Coming up on this edition of Judica County Radio, we have theme music. Are you kidding me?
Plus, self-employed estate planning checklist. You don't want to miss it. All coming up next on Judica County Radio. About the law and sporting ways. Morgan's on the town keeping in control.
There's a fist by far, no one else on the road. Yeah, with Judica County it's where we turn. Through legal talks, they've got the burn. Josh and Joe, they always learn.
Yeah, stern concern. Again, Judica County Radio, our hosts again. It's fun because Joe Hamer, one of our co-hosts, working with his producers in the back, came up with some great music. Again, Josh Whitaker, Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm, hosts of Judica County Radio. We also have Cassandra Nicholas, fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer, joining us on the program.
Joe, I've got to bring you in. You've put your thinking cap on and you came up with a nice theme song to open it up. Yeah, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in the development.
I got a line into some pretty high influential people in Nashville and the country music scene. They got to work right away on putting together that deal. Well, it had to be approved, of course, by Josh and Cassandra and probably an entire committee that helped put this show together. So kudos, man. I like it. We've got a second one. We'll hear that a little bit later in the program. We had a lot of notes about the musical interlude at the beginning, but we got it all straight.
We got it taken care of. You know, it's pretty wacky what the artificial intelligence can get done these days, but we were just talking about they only gave you 32 seconds. Is that what you said, Joseph? Yeah.
You give them a prompt and you can say as much or as little as you want and you get widely varying results. And there's been a few that have just been just a baby. Yeah. Yeah. Like gibberish.
But sometimes you get gold like the Judica County theme song. So, yeah, it's very interesting how they do it, man. I tell you, I've done a lot of it because I haven't told you this, Josh, but I'm planning on leaving this career and getting into AI music making in some sense. Sure.
And I've listened to a ton over the last few days and I haven't heard a repeat of like a tune like it's all very it's incredible the amount of depth that they have. So you got to you got to come up with some kind of DJ name to do that. Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm working on that. I'm more focused on my craft before I worry about the details like that, man.
I want to perfect perfect my craft first. Hey, before. Hey, guys, before we dive into self-employed estate planning checklist, because we're going to get to that, let's just go around the horn and just talk about the week and kind of catch up.
Josh, you start. Well, you know, I spent a lot of time working with Joe on the on the on the theme songs, the because these are in the final cut. No, that was that was that was sample a we got a sample be coming. I think we made a couple other genres, too.
I don't know. I was thinking like hair metal. I think that might be fitting.
Oh, I think hair metal would sound good. Yeah. I keep coming with some heat, man. I'm going to put away all of the needs of my clients.
It's exclusively on. I think we need I think we need a we need a wrap. What do you give them? Like an artist or you're just just general.
I'm going to wear your name. You can't give them an artist. You got to give them tags. So like you can say you give them like four or five tags. And then if you want to do and then you just tell them generally what it's about, like give them a rough understanding of it.
OK, go to work. That's kind of like I play around with the art and giving it you know, one of my kids is really into animation. And so we played around with giving it the prompts for drawing things. But you never can never draw the same thing twice. You know, like it'll give you something and you'll finally like it. And then you try to get it, draw something else.
And it'll be completely it'll be completely crazy. Yeah. Yeah, man.
Those are the pain of working with the robots. So we've got Josh, we've got Joe Cassandra. How have you been? Oh, good.
I've been I have a bad Facebook scrolling habit. And as far as A.I. goes, there was a post yesterday. I saw someone loves deer and asked A.I. for where the closest deer farm was. And it like realistically created a deer farm and told this person where a deer farm was.
And it's like hours of operation. The person got so excited and googled it and it was fake. And called A.I.
out in the A.I. prompt saying for your next answer, do not invent a deer farm. Only tell me about real deer farms. And it created another fake deer farm.
They were very upset. You got to be careful, man. You turn the robots against you and they'll never come back. I spend an hour and a half a night just saying nice things to the A.I. I'm trying to I'm trying to keep it from like the eventual takeover. And like, you know, if they kill everybody else, maybe they'll be like, well, this guy, he was super nice. Yeah.
Call off the call. The terminators. Yeah, exactly.
