They mean something very, very similar, but they might be referencing being a trustee of a trust. There’s some similarities across the two, but let’s talk about being named an executor. What does that really mean if someone names you as an executor of their will or their estate?
Steve Lewit: Yeah, so what it means to me is that you have responsibility for that person’s estate and what happens. And that responsibility has to do with balancing the checkbooks, paying taxes, working through probate, anything that has to do with money in that will becomes your responsibility. And whether you’re executor of a will or a trustee of a trust, because they are, as Gabriel said, quite similar, there’s a lot of work involved and most people, Gabriel, I find do not realize how much work is involved when you become the executor of a will or a trustee of a trust.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, usually if they did, they’d probably say, no, no.
Steve Lewit: Exactly.
Gabriel Lewit: So, there can be a lot of work. Now, Steve, you mentioned the term just briefly, what is probate for those that don’t know?
Steve Lewit: Yeah, so when you have a will, let’s say you don’t have a beneficiary on an account. Well, let’s say it’s your home and you want your home to go to your two kids. Well, the will can’t pass the home to your two kids. It has to go through the court, and the court has to approve that transfer, and that’s called probate. And anything that does not have a direct beneficiary on it has to go through probate and be approved by the court. The estimates say that if you go through probate, it can be anywhere from five to 8% of the value of your estate, which is why a lot of people do trusts which avoid probate. But that’s what probate means.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, what does being an executor then mean? It means, as Steve started to talk about, you’ve got to handle the probate process. Usually it means contacting an estate planning attorney, because especially if it’s a sizable estate, there are legal components to this that you will likely want to consult with an attorney on versus just making decisions on your own. You could certainly talk to your financial advisor or talk to us. We can help guide you through the process and let you know if something is a real legal element to it or has a real legal element to it so we know when to bring in an attorney. If you have a will and you’re looking to understand what’s in it, that’s part of the attorney’s job as well through the probate process. And then eventually you’re going to likely have to start distributing funds to beneficiaries.
But I think above all else, you have to have patience because this process can really take a long time, especially the probate process can start to drag and you’ve got all these beneficiaries. Unfortunately, many of them are just clamoring for money now. Once they know that they’re going to be due some kind of share from a relative or a parent, many of them raise their hands say, “How quick can we get this?” But it’s really working very methodically. You’ve got to be very well organized, hopefully, because you’ve got to get your arms wrapped around all the things that this person had, all their belongings, their directives. You’ve got to contact people. As Steve said, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, it’s surprisingly time-consuming. And what’s happening now, Gabriel, with also if you’re going to be the trustee of the trust, is many people are finding professionals like a professional… Like an attorney or a group that actually will do this work for you. So rather than have an individual and you got your family yelling and screaming at you, “Where’s my money? Where’s my money?” It all gets handled by a professional, and even though there’s a cost involved, that takes the burden off of the family and arguments, and it gets done more efficiently.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, there’s something called a corporate trustee or a corporate executor, and sometimes they work with certain minimums and up, so that’s a whole different world we could get into. But it’s really just being, I think, as I mentioned, organized. And so there are things you can do even before mom or dad or family member passes away. If you know ahead of time, and it’s not a surprise that you’ve been named an executor, what you can start to do ahead of time is have conversations with the person while they’re living, “Hey, where is this stored? Do you have a list of your investment accounts? Can I see a copy of your will? Where do you save X, Y, and Z? Do we have passwords to computers?” Because these things, if someone just passes away, maybe you can’t get into their phone, you can’t get into their computer, you can’t have access to things.
You have no idea where records are. You’re sorting through boxes and boxes of stuff, and it can become very challenging, especially while dealing with often the emotional element of someone that has passed away that’s near to you. And that can be even more challenging when things are in disarray at the same time.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. Well said. Well said. Because if you open your closets folks and see what’s in there, somebody will have to go through all that stuff.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes. Yeah. And so I think to me, this wasn’t a super in-depth focus for us today, but it is something we haven’t talked about, I think ever specifically as we look back. It’s amazing how we can go at 270 some odd shows or whatever we’re at. And it’s like, did we ever talk about what being an executor means?
Steve Lewit: We never did. We never did.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, I don’t think we have, and it’s not a ton to say about it. It’s something that you tend to dig in deeper when you get there, but if we can at least prepare you for those basics, plan for it to be time-consuming, plan for it to be an organizational challenge, try to prepare ahead of time for it, be aware that people are going to be pressing you for money and distributions, that can maybe help prepare you for what to expect and make that process a little bit easier should it be something that falls on your shoulders.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, folks, and if you are writing a will or a trust and you’re appointing an executor or a trustee, it really will behoove you to sit down with that person and explain that you are appointing them and these other responsibilities because we see a lot of trust. Jane is the trustee and Jane has no idea that she’s the trustee or what that involves.
Gabriel Lewit: Usually it’s a surprise to the person. So whether you’re naming someone that’s going to be an executor or a trustee or you know that you’re named as one, hopefully this will help spur you to maybe get a little bit more organized, get your arms wrapped around things and feel a little bit better prepared when this time does eventually come to pass.
Steve Lewit: And folks, if you like it, if you have a son or a daughter and you’re not sure about what a trustee does or what an executive does, you’re welcome to bring that person to us and we’ll go through the list with them and just explain what their responsibilities are.
Gabriel Lewit: Yep, exactly. And so if we can help you in any way with this topic, of course you can give us a call. And if we can help you with anything that we’ve talked about here today about retirement planning, about mapping out bucket lists and goals and dreams on what it means to be an executor, anything we can do, we’re here to help you folks set up a time to talk with us. There’s no cost for that. We’re here anytime. We’d love to chat with you, help you figure out how to give you a better financial future, grow your wealth and give you greater peace of mind. So we’re here for you. Call us 847-499-3330 or go to sglfinancial.com or you can email us info@sglfinancial.com anytime.
Steve Lewit: So Gabriel, so you can help me decide whether I should get a cat or a dog.
Gabriel Lewit: Now that one has got to be up to you. That one, we’re not going to take sides there. It’s like a no-no, right? We’re going to go with whatever makes you happy.
Steve Lewit: Okay.
Gabriel Lewit: All right guys. Well, thanks for joining today’s show and we will see you on the next one. Take care now.
Steve Lewit: All right. Go Bears. Stay well everybody.
Gabriel Lewit: Bye-bye.
Steve Lewit: Bye now.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to Our 2 Cents with Steve and Gabriel Lewit. For any questions about your finances, give SGL a call at 847-499-3330 or visit us on the web at sglfinancial.com and be sure to subscribe to join us on next week’s episode.
Disclosure: Investment advisory services are offered through SGL Financial LLC, an SEC Registered Investment Adviser. Insurance and other financial products are offered separately through individually licensed and appointed agents.
