476 | Love, Loss, and Money: The Shocking Financial Aftermath of a FI Spouse’s Death | Amy

25:51But what I learned is that this varies from state to state. It really depends on where you live. There's a huge spectrum. But in Colorado, as it turns out, even if you're married, even if you have been married a long time, if you die and there are assets that are only in your name and you don't have a will, those do not automatically go to your spouse. What happens instead is there's something called intestate succession laws. And here in Colorado, what they meant for my particular situation is that Phil's parents actually had a legal claim to a chunk of his estate. That is shocking and crazy.

26:32I think most everyone, I don't want to put words in people's mouths, but I think everyone would assume if you are married and one of the spouses passes that the remainder would automatically, and I use that very loosely, not in a legal sense, but just in a, hey, I'm just a regular person. This is what I would think. Of course, it would automatically. There might be some delay, et cetera, et cetera, but how could anybody else have a legal right to any of this money? So that seems absolutely insane. So right, intestate succession law. So we will try to find a list. The easiest way, honestly, for anybody out there in the audience, just Google intestate succession law and your state, And a whole bunch of links will pop up because, like you said, it is truly a state-by-state set of laws that would determine, I think, many states like California, I think, is community property, right?

27:25So I think that is the most straightforward and beneficial for the other spouse. Whereas I don't want to say Colorado is the worst, but I mean, that's got to be pretty low on the list, I would imagine. I mean, Colorado is definitely not the worst. But to go back just a second to what you were saying is that that was absolutely our default assumption also. We had actually talked about death many times, not in a super serious way. We did not make a will. We did not have a trust. But conversationally, we did talk about it. And we talked many times about our assumption that obviously if one of us were to die, the other one would inherit everything.

28:03We did not know we needed protection because we thought our marriage protected us. We thought that just by dint of being married, of course that's what would happen. So in this handful of days after his death, when I learned that that was not actually the case, that a piece of his estate was actually legally subject to distribution to other people, even other family members, it was so shocking. And it definitely contributed to this feeling early on of feeling very threatened by the whole situation. Right. And now at that point, you had no reason to believe that that would actually necessarily come to pass, but there was certainly the threat hanging over you.

28:43I think at that point, you had a pretty reasonable relationship with his parents? Yes, I did. His parents are divorced and they live in different states and they've been divorced since he was very young. So I have different relationships with the two of them, but we had good relationships. We had never had any type of falling out. We had never had any friction. I can't say that we saw them five nights a week, anything like that. But for an in-law relationship, it was fine. It was good. It was functional. I had no reason to believe that even if the law said that they were technically entitled to this money, I did not have reason to believe they would actually take it.

29:26Sure. Yeah. And that makes a whole lot of sense, right? And I guess just kind of taking one step back, because I think what you really want to get across is, okay, here's what happened to me. hey, here's what you in the community can do to potentially make this not even remotely an issue for you. So it sounds like how I'm hearing it is, had you had a will, just a generic will, none of this would have been an issue. Correct. That you would have just specifically delineated, hey, this is what happens if one of us passes, and that then would supersede any of these ridiculous state laws, and that would essentially be that.

30:05That's true. But you saying the word supersede reminds me of something that many people don't know, which is that beneficiary designations on any given account, a 401k, a bank account, whatever, a life insurance policy, a beneficiary designation actually supersedes a will. So if I have a will that says I want 100 % of my assets to go to my current spouse And if I have maybe an old account that was opened, if I had had a previous marriage that had a former spouse designated as that beneficiary, that trumps the will, that beneficiary designation. So that is one thing that everybody should absolutely do is make sure that their beneficiary designations are exactly what you want them to be today.

30:50Okay. That is huge. I never, never would have imagined that. So, okay. Now that's probably the first step, let's say, but where I was going to go, I, in my mind, I was thinking of that as the second step, but clearly that has been changed. Okay. That's something that pretty much anybody can do literally right now. You can hit pause on this recording and probably in 90 to 99 % of your financial institutions, you can do this online in under a couple of minutes. You probably, you could just Google beneficiary fidelity, beneficiary swab, ad beneficiary, whatever account, right? And you'll find the specific details.

