Estate Attorney: "I'm Giving Away What My Industry Charges Thousands For" | Ep. 445 with Atty. William Funk

0:00If people don't have a will, invariably the court will screw up the way they want their stuff distributed. One of the most famous cases that somebody did create a will was the rock star prince, and it ended up in litigation for 14 years. He watched families lose fortunes to courtrooms for 30 years. He charged up to$15 ,000 to stop it. Then demand exploded 25 times over, so he gave the secrets away in one book. This is William Funk. You are an attorney. Why would you give this information for free? It seemed to me that a lot of these charges for wills are exorbitant. They want to try to control the money after they pass away.

0:46You cannot do that with a will. But what you can do that with is a...

0:58so bill you spent 30 years as an attorney you even wrote a book recently about wills why have you seen it that it's so important that somebody sets up their will well because if people don't have a will invariably the court will screw up the way they want their stuff distributed. And by taking just a few hours, you can draft a simple will that will take care of all the stuff that you've spent a lifetime accumulating and get it distributed the way someone wants to get it distributed. What's the worst case scenario that you've seen around somebody who didn't create a will and it was a disaster? Well, one of the most famous cases that somebody didn't create a will was the Rockstar Prince.

1:52And he had obviously a very substantial estate and it ended up in litigation for 14 years. And I'm quite sure that in the end, it wasn't distributed exactly the way he had wanted it to happen. and a similar situation happened with Howard Hughes, who had a gigantic estate, and it was in litigation for over 17 years. So you want to avoid that, and you want to avoid having to pay the lawyers tons of money to do something that you could do in a relatively short period of time. So I think this might be one of the most unsexy topics. I think most people don't like to think about something that's related to when they're dying.

2:40So they put it off. I almost would say it's probably likened to life insurance, right? Nobody wants to talk about something, but a lot of our viewers, they're entrepreneurs, they're business owners. They might have more than just money at stake. What is something that they need to know? Well, Daniel, you hit the nail right on the head. People realize they're not going to live forever, but they think that talking about it is going to hasten their demise. So consequently, they put it off and put it off and put it off. And I think when they read my book, they come to realize that there's no big mystery here.

3:19And in a relatively short period of time, without a significant expense, they can have this covered. And if they need to change it a year and a half from now or five years from now, it's easy to do. Let's say I'm going to start a will today. What are three tips that I need to know that I should put into the will? Well, one of the most important things in a will is going to be the person that the author wants to settle the estate. That's called the executor. And the executor has to be trusted by the author implicitly because in most states, they function independently from the court. So there's nobody sitting on their shoulder checking everything.

4:15So it's very important that the executor be a person that the writer of the will trusts implicitly because they're not supervised. And there's a temptation there for some people to take money from the estate. They may or may not be paid, depending upon how the will writer would like it, but they have access to everything. They have access to the money, the property, and you don't want any of that to end up in their pocket. So you want to be sure that the executor is someone that you trust completely. The second thing is the execution of the will needs to be done according to the terms that are included in the book.

5:04They're not complicated, but they're different in every state. and so you want to follow the rules to make sure that that the will is done correctly and that's that really means getting the witnesses and having it if signed properly it is amazing the number of wills that everything was done and they just never signed it you know and It is worthless if it is not a signed will. You want to be sure you get that done. It's one of those things that doesn't take any time at all, but you've got to be sure that you sign it. Have you ever seen a time where everything was great, but it was not signed, and then that became a nightmare?

5:58Absolutely. I mean, a lot of times wills are done on the deathbed of the testator. That's the person that writes the will. They're done when they're already in pretty bad shape. And those are the ones that you think, okay, well, he'll feel better tomorrow and we'll get him to sign it then. or he's in hospice or something like this and they don't get it witnessed. And a witnessed will in a state that requires witnesses is pretty much worthless. So you want to have people or there's one thing, and I should add this. the witnesses in most states cannot be beneficiaries in the will. You can't be a witness on a will where you're going to inherit stuff.

7:01It has to be an independent witness. Now, if you were not named in the will, you could sign it, even if you're the person's son, daughter, whatever. But if you are named in the will, you do not want to be a witness. According to your book, you can do your will yourself. You don't need to hire an attorney. You are an attorney. Why would you give this information for free? That goes back to why I started to write the book. It was in the middle of COVID. And I'd done a number of wills throughout my legal career. and in COVID, I got requests for probably 25 times as many wills as I had done in the previous 20 years.

7:54The reason for that was people were afraid they were going to get COVID and die. So they wanted to be sure they had a will. And so I got request after request after request. And, you know, They're not that difficult to do, but I would normally charge anywhere from$1 ,500 to$15 ,000, depending upon the type of estate and the type of will and that thing. But even$1 ,500 is a lot for what a person could do in basically three or four hours themselves and not pay anybody. Okay. So that's what I was thinking. I mean, it seemed to me that a lot of these charges for wills are exorbitant. And why not get people a tool that they can utilize if they want to and get it done quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively?

8:56yeah i remember those times you wouldn't even make it past the grocery store it was pretty scary is there a way that you can give something to somebody in your will but maybe spreads it out over a long time and the reason why i say that is i've been reading a lot around how most wealth is squandered i think it's second or third generation so is there a way that people can spread things out because i imagine that there's more wealth now than ever in history which means Because there's more people that have things. And the baby boomer generation is getting older. Many of them are passing, you know, what, the 75 or 74, the average age that most people live.