The. Yeah, I saw somebody post I can't remember who it was. It was just I was I was doom scrolling on Twitter one day. And somebody was like, I don't want A.I. writing the music and drawing the pictures. I want A.I.
to wash my dishes and do the laundry so that I can write music and and draw. I thought that was funny. I'm telling you, as someone who can't write music, it's been fantastic to have any source, man. You know, I'm not going to be going professional in it, but I like making dumb songs about things my friends did like 15 years ago.
Hold sending the songs to them. It's good. It's really good.
Sure. Your friends are loving that. Oh, they love it.
They absolutely love it. Joe's got a lot of time on his hands. A whole lot of time. And my kids neglected. There's you know, but my friends laughing the. Well, today, today, what I thought we talk about estate planning a lot. And then today, because I sat down and had you know, I've got I draw I do estate planning for for a living.
Right. So I've got an estate plan and it's it's a good solid Whitaker and Hamer crafted estate plan. So I feel pretty good about where I'm at. But I had never really you know, my spouse knows. You know, my spouse knows our assets, know what knows what we have. You know, so but I sat down with my spouse and I told her, you know, this is what you need to do if I were to die tomorrow. This is this is kind of what the plan is.
This is what I think you need to do. And this is who you need to talk to. And this is where this is. And this is where that is. And we're we're we have a very close relationship.
We're not hiding the ball from each other. So everything is kind of out there. But we still had to do a lot of talking about, you know, because you've got to make sure the kids are taken care of and some assets, cash flow and what the life insurance is meant for. And so the more I talk to her, the more these questions came up. And I was like, you know, I just thought that would be interesting to talk about because we do this every day. And and and and, you know, we talk to folks about this.
But like even past the legal stuff, there's things that you just need to know about. You need to figure out. And I've talked to a lot of self-employed people kind of about what happens to the company.
How's it going to run? Do you have employees that are going to step up and buy it out? Or is your spouse going to be running this company or, you know, and it got us it got us talking about a lot of different things. And I don't know.
I thought I thought that might be interesting. Maybe so, man. We'll have to find out. I guess we'll know in about 15 to 20 minutes.
Waited waiting with bated breath. All right. Judica County radio, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, you're managing partners at Whitaker name or law firm practicing attorneys here in North Carolina. We're also joined by Cassandra Nicholas, an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer out of the Moorhead City office and mentioning the locations. They're almost everywhere. Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia.
We mentioned Moorhead City now in Cleveland as well. So, again, offices conveniently located for you. And here on the program, what we do each and every week is we have five complimentary consults. And let's just say, you know, if you're thinking about your estate planning or maybe you haven't thought about it and you wanted to kind of get started on it, you could use one of the consults to do that.
And how do you grab one? You call the number 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.
Just say, hey, I want one of the complimentary consults and they will sign you up for that. And, again, you can get moving on it. Now, we're going to talk more about self-employed estate planning. We'll also have our second edition of the, I guess, the theme song. We're trying to decide on a theme song. We got a little, we're heavy country this week. Maybe we'll do hair bands in the near future, rock ballads. I mean, it's totally up to Joe and obviously Josh.
They kind of get together on these things. So, anyway, we'll have another lead-in song, a theme song coming up on the other side. But you're listening to Judica County Radio.
Don't go anywhere. Music Music All right. It's all the real deal. I will say this, Joe. The early portion of the second one, there was a little mumble mouth going on there.
Yeah, they do that. That's part of the deal. But I tell you right now, yeah, the one you let off with in our, as we opened up the show, that was pretty good. We do a little bit of trail music and that could be a winner.
It was clean, but I'm going to be honest with you. I like the chorus on the second one a little better. I do too. And, you know, so if we could, I'm going to work on it. I'm going to get back in the lab.
I'm going to come back. I might do every genre and just, yeah, we'll put it. You could literally have four lead in, four theme songs. You could just rotate them. Yeah, I like it.
If I have a vote, which I'm not sure if I do, I would love to hear a like mid 2000s alt rock emo theme song option. That's easy. That's easy money right there. Take notes, Joe.
Take notes. I think we should have four different theme songs every show. The more we can confuse the people. One for each of us.
I'm going to legally change my name every week, too. And we just won't reference it. No, I like that. I like that. That's that's a lot of fun, man.