31:32It probably is actually pretty easy. You might not even need to do that, but there's no downside to that. So again, I think it, Amy, it's like these mental impediments, right? This is what stops people. It's, oh, that seems annoying, right? Like before somebody's listening to this in their mind, it's like, oh, I don't need to do that. That's going to take me an hour or two. That's so annoying. I don't want to do that. Yeah. If you think it's annoying now, imagine what it would be like for your spouse to have to do it while grieving your sudden unexpected and tragic death. It's a million times worse.

32:04So take the annoying, suck it up, and just handle it. Can't get more succinct than that. Suck it up and handle it. You heard it here first. Yeah, be a grownup. Yeah, be a grownup. This is going to take you a couple hours. Okay, so be it. It's going to make your surviving spouse, your loved ones, their lives dramatically easier. So just you have these accounts, and frankly, you might have individual accounts. Right. Like Amy, I have, I looked up an account that I have some cash in a significant amount of cash is just in my name. Because again, for expedience sake, when I opened it, oh, I don't need to put Laura.

32:39It's more annoying than I have to put her social security number in there, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now to my great credit, I did put her as a beneficiary. So we would have been covered. So no, no harm, no foul in this case. But I got to be honest until I logged into that and checked, I wasn't a hundred percent sure because I suspect there are, and this is a call to action for me as well, for all of us, obviously, but I'm not a hundred percent sure all my beneficiaries are up to date. You know, I suspect my brother's probably listening to this. I suspect he's still named on my oldest accounts. Maybe, maybe not, but it's not impossible to believe that I haven't updated that in 20 years.

33:13Absolutely. And it's not just your regular everyday brokerage accounts, right? It's every individual 401k or IRA, every life insurance policy, you might work at a company that gives you a default life insurance policy. And when you start working, you have to designate a beneficiary. Maybe you've since gotten married and that needs to be updated. There's a lot of these little corners of your financial life that you really need to shine a light in to make sure that everything is in line. But what I would say is that the planning that you do in advance, both for your financial life and also your end of life wishes, how you would want to be either buried or cremated, what you might expect in terms of how your death might be handled.

34:00The planning that you do in advance on all of these fronts, it's not for you. It's a gift to the other people in your life. What you're doing is you're relieving them of having to handle that stuff in the most vulnerable, most compromised mental state that they will maybe ever experience. Yeah, I completely agree. And all right. So we have beneficiaries, absolute no brainer. You need to do that today. I think a lot of people, I'm always looking for what's the excuse that someone has, right? So why would someone not get a will? Oh, I don't have children. I suspect a lot of people have that exact thought.

34:37Oh, I don't have kids. I don't need a will, right? Like I'm married and everything goes to my spouse. It's fine. That's very, very not, not true. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We also didn't have kids. We were childless by choice. And that was, I think, in the many conversations we had had casually about like, oh, maybe we should get a will sometime. I know that if we had children, I would have absolutely insisted on that. But because we didn't, it did not feel like that big of a deal. But I was wrong. Okay. So that clearly is something that you need to take action on. And what you've come across, because again, this is to get people to take action.

35:15And sometimes it's just getting that ball rolling. Is it best to find an estate attorney in your local area? Are there online services that you might be able to recommend? Or would you just say, do your own research in essence? I'm not sure what you feel comfortable. The most authority that I can muster would be around designating beneficiaries. Because like you said, Brad, you can log in to your Schwab or your vanguard and you can do that today. The rest of it, I mean, I can share how I did it because having been through, and we haven't even gone on to the rest of the experience I've been through, but maybe later in the conversation, I'll share how that spurred me to settle my own estate, to get it set up in such a way that whomever is my next of kin will not have to deal with a mess.

36:00Okay. We will definitely come back to that. So right. We're not giving any advice here personally on what to do. Just find an attorney locally, find a friend who's had a will and maybe trusts that usually go hand in hand set up and see if they recommend that attorney. So yeah, just do your own research, but it's really, really important. So, okay. I guess, like you said, planning in advance, the logistics, like I'm thinking about, man, passwords, like social media, even like, and that's probably jumping ahead, social media and things like that, but like all of your accounts, like, you know, all my frequent flyer accounts, all these things, like how the heck do you prepare in advance for that?