9:38So I would think that they would want to continue all of their hard work through multiple generations. And that is something that, that is a mistake that a lot of people make when they're writing their will, is they want to try to control the money after they pass away. You cannot do that with a will. But what you can do that with is a trust. A trust controls the corpus of the trust after the person passes away. It can control it while you're alive as well. But typically, these types of trust are created in a will, and you put the stuff in the trust, and then the trust may be set to function for five years, 25 years, or the life of your grandchildren that haven't been born yet.

10:34You know, you can set up that kind of a trust, and the trust will control the assets for basically as long as you need them controlled. It's not infinite, but it's close. And you need a lawyer to help draft most trust. I'll be coming out with another book in in 2027 how to write your own trust but that's for another day there you go so they can write the will today and then they can create the trust in 2027 hopefully they make it to 2027 for that book though if not they can hire an attorney being an attorney for over three decades what was the biggest mistake that you saw overall that business owners make in general?

11:30Was there something legally that you saw that you said, wow, every business owner shouldn't be doing this? What happens so often is that sole proprietors, people that own a small business or people that are partners in another business with other people, they don't prepare for the distribution of their assets until it's too late. If you were partners, let's say your partner is in a hardware store and you own half and your partner owns half. Well, you want to figure out how you would like your half dispersed upon your death. Don't wait because your partner in that, he may predecease you and then you don't know how to handle his.

12:26you you need to write it down and put it in the will that's one thing that's significant and the other thing is states handle property differently texas where i reside is a community property state that basically means when you and you're when you're married the stuff that you and your wife accumulate while you're married is shared ownership. Even if you earned all the money, but you were married, your wife would, in a sense, be entitled to half of what you've earned. As anyone that's ever gotten divorced knows, it's not an easy thing to deal with. But if you create a will, you can get that property properly distributed after your death.

13:23Now, there's one thing you've got to remember, and that is the laws of this kind of stuff vary from state to state. But that is another thing in my book. The will that you will write following the book is valid in all 50 states, whether it's community property state or separate property state or any of these things. If you do the will like it's set up in the book, it will be valid everywhere. And if you screw it up, because people do make mistakes, most of the mistakes can be fixed by the court if you have addressed it in the will. And that's important because suppose you called your son Willie for his entire life, and his name was Bill, and you used Willie in the will.

14:32The courts will straighten that out, okay? We're fortunate in this country that the courts don't require magic words on almost anything. They'll fix it for you. And the other thing is, when the person, the administrator, the executor of your estate, goes in to handle this for you. Real talk. We used to run our entire sales process on spreadsheets. Every new hire made it messier. Deals slipped through because nobody knew who to follow up with or when. That's where today's sponsor, PipeDrive, comes in, an intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Switching streamlined everything, onboarding got easier, everything stayed organized, and we stopped missing sales.

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16:06The courts will help him, and he can hire a lawyer to help him navigate the probating of the will. Okay, and that's significant. I mean, if you've got to turn around and pay a lawyer$1 ,200 to help you do this, that's small in comparison to the size of your estate. And so your executor doesn't need to be someone that knows all the laws. They'll go hire a lawyer. They'll go hire an accountant. They will do that to make sure it's all done correctly. but you've got to trust the executor. It's got to be somebody you can believe in. Thank you for sharing that. It's, it seems like one of the most important things besides writing it is finding that person who can execute it, that you really trust and who's not going to essentially take everything and or, or mess it all up and not do exactly what you wanted it to do.

17:14And by the way, if you're in my will, I can't call you bill. I got to make sure I call you William. So Bill, what in the last 30 years did you find as being an attorney is the most challenging part? I think that people that are doing wills in particular for their family, they, they worry about their heirs feeling like they are being treated fairly. You know, you've got three children, you're going to give them each a third. But guess what? One of them is a physician now. He doesn't need the money, but you don't want him to feel cheated, even though he doesn't need the money. And so trying to balance the equities there in a will can be challenging.

18:12and I always try to don't be afraid to write in there why you gave Joey your wristwatch and you gave Billy the house and it might be because Billy needed it and you thought he was always going to need it because he was never going to have the kind of job that his other brother had or whatever and if you write it in there people understand that people will understand oh i gave this to you because uh i thought you wanted it and uh the the will also it's it's very important because there are often things in someone's estate that someone in the house valued or wanted much more than the other people did.

19:10I mean, my sister is a good example. Our mother left all of her arts and crafts stuff to my sister. And I was so glad she did, because I didn't want them at all. And my sister loved them. So that kind of thing is valuable. And it makes these people figure out that you thought about them and you thought about what they wanted and you did it. So that's one of the things that I think is significant. And for spending two hours on this, you avoid a lot of problems. Well, I imagine most people watching this, I'd say our age demographic is probably 25 to 50 and they most of them probably do not have a will so this is something that everyone needs how to write your own will seems like a great book something simple where can people pick it up they can pick it up on Amazon they can pick it up in electronic publishing on Amazon they can pick it up in in hardcover publishing on on Amazon it's going to be in a number of bookstores it's primarily obviously prepared for United States distribution but it's the kind of thing for for 20 bucks you can save yourself a lot of headaches well this has been great William Funk aka Bill Funk I like your last name by the way it stands out, it's very memorable but I need to pick up the book, How to Write Your Own Will on amazon.com.

20:59Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Daniel.