This is fun to play with. But all right. So so like I like I said earlier, that the thought was today to talk about some things that come up for the you know, some of this will be for everybody. But but especially self-employed people, people who have opened a company, whatever it is, you know, professional or not, you know, not professional retail, you know, construction, you know, whatever it may be. If you started an LLC or corporation or you started a company and you've done it for 10, 15, 20, 25 years, you know, that company has value. Maybe you have employees and that's how you that's how you make your money to feed your family. And you you pass away even with a good estate plan, you pass away. There's some things that you have to to think about. And so the first thing you do is the first thing I would say is you do need an estate plan.
And I would argue you need to talk to your estate planning attorney, hopefully us, about trusts, because trust make it a lot easier for the surviving spouse to keep moving with without too much inconvenience. Obviously, you know, your spouse is going to hopefully grieve for you and miss you and all that good stuff, hopefully. Right. But but they still have to get on with their lives. They still have to pay bills.
They start to pay the mortgage. The kids still need to eat. In theory, the kids. I got three boys. The kids. A theory.
That's a scientific fact. I can't they can't live all they can't live off of our music royalties that we're that we're trying to make here. Yeah. But it's only get Capri Sun. That's it. No food, no hard food.
Capri Sun and Slim Fast and Tang. That's all we're that's all we're doing. The but what I'll start out with, I know Cassandra has seen this horror story a million times. So first, we're going to assume you don't have an estate plan.
Right. So if you pass away without an estate plan and you own a house that's in your your sole name, you have a business where you're the you're the only owner. Your assets are still going to get to your to your heirs. But they get there in quite a different way than they do if you had a an estate plan where everything was was wrapped up. But Cassandra, you see that. Unfortunately, you see that a lot.
I do see that a lot. And it causes the most complications when there are minor children. So your spouse, if you don't have a will, your spouse does not automatically inherit everything. They inherit a share and your children inherit a share. If you just have one child, it's 50 50 spouse and child. If you have multiple children, it's one third to the spouse and two thirds split among however many additional children. And that goes for personal property and real estate.
That is in your sole name. However, children cannot own real estate. And I know we're talking about self-employment. So children can also not own businesses. So that creates a lot of hiccups if you do not have estate planning. But there are children inheriting real estate and businesses you have to go through. In addition to a state administration, an entirely separate process to create a guardianship of your children for the guardian to be able to assist with those assets. And they have to get clerk permission with a hearing to deal with each of those assets. So I know that we talk about estate planning a lot, but it's because it's important. And it's the most relevant to the widest swath of listeners. Most of our other practice areas, like you only need us when you need us, but everyone needs estate planning.
Yeah, the more you have, right? It was notorious. And I guess P. Diddy just got arrested the other day. Wait, notorious? Like Biggie? Yeah, what do they always say? The shiny rap song? The more you have, the more problems you have. Yeah, Mo Money, Mo Problem. That's right.
What are you doing right now? You didn't know that? It was in my mind. I couldn't remember it, man. I couldn't remember. That's like the worst thing that's ever happened on this show, that you didn't know that. We need to put a finger in this and go back.
No, nothing, man. The people are going to have to hear that a lot. I'm not going to hire that guy who can't remember. P. Diddy got arrested, man. He was having freak-offs that lasted multiple days. That's not a crime, though. No, it was like a racketeer in charge. There was a lot of planning that went into these freak-offs.
Yes, he was. When you're drugging the people and coercing them and holding them against their will, I didn't let a crime man. Maybe you do that, John. But no, the more you own, the more important this is. The more you own, usually the busier you are. This is something that you put behind you, but I am telling you, you need to figure out, especially if you run a small company that your family depends on, we're not guaranteed any amount of time. You do need to have some sort of plan, or your spouse needs to be familiar with how it operates and what it's worth after you're gone. Is this something that your spouse will need to figure out how to sell?
Is this something your spouse can hire someone and operate and it still will produce income? You need to make sure that it gets to your spouse, and again, not to your underage children, because like Cassandra says, that presents a lot of problems. A good way to do this is a trust. We talk about trust. You can create trust. Trust don't die.
We're all going to die. Your trust is not going to die. So if everything is in a trust, it's easy sailing.