36:43I don't even know where, I don't know the legalities of things like that with even something as silly as, as frequent flyer miles, but I mean, I have millions of miles. Laura has millions of miles. Like what the heck do we do? Is that, is that just Like that's neither here nor there, but it's just, it gets you down the rabbit hole of there are a lot of things to think about and you need to really document just a lot of these things that you probably aren't even contemplating. Exactly. I think it speaks to the sort of spread of how many accounts all of us have, all the aspects of our lives that we use, you know, online accounts or electronic accounts that might have a password, even our phone.

37:22So I know couples who don't share each other's phone passwords. I don't keep a password on my phone because I just find it annoying to have to type in every time I pick up my phone. But Phil did keep a password because he was like a security minded person. And I knew the password. If I didn't, there are many steps that would have been much more difficult because it was that way that I was able to access his email, which meant that, you know, the two factor authentication or whatever, I could handle those things if I'm trying to get into his Facebook page, for example. Even literally on the day he died, I needed to contact his employer and say, hey, this is what happened.

37:59This is why Phil didn't show up for your nine o 'clock meeting. And the way I did that was by getting into his phone and opening up Slack and pinging his boss that way. So if I had not had that option on his phone, knowing the password to it, I don't know how I would have... The company is an all remote company. They don't have an office. There was no front desk I could call to asked to be directed to so-and-so. I'm sure I would have gotten there eventually, but it was such a big, big job. And I was not operating at my best, obviously, in these immediately following days, weeks, and months after his death.

38:31And I'm sure that I made mistakes that could have had big ramifications because I just was so compromised. So I think when we're talking about passwords, some sort of spreadsheet, even a notebook, or we have password managers, like LastPass or OnePass, I think those are all good options. But not having anything is just not a responsible adult way to be. Yeah, agreed. And I think on most of the password managers, I suspect all, but they have an emergency access or emergency contact that, if memory serves, that you set up that person to be that emergency access person and they're able to request access.

39:18Now you can set it up on a lag. So basically the goal is that they can get access, but that not that that person, if they got compromised or they just decided to steal all your passwords, that it could happen instantly. So it's something like, okay, there's a 72 hour lag on this where from the time they requested, you would get notified. And obviously if you were there and looking at this saying, okay, this is obviously not okay. You would just hit deny. But that if this was an instance where they absolutely needed access, then it's set up for that. So I would be shocked if all reputable password managers did not have that as an option.

39:55So if you're someone who has LastPass or Bitwarden or 1Password, please set that up. That's another action step to take because it's all well and good that you have these wonderful, unbreakable passwords, but nobody's memorizing them. Your spouse certainly isn't memorizing them. How can you possibly expect them to get in? And yeah, I mean, Amy, I think about my own security. Like I've gone to the ends of the earth to put two factor and all these things, but it's all behind a password or my thumbprint on my phone, right? Like, I mean, is Laura going to have to somehow have access to my thumb in that scenario?

40:29Like if I don't tell her my, my password, so, okay, clearly there are steps that, yeah, that I need to take to really, because ultimately we're doing here is you need to think out this eventuality, right? Like think about the steps, like you were saying that shock and stress on that first day, that first week, that first month of like, you were paralyzed ultimately by just absolute shock and grief. And then to have to think about how the heck am I going to get into the phone like that? It just, it doesn't make any sense. So if you have your entire life on the phone, somebody else has to have access to that phone.

41:03Exactly. Because if you don't, if they can't access what they need to access, that means they're going to have to take other channels, right? Which usually involves calling a customer service number, often located in a different country and having the same conversation over and over and over, which is like, hello, my husband died and I need to get into his Delta frequent flyer account or whatever. Oh, goodness. And then they're passing you off from department to department. You become numb to those words. I can't even tell you how many thousands of times I have said to these customer service folks, my husband died, my husband died, my husband died.

