Financial Independence
A Better Perspective
Podcast

EPISODE 11 Protecting Your Estate Plan

Presented by Lance Edwards and Randy Luebke

In this episode of “Financial Independence – A Better Perspective”, Lance and Randy discuss the dire need to protect your estate plan, so that when you pass, your assets can transfer quickly and easily to your beneficiaries, without the need of probate and costly attorney fees.

Included among their topics is the importance of “beneficiary designation” and keeping your beneficiaries up to date as life circumstances evolve.

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What you’ll learn in this episode:

  • The most important questions that need to be addressed: How do I get the stuff I have to the people I want when I’m dead? How do I pass what I have onto the estate, whether it’s going to my wife, children, grandchildren, whatever? Or go to charity? The key is to take action so that, whoever you choose, you pass it on efficiently.
  • Many people do not have a trust in place, this should be an urgent issue.
  • Beneficiary designation explained and it’s importance discussed.
  • Complications with the beneficiary designation.
  • You have to designate specific people as beneficiaries – not “my daughter and all her children,” for instance. 
  • Financial planning system called the “4×4 Financial Independent Plan” and it’s 12 Foundational (Financial) Modules.
  • Review one of the financial modules, called The Estate Plan Protector.
  • Different types of assets that need to be addressed are: life insurance, checking and savings accounts, CDs, IRAs and retirement plans. A lot of people want to make their trust the beneficiary of a retirement plan, but Randy says it’s the wrong approach because you lose the ability to “stretch.”
  • With a “stretch,” if you die, the money can stay in a tax-deferred account, growing tax-deferred, or maybe tax-free if it’s a Roth. But if it’s put into a trust whose language isn’t set up properly, it might have to be distributed immediately. Randy says, “Again, the benefit of the designated beneficiary is that it avoids probate.”
  • Real estate is not a designated beneficiary. With real estate, you need a trust because you want to avoid probate and you want to have another exchange mechanism asset besides a designated beneficiary like a brokerage account.
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