Everything is going to be wrapped up. But we talk about the will, we talk about trust, we talk about power of attorneys, and all that stuff is very important. But there's still the practical aspect, the planning part of it. Your spouse needs to know what they're supposed to do. Maybe your spouse works with you and knows everything. Maybe your spouse stays home with the children and doesn't really know the day-to-day how to operate. Maybe you have an employee that's very helpful and maybe would want to buy the company. Maybe you have partners and you've got a buyout agreement, maybe some life insurance to fund it. But you need to have that all planned out, and people need to know what to do. You're making me anxious, actually.
What does my spouse know? At this point, even my laptop requires my fingerprint to get into it, so he should probably do that before he calls the medical examiner to take me away. Yeah, easy money. Chop your finger off. Keep your finger in a bag. It's easy. Honey, can you reach over here real quick? Reach over here. Necklace.
I think that would be awesome. No, but it's something to think about. Of course, I've had clients that had... I mean, fortunately, I have not had to go through that myself. But I've had clients that have to go through it. I've had attorneys who are friends whose spouses have to kind of help get their law firm sold or moved on. Of course, it's a tough position for anyone to be in, but it's really tough if you have no idea what's going on. You don't know where the bank accounts are, and you don't know where payroll comes from.
I mean, there just needs to be, I think, a familiar... It takes some planning and it takes some doing. I mean, that's above and beyond your normal estate plan that an attorney... An attorney is going to make sure legally you're all squared away.
And from a legal perspective, it's as easy as possible to get everything to the people you want it to go to. But there's still more things to think about on top of that. And self-employed people are usually kind of aware of this, but none of us think we're going to die. Like, if I died tomorrow, I certainly wouldn't have been sitting around thinking that I'm going to die tomorrow. It's usually a surprise to everybody when you die, right?
I don't know. I had to go through that conversation before, and it just made me think. There's a lot of things to think about when something like that happens. Well, when you also think about it, it's your end game. A lot of people procrastinate. They don't want to think about that.
And planning for it, being proactive, and certainly sitting down and mapping things out will give you confidence as you move towards, you know, just live your life. All right, so Judica County Radio, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We've got an encore edition of our question and answer. I have a feeling it will deal with estate planning, and then we'll come back and we'll wrap up the program.
Judica County Radio, we want to remind you, too, if you've got a legal situation, you've got some questions, we have five complimentary consults available right now. And all you've got to do is call 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.
Maybe you're one of the many that just procrastinated and you're at a point now where maybe an estate plan is something you need to consider. Get on it. 800-659-1186. Five complimentary consults.
That's 800-659-1186. Again, we've got Q&A and encore edition coming up on the other side. You're listening to an encore presentation of question and answer here on Judica County Radio. Welcome back into Judica County Radio. Your hosts, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm.
Offices located conveniently for you in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Farina, Gastonia, and in Moorhead City, Whitaker and Hamer, your law firm for life. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate. Josh, we are again having some of your all-star attorneys joining us on the program.
Who's up next? Up next, we have attorney Ashley Penner. She is with our firm, has been with our firm for a long time, handles estate planning and trust. Today, our theme has kind of been talking about how you can use your attorney to kind of do some planning. We've talked about business planning. We've talked about family law planning. With Ashley, we're going to talk about estate planning. And later on in the show, talk about what happens if you don't do estate planning. What becomes purview of the court, public information.
What do you have to deal with if you don't do your planning? And so, Ashley, in that vein, I know one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is this planning process, you know, and what you can do to keep your information private, to keep your stuff out of the purview of the court. None of us ever want to have to rely on a clerk's order or a judge's order or get our assets caught up in an estate probate or an estate contest or something like that. And people in that vein, you know, we're going to talk about, you know, your estate planning will, which I think everybody's pretty familiar with what a will is and what a will can do. That doesn't get you out of probate versus a trust, which I carefully crafted and managed and a monicured trust would keep you out of possibly probate.
So that's where I'll start it with you, kind of the advantages of, you know, what is a trust and kind of the advantages of trust. Yeah, the trust is a legal document that, of course, you would create as a part of the estate planning process. It can hold assets during your lifetime and then speak to or control what happens to those assets, how they're distributed or how they're held in trust, who they can benefit after your death. And it's the ability of the trust to hold those assets while you're still living that gives you that probate avoidance. They've already been transferred into this this legal entity, so to speak, that you've created. You've already designated someone who we call the trustee that's going to be in control of the assets after your death.