41:40And that has its own impact also. That is not a pleasant thing to have to do. So again, the planning ahead that you do is the gift that you are giving to your next of kin so that they can concentrate on grieving you, on feeling those feelings, on processing this just colossal tragedy that they've experienced and not be focused on having to notarize the fourth set of documents from the mortgage company. Amy, I wanted to ask one just kind of random question, but it sprung to mind was, do you eventually lose access to some of the accounts? So let's say Phil's email addresses or things like that. Like, I know that's, it's kind of a strange question, but like, does, let's say Google eventually close down an email account of a deceased person?

42:31Like, does that happen? Or like, is that something, I guess the most succinct way, is that something that we need to be concerned about? Like losing access to accounts or is that just really a non-issue? That's a great question. In my particular case, in Phil's particular case, like many software people, so he had his own hosted email account, his own email address. He did have an at Gmail and whatever, but he had this other one that was his main one. It was a URL that he paid for every year. Okay. Okay. But I had no idea how to access that. Right. Or where he had it hosted and paid for that. Yeah.

43:09I don't know that stuff. I don't speak that language. So that account lapsed. And actually, I think it was not that long after he died. Maybe it was set to renew at the end of the year, you know, and then the account that it was being auto-paid from had been frozen, rolled over into an estate account. So that one went away fairly quickly. Gmail, you know, Facebook has a, you know, you can memorialize a Facebook page. Same with LinkedIn. Actually, you can either delete or you can memorialize, but things like Gmail or, I don't know, Amazon, or whatever, I think those are still technically active.

43:48Although Gmail, I believe, did recently put out information on a new policy where they are closing down inactive accounts if you've been inactive for a certain amount of time. And that's whether you're alive or dead. But with a lot of these tech companies that I had to deal with, some of them, many of them required me to send a copy of the death certificate, either a scan or a physical copy. I believe I had to do that with Facebook so that they would memorialize his account. Otherwise it just looked like everything was normal. So there's a lot of handing out death certificates like candy to all types of accounts, financial, online, email, et cetera.

44:25Okay. Yeah. Again, what we're trying to do here is trying to get people thinking. So like even just asking that there was kind of a random question, but it got me thinking about, oh, I obviously own a bunch of websites that, yeah, I mean, I don't think certainly anybody in my family knows where those are hosted or where I pay for that domain name. That would just simply go away. And a site like Travel Miles 101 or Richmond Savers that I've had for a decade, they would just blink out of existence in a year or two because nobody could log in. Nobody would even know where to log in to even pay for those things.

45:07So, you know, that's obviously a kind of a silly little example that I guess, you know, both Phil and I shared in that instance of like having our own sites, but like what hopefully this is getting people to think is, Oh, I have to really think through my entire life. And what's this knowledge that only I have, like, who's the contact that I have for my 401k plan or, Oh, I have this old thing here. And, oh yeah, of course I just, or even like who my CPA is. Like, what if one person just is the only one in the relationship who works with the CPA and like, there's no contact information. Like, you know, is that a stretch?

45:45Like, yeah, probably because the other spouse in all likelihood had to like sign something they could probably figure it out. But like, you don't want to have to rely on probably, right? Like I can probably figure it out in this stressful time. So this is both immediate action. I think Amy is what we're trying to get across, right? Like there's immediate action of beneficiaries of the will can be almost immediate, not today necessarily, but emergency access on the password manager, how to get into the phone. Like that's immediate access, but then you need to start thinking over the next year, all of us, like, what are these things that I just do as the normal course of my life that I don't tell anybody about and would go away?

46:24Right. Absolutely. So I have two things I want to touch on your point about having a website and these websites you have, I assume some of them, they generate income. But I ran into this with my brother. He has a biotech data website. And I have asked him at various points, what if something happened to you? Would your wife know what to do with this? It's very niche. It's very specific. And his response was like, yeah, this company isn't really worth anything without my particular presence because I'm the one that does all this stuff and I know. And I thought, his company generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

47:01So I was thinking like, really, it's worth nothing. So what came to mind was like, okay, well, maybe a smart thing would be if you could at least assemble a short list of people or companies who might want to acquire that digital asset, so that your spouse could have, even if it's like a bargain basement price, but then it's still not nothing, you know, this thing that was a part of you that was a part of your financial life that contributed to your bottom line, like, maybe that could be parlayed into more financial security for your family at the very least. So I think that's an interesting angle to think about, like a contingency plan.

47:36If something were to happen to you, maybe it would not, maybe Choose Fi would not go on as it was before or your other sites, but maybe they can be transformed into something that does still benefit your family. Yeah. I think that's the perfect phrase, contingency plan. So, right. Like we should all just be looking for aspects of our lives where, yeah, there is a potential for a future for something, but you need to communicate that with people. You have to have a plan. You have to think about this beforehand, as opposed to just kind of sleepwalking through, oh, this is what I do and I handle this and it's no big deal, but it's not no big deal essentially is what we're trying to say here.

48:10So Amy, I'm glad we touched on that because I think that was important, but I do want to dive back into your story because I think this is another just really important aspect and something that happened to you that you couldn't have foreseen, but you kind of alluded to, okay, after Phil passed, you found out that there was this potential that his parents could, that they would have a legal right to some of his assets. But at that point, that was just, okay, this is something I learned, but nothing came of it at that point. So what happens from there? Because obviously it does take a dramatic shift.

48:44It does. Yes. So one of the first things that had to happen just, and that would have to happened for any assets that were held in only his name is that a probate case had to be opened. So that meant I had to hire an attorney and they had to file some paperwork and an executor had to be appointed. And that was me for Phil's estate. So all of those things happened. And then, you know, it became, because it is a legal proceeding and, you know, the county court was notified of these three potential beneficiaries, not just me, but also Phil's parents, they had to notify the parents. The court legally has to notify the potential beneficiaries that this is happening.

49:26And when that was coming, I knew that was coming. And I didn't, like I said, I had a really good relationship with Phil's parents at the time. So I did not want them to learn this by getting this impersonal letter in the mail from the court system, and they would have no context for why this was happening. So I decided to have an in-person conversation with one of Phil's parents. And I sat down with that parent and I explained, okay, hey, look, so this is what's going on. Phil and I had no idea this could happen. And in fact, we assumed that all of our assets would belong to each other in the event of one of our deaths.

50:05So it's not like he willed you this money. It was not a specific wish of his. This is just literally what the law says. So you're going to get this letter in the mail and I want you to know that. And this parent, they said to me, they said, Amy, I want what Phil would want, and you're the best person to know what that is. So if you think this money should stay with you, then that's what I want too. And I was incredibly relieved. I just was like, okay, that's what I thought would happen. That's what logic tells me should happen. But until I have that proof out of the horse's mouth, I was not counting on that.

50:41So hearing that perspective from them, I was like, okay, wow, what a relief. So that happened in October, about a month after he died, that conversation with that parent. And a couple of months later in December, early in the month, I believe, my attorney was notified that that parent had retained legal counsel and they were now asking for information about what exactly was in this estate. How much money are we talking about here. And getting this news was really jarring for me. It was like, wait, what do you mean? Why are you asking about our finance? This is not your business. This is not yours.

51:18So it was super jarring for me. But the other part of my brain was like, Phil was a very engineering kind of person. He would always, at every situation, want all the facts. So I thought, okay, maybe that's what this parent is doing. Maybe there's some justification that I can't see. and I honestly, I did not have a legal choice about it. Like they had a legal right to this information. So, you know, I say to my attorney, like, okay, yeah, let's send them the account balance. And then shortly thereafter, um, maybe it was a week or two, I came back from a trip and there was a, um, there was a letter that said that they had decided both of the parents were now, despite being divorced and living several States apart, they were sharing that attorney that had been retained and they were going to take this money.

52:05Wow. They were going to take your money, yours and your husband's money. Thank you. Yes. They were effectively helping themselves to a portion of what had been our Phil and Mai's collective financial security and was now what I needed to see through the rest of my financial and just my life. Unbelievable. That is the most infuriating thing I've ever heard, honestly, in my entire life. That's insane. And I assume, I don't want to say you have no legal defense, but it sounds like you have pretty close to no legal defense based on the fact that you didn't have a will and you didn't have beneficiaries named on these.