And it streamlines that process so that you do avoid the probate process or administration process where a clerk is involved in making sure that what you've said in your will is honored in the in the administration. So when I was when I was growing up, I think the first I was trying to think about earlier today, the first time that I ever heard anybody talk about a trust. And I think the first two times that I can remember hearing anybody talk about a trust was, oh, man, who was the rich guy on Gilligan's Island? Oh, it was his name. Mr. Howell. Mr. Howell. Yeah. And or Beverly Hillbillies.
Beverly Hillbillies a couple of times. But and maybe that's why I think about trust. I think about they're just for the rich people. They're just for people with like tons of assets. And and and that's really not the case. No.
Yeah, I definitely grew up thinking the same thing any time I heard them. Of course, no one. No one in my family ever had a trust. Nor have I ever been the beneficiary of a trust.
So most of my my actual knowledge of it comes from law school, like like most of us, probably. But it is certainly not reserved for folks that have massive amounts of wealth. I tell a lot of my clients, you know, if if the only thing you end up using your your trust for is to hold your real estate, you have done yourself and your family a significant service.
Because, again, it's going to really trim up what they have to do and how quickly they can do what they need to do, depending on what that is. So, yeah, I've always heard this rule of thumb of, you know, five million dollars. You should have roughly five million dollars in assets before you should even think about or worry with or bother with a trust.
And, yeah, not the case. It has so much benefit to so many different folks. You know, and it's it's kind of one of your biggest estate planning tools. And, you know, a trust is basically I think of it as, you know, it's kind of like starting a business.
Right. You start an LLC, you start a corporation, you're starting. The law sees that as its own entity, its own its own thing.
And so I'll talk to people a lot about probate assets and non probate assets. But the trust is like a magic bucket. You can put things in and, you know, trust will not trust isn't going to die. It may terminate on its own. It can only go on for so many years. But in theory, it's going to outlive you. And that's the convenience of it. It's like this is kind of oversimplifying and maybe kind of dumb, but I like it as a metaphor. But it's like you put stuff in this bucket and this bucket automatically goes to your heirs.
Yeah. No one looks in the bucket. No one's going to ask you questions about the bucket. You've got some basic asset protection if someone was going to sue or challenge the way you're distributing your things. So it's like this magic vehicle and there's tax advantages and there's other advantages, too. It's this magic vehicle to get stuff to your heirs easily.
And, you know, you think about it. If you if you've got a house with equity and you've got vehicles and you've got your 401K and you've got your investment accounts, we may not think of ourselves as as having a lot of assets to average American who might be looking at this. But you've got a lot of assets to protect. Certainly. If you you might have a different stance on that, if you're being sued and you start looking at what could become subject to a judgment in the you know, in the event that one is in place.
Yes. Then you absolutely have a lot of assets. And then, you know, something you mentioned, I think that is also good to point out what the trust is. It has so much flexibility because it is that, you know, that existing entity. It can undergo changes, you know, a little bit more easily than if you're changing how your will distributes your property. There is a lot more rigor involved in the signing of a will than in the signing of a trust, but also the privacy that it brings with it. The fact that, yeah, no one's going to be delving around into that document. And no clerk is going to be looking over the shoulder of the trustee to make sure that, you know, they've they've adhered to adhered to the rules in the trust.
It has the privacy that a lot of folks want in keeping all of their business out of court filings. I guess there's certain things we're talking about trust and I've talked to them as magical about being magical and things like that. There's things trust don't do that you need your other estate planning documents to do. So one of the things that you pointed out to me before is, well, you know, if you have a good trust, your will is what we call a pour over will.
Right. Where the will is just saying, hey, anything that I haven't managed to get into my trust, please give it to my trust. So that's a pour over will.
But there's there's other things that will can do for you. And and actually, you always point out to me, I always overlook guardianship. You know, that's an important one to your minor children. Right.
Yeah. Making sure that anyone who's under the age of 18 has that you've been in control of saying who they should be with, who should be caring for them. If you don't have a will.
Right. You're leaving it up to the courts to determine with whom they should be placed. And also, you know, sometimes, unfortunately, there might be people who you as much as you want other folks to be the guardian of your children, there are folks you don't want to be guardian of your children. And the will is a place where we can make that known as well. If you don't leave a document behind that addresses that at all, it could be the person that you ultimately did not want to be guardian of your children who goes and applies for that guardianship.