52:43So I assume it's only particular accounts, right? Particular accounts that weren't jointly held. Correct. And that were only in Phil's name and did not have a beneficiary. It did not have you as the beneficiary. Correct. And that in our case turned out to really just be one account. There was one single account. I was the beneficiary of the life insurance policy, the default one through work. I was the beneficiary of the 401ks and the IRAs. But this one account had been our main investment account for basically our entire marriage. It was the one from which we paid the mortgage. We had joint credit cards where we did our spending and this account paid for those.

53:23All of our utilities, everything about our lives was financed through this one account. So not only was it frozen and I didn't have access because of the probate process, but now I had learned that his parents were going to walk away with a chunk of it. Wow. So this was like a taxable brokerage account that you lived out? Correct. Okay. Yes. With a linked checking. Okay. Understood. Understood. Got it. Wow. And right. I guess, so it's again, for everybody listening, it's the intestate succession law by your, fill in the blank, your state. So Colorado says, and we could just look this up. I know you have it in front of you, but is it that the surviving parents get X percent or is it like, I guess, how is it limited only to the you and the parents in that case?

54:10Like, is it just very specifically delineated spouse gets X parents get Y or how does that work? Basically? Yes. So it depends if you have children, then that changes the math significantly. But because we had no children, and because his parents were alive, what those intestate succession laws in Colorado say are that the spouse inherits the first 300 ,000 of your intestate property, plus three quarters of the balance, and whatever's left, the parents inherit. So obviously, that's a lot, you know, the first 300 ,000 plus three quarters of the balance. That is the majority of any given account.

54:52And I definitely want to acknowledge that. But at the same time, I think for those of us in the FI community, it is not uncommon to have millions of dollars in your main primary brokerage account. That's a very common scenario. So even given this math, the potential is still there. And in my case was true that the parents walked away with well over six figures. That's not a small amount. When you're looking at your own phi horizon and your own math and what you need to meet your expenses based on the 4 % rule, yada, yada, yada, somebody walking away with that kind of money, just all in one fell swoop is just not, that's not in the math we do, right?

55:31When we're planning these things out. No, no, that is, that is for sure. And I guess, and again, we're just talking about Colorado here, so this is not applicable to everybody. So that 300 ,000, is this an account by account or would you have added up all of those intestate accounts, the ones where it was just Phil and you were not a beneficiary? Like, do they all get lumped together or is it just literally this one brokerage account and you get the first 300 ,000? If there were other accounts that, like you said, had no beneficiary designation and were only in his name, they would all have been lumped together.

56:05In our case, it really was just one account. Just this one account. Okay. Gotcha. So right. Just doing the simple back of the envelope math. If you had a million dollars in there, you back out the 300, so 700 ,000 remaining, they get 25 % of that. That's$175 ,000 if you had a million dollars. So yeah, that is wild. So okay. I mean, obviously I can't say this enough, but I just cannot believe that happened to you. I'm just so incredibly, incredibly sorry. Thank you. And the part that I'd be interested to hear from you on specifically. So like I said, Phil and I did not have children and that was a very intentional choice.

56:42And so therefore I cannot imagine at all what it's like when your child dies. I've talked to many people about this since, but since I'm on your show right now, I'd love to hear from you. Do you envision a scenario where if this unspeakable tragedy were to have occurred in your life that you would feel, you know, as the parent that it was rightful that you should get this piece of your child's estate? I mean, no, I can't fathom ever doing that. I mean, to be perfectly honest, like, again, I'm trying to keep my voice calm, but I'm seething with anger on your behalf. Like, I can't imagine the type of person that would do that.

57:19I mean, to me, that it just seems like theft in essence, but it's legal theft, obviously, because these are the the laws in that state. But I mean, this was your property as a married couple. And because you didn't dot some I's and cross some T's, they get to walk away with some of your money. And, and, you know, it's, it's unfortunate, like a lot of the old sayings that, you know, like don't mix money and family, you, you might find out some bad things that you don't want to, uh, to find out. I think, you know, this is a perfect case in point of when the numbers are big enough, people put some of their morals aside.