And now they are being raised by someone that, you know, in your mind would have never your children would never live with. So a trust is certainly a very important estate planning and can be kind of the primary estate planning vehicle, but it can't do everything that we need. So I tell a lot of my clients, you might have a will and not have a trust. But if you have a trust, you should still absolutely have a will, because aside from addressing guardianship, let's say you don't have minor children anymore.
You go out and you acquire assets. Let's say you've you've gotten this trust prepared and you're working on getting everything transferred into it. And then something happens, sudden death, and you don't get a chance to continue in your your funding of this trust mission. You've still got a valid will that's going to get everything there. Yeah, I talk to a lot of clients who who who definitely think it's an either or situation like, well, I've already got my trust or I've already got my will, but you really need both of them. And the will handle some things you can't handle with the trust.
And it's also kind of a fail safe there. So that that does come up. I know there's other ways we're talking about the trust being this magic bucket, which can make otherwise a probate asset, an asset that would have to go through probate, non-probate, private. But there's other ways to make probate assets non-probate. Yeah.
Yes. So, you know, you might have things like bank accounts, life insurance, retirement plans. And on all of these assets, you know, we counsel our clients. You want to make sure you have beneficiaries designated a primary beneficiary and a contingent. And maybe, you know, if you're a married couple with children and you have this trust, you're going to name your spouse as the primary beneficiary, but then you name the trust as the contingent beneficiary. But even on things like bank accounts, you can name a payable on death or transferable on death beneficiary. And these are ways that you can ensure that those assets avoid that probate process.
There's not going to be a significant delay in being able to access those funds. Of course, you'd have to have a death certificate. We don't want people are designated beneficiaries being able to show up at the bank and say, hey, she died.
Can I have her money? Right. We want them to show that proof through death certificate. But that's going to be a much shorter process than going to the clerk's office and setting up that estate, that probate estate, and then transferring the account into an estate account and then documenting for the clerk what funds were in that account. That's going to hold up things. And particularly if we have a situation where, you know, parents are lost and there are children that, you know, will have needs that need to be tended to.
It'll allow for much less disruption in the basic maintenance and care for those those minor children. Well, actually, I think that's I think that's a good discussion today. Kind of on this, this using your attorney to plan things out for you to make your life easier, to keep you out of litigation, to keep you out of the court, keep you out of the clerk's office. So I appreciate that. You know, the first step in estate planning is to is to give us a call. If you call Whitaker and Hamer, if you call our law firm and you want to talk about estate planning, you're going to end up talking to Ashley.
And that's for good reason. She handles many, many, many of these every month. And she's she's a good place to start. And we'd be happy to help you with that. But, Ashley, I know we'll talk about this again. So we'll we'll see you before too long.
Absolutely. Looking forward to it. That's Ashley Penner again, estate planning with Whitaker and Hamer. We are again visiting with the all star team of attorneys at Whitaker and Hamer hosted by Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer.
Again, hitting a lot of different questions that the firm gets quite a bit of. And, folks, if you've got any situation you're facing and you need answers to those questions, you can always call Whitaker and Hamer. Eight hundred six five nine eleven eighty six.
That's eight hundred six five nine one one eight six. Leave your contact information briefly what the call is about. And an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch and you can email your questions to the show. We'll answer them on a future broadcast info at Judica County dot com. When we return on Judica County radio. Yes, we have another attorney and she's very familiar. Cassandra Nicholas joins us. It's about estate planning. We're looking forward to this discussion.
Again, that's coming up on the other side. You're listening to an encore presentation of question and answer here on Judica County radio. Welcome back into Judica County radio hosted by Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer and the power behind this program, where you can find Josh and Joe. They're the managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer law firm. They're practicing attorneys here in the great state of North Carolina.
They have offices located in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia and in Morehead City. If you've got a legal situation you're facing, you've got questions, you need some answers, you can always call Whitaker and Hamer. Eight hundred six five nine one one eight six.
That's eight hundred six five nine eleven eighty six. Leave your contact information briefly. What the calls about an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch. And as always, you can email your questions to the show info at Judica County dot com. We'll answer them on a future program. So we have another attorney joining us on the program. Josh, who we got.