57:55It's really awful because in all the mourning that I've had to do, of Phil, of course, but also of the entire future that we had planned, the entire life that I thought was going to be mine for the next decades until my own death, there's been so much mourning. But some of the worst mourning is the mourning of the loss of these relationships with my in-laws because once they decided to pull this trigger, I did not see a way that I could continue to have a relationship with him. And it's a really huge loss because they were maybe the two other people who loved Phil the most. And now I don't have access to them.

58:36I can't envision a scenario in which we can just sit back and lovingly remember this person who was so important to all of us because they've drawn this line that I just can't cross. It's like they lost their son and they could have had a daughter and they chose money instead. Yeah, that is just disgraceful. There's no other word for it. And again, I'm just so, so incredibly sorry. And I think something you alluded to before was a lot of just this entire situation and maybe especially this portion of it has compelled you to set up your future financial plan, your estate plan in a specific way.

59:20And I'd love if we could maybe leave the audience there, right? Maybe we could just touch on that before we close out because I think it's important. Yeah. So the first thing I'll say, this is going to violate so many of the rules in the FI community that people are going to want my head on a pike. But I bet many people can understand that in the wake of Phil's death, one of the things that had been lost was all of his knowledge and the things that he did in our life, in our household that I didn't know how to do. And one of those things was managing the money. Even though we did have many separate accounts, I have accounts in my own name also, the totality of our financial picture, what was in stocks, what was in bonds, what was the potential drawdown strategy, that was all managed by his very like math loving brain.

1:00:09I do not have that brain. Plus I was completely traumatized and forced into an immediate drawdown situation, which we had not been in before because he was still working. So I elected to begin working with a financial advisor. This is the part that I know a lot of people in the community are super against and that's fine. Like we all have our things, but one of the benefits that came from that financial advisor relationship is that this estate planning piece was thrown in. They had in-house legal counsel, estate planning attorneys, and they would, because I had a certain amount of assets invested with them, this was just sort of like a side benefit.

1:00:46And that really worked out well for me because I was really feeling the pressure to get these things in order. So I imagine it's similar to working with any estate attorneys. They give you questions. They want to know about, do you have preferences about your funeral, about how your body's disposed of, and then of course, all the financial questions about who do you want to benefit in the event of your death. You can break that down by percentages. You can break it down by dollar amounts. I know in my own case, I have a few either individuals or entities, charitable organizations that are getting like a flat $25 ,000 or$50 ,000.

1:01:21And so those will sort of be taken off the top. And then what remains is basically divided up percentage-wise among various family members. So that's what that looks like for me, but I can tell you it brings me so much peace of mind. Having been through what I've been through and having had to deal with the really messy aftermath and the collateral damage of those relationships with my in-laws, I can go to sleep at night now knowing that there's this very tidy binder in my safe at home to which one of my family members has the code that literally outlines everything. And additionally, I elected to appoint a corporate trustee because there are so many horror stories that lots of listeners I'm sure have heard about like, oh yeah, well, maybe our parents died and my brother was in charge, but I think he hoovered away a bunch of this money that he's not telling it.

1:02:12There's a lot of lack of transparency and that ends up having a really big fallout with the family relationships. And that's the scenario I definitely wanted to avoid. So I elected to have a corporate trustee, which will mean that they have a fiduciary responsibility to distribute my assets in this way. But there will be no accusing one brother or one parent or whatever of not doing it correctly. Okay. Yeah, that is a great piece of information. And yeah, as we've certainly illustrated here in the worst possible way, this money has a way of corrupting people on a lot of levels. So yeah, if you can take a step like that to avoid that.

1:02:49Okay. That sounds pretty darn good to me. So, you know, just talking about, about attorneys, I'm thinking back to my own when we set up our will and such is I actually, originally it was when I was still working full-time in my corporate career. And I think we had a benefit called prepaid legal at the company. And it was something like, it was so cheap. It was like 150 bucks a year, somewhere in that vicinity. It might've even been a little less. And one of the benefits was basically to set up a will and to have a local attorney. And I mean, it would have cost whatever it was. I don't even remember at the time, maybe 800 bucks, something like that, 800 to a thousand dollars, somewhere in that vicinity.

1:03:28And I was able to sign up for this prepaid legal for a year, get that will and trust, you know, those documents set up. And then I think I stopped the prepaid legal the next year. It was, it was like just a nice little frugal hack, right? Just, I guess, again, because these These are action steps, right? If you're listening to this and it's, you know, the next time you have open enrollment or whatever it is, your benefits at your job, see if that's an option. See if prepaid legal is an option. See if this is an option. Maybe you don't want to wait that long, frankly, but you might already be signed up for it.

1:03:58It might just be an auto thing. Look into it. That's a nice thing. You know, you mentioned a binder. We had Chelsea Brennan from emergency binders on the podcast. And yeah, that was in episode 125. five and she has this really incredible binder that it just, it thinks of all or most of these different things that you just might not think about. Like, I think we all think of the obvious ones, right? Like, okay. The passwords for our financial documents, but like we've talked about, like there's so many aspects of your, just your life, not just your financial life. Like who are the doctors that in my case, like my kids go to, like, who's the dentist?

1:04:35I wouldn't even know who to call, like all of these things, like if you cannot disrupt lives, like if you can just plan in advance, do the work in advance, it makes everything easier. So we're going to put that in the show notes. I think Chelsea was nice enough to give a choose a buy listeners a 20 % discount if you use choose FI as the code, but there's definitely a link in the show notes. So that's one of those things. I think it's somewhere around like$31 at the discount. I mean, it's nothing. It's a pittance. Just do it. It's just another one of these action items. And it's just so, so important.

1:05:08So Amy, thank you so very much for coming on the podcast. This was really, really genuinely wonderful. And I think it's just so helpful for our community. And it just, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. And I guess I just want to ask on a personal level, how are you doing now? I know we were first introduced and got to know each other a little bit about a year ago. And I just wanted to ask that. Yeah. Thank you for asking. And also thank you just so much for having me and helping me disseminate this message because I do feel really passionate about it. In terms of how I'm doing now, if we had done this interview a year ago, a similar interview that I did last spring to this question, they asked me how life was now.

1:05:51And I said, well, life is tolerable. And at the time, I was a year and change out from Phil's death and that's how it felt. Life was tolerable, but tolerable is not a great place to live in the long term. I'm really happy that now I can report that life obviously will always be just forever altered, but I finally feel, literally as of less than a month ago, I feel like I turned a major corner. To quote the great Taylor Swift, I feel I have exited my grief era, and now I am in whatever era comes next. I don't know what that is. I'm writing a book that's still miles and miles away from completion.

1:06:34So not much to say about that yet, but I feel good about the possibilities that are open to me. I feel really good about my community here in the center of the Phi universe, Longmont, Colorado. I haven't really done much dating yet, but I'm starting to think about maybe doing that. So if anyone listening wants to email me, feel free. Just kidding. Anyway, But yeah, I feel like I've made a lot of really good strides. And while I still think about Phil every single day, and I think that will likely never change, I do finally feel like I'm in a place where his absence and the tragedy of his death is no longer the dominant feature of my life.

1:07:12Does that make sense? It makes a whole lot of sense. And I love the, you know, I'm a big Taylor Swift fan. So Taylor's had 10 errors so far, right? I think it's a nice time for you to have your next era and many more in the future. That's for sure. Thank you. That's just a wonderfully hopeful way to end this episode. And again, I really, really appreciate you sharing your story and all your wisdom. It's really, really something special. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first, subscribe to the podcast So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

1:07:58I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand and I send it out Tuesday morning. So just head over to choosefi.com slash subscribe. And it's really, really easy to get on the newsletter list right there. And I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me. You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails and it comes directly to my inbox. So that's the way that I keep a pulse of the community. and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. And finally, if you're looking to join an in-real-life community, we have Chooseify local groups in 300-plus cities all around the world.

1:08:34So head to chooseify.com slash local, and you'll find a list of all of those cities in 20-plus countries all across the world. And if you're just getting started with FI, or you have a family member or a friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways. Choose a Vi episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the Fi community. And even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up. And it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence? What are we doing here? Why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to live a better life?

1:09:11And then Choose a Vi created a financial independence 101 course that's entirely free. just head to choosefi.com slash fi101. And again, thanks for listening.