All right. So if you're if you've been a regular listener of our show, you know, and already familiar with Cassandra Nicholas, but she is our attorney stationed out of the Morehead City office who deals with a state administration and probate across the state of North Carolina. But we bring Cassandra on to talk to us about a lot of different things today. Cassandra is here to talk about state administration probate.
You know, there's those words kind of go together, but basically you're dead and someone hopefully someone you've named and planned is taking care of your affairs, taking care of your estate, taking care of your assets because you're no longer here. And me and Joseph, we spend a lot of time talking about planning ahead of time using, you know, using your attorney to plan ahead of time to avoid probate. Right. We're going to try to avoid the whole process to the extent that we can to try to keep your information private. Keep your heirs or your fiduciaries from having to go downtown and deal with a clerk, deal with a deal with a judge, keep things moving along. And Cassandra, in that in that vein, I was going to talk to you kind of about what a state administration looks like when you when you can't avoid it.
Right. So you're you're usually only involved if we can't avoid. I mean, we just spent some time talking with Ashley about trust and and planning to kind of keep things out of a probate. But let's just say you don't do anything. You never plan and you die.
What's that going to look like? So I absolutely want to funnel people to Ashley. If you're not already in a situation where you need a state administration, please do your estate planning. Trusts are an excellent tool to be able to avoid a state administration entirely. If you're not using a trust or not, causing assets to be automatically transferred to your intended recipients by some other means, either as naming them as beneficiary beneficiaries on specific assets, pay on death beneficiaries on bank accounts, putting folks on vehicles with you as joint with right of survivorship so that those automatically transferred just as a function of generally a contract.
If that's not the case, then there are two camps when you get to me for a state administration. There are folks who did estate planning and have a will and everything, but still need a state administration because there are assets that did not automatically transfer by some other means. So you can die test date with a will with assets that the clerk needs to assign award to your intended recipients, or you get stuck with the state's default rules and that's dying in test date without a will.
And there's there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The lawmakers did think, you know, long and hard about how to come up with the schemes of intestacy and how heirs would inherit. But those default rules aren't necessarily what everyone wants and understanding what those default rules are is important in your estate planning or in in considering what happens. A lot of folks don't realize they think if if they are married to someone that the default rule must be that their spouse gets everything when they pass. But that's not the case. The intestacy statute, if you have a spouse and children, your your assets are split between your spouse and children.
So if you want your spouse to have everything and you don't want it to be split with your children automatically, you want your spouse to have, you know, the authority to do what they want with those assets that needs to be done through estate planning rather than allowing just the default rules to exist. Yeah, it's one of those it's one of those nightmare situations that we we unfortunately see. You know, everybody everybody thinks depends on how old you are, how you know, I'm in my late 40s now. So surely I'll make it to my 70s. Right.
And people in their 60s. Surely I'll make it. I hope you do. I mean, thank you.
Me, too. But but you always think you've got more time and maybe hopefully you do. But we were in that situation where someone dies way too early. So we we've got the situations where the 40 year old father of three has a heart attack and passes away.
You know, it hasn't done any estate planning because that's that's young estate planning is hard to think about. And yeah, like you said, like, you know, if the house isn't owned correctly, you know, we've had a situation where a spouse is inherited with underage kids. And trying to get that house sold or dealt with when one of the owners is your four year old son is challenging, to say the least. Right.
Oh, absolutely. Because then we're also dealing with not just the the intestacy, not just the estate administration. You also then need to deal with a guardianship in order to the the courts are interested in protecting the assets of minors. So a parent can't just automatically make decisions about real estate that a minor inherited for them.
You need to have permission from the courts to do so. And, you know, that that is a lot of work time. Attorney expense, court fee expenses, mandatory hearings for guardianships to get a guardian assigned. So especially when there are minor children involved, it's it's important to. Do the estate planning on the front end because we are here and we're happy to help with all of those, but we want people to be aware that it's definitely going to be added time and expense when you haven't avoided those on the front end.
You know, it's just like anything else. You know, we've talked me and Joe have talked today about business planning. You know, you can do a lot of planning with your operating agreement, with your business assets so that when someone passes away or when there's a disagreement with a partner, you've already kind of planned out what's going to happen and it doesn't necessarily have to become something that's litigated.
Right. Our big theme today is things that the courts have to be involved with, things that have to be public versus things that you can keep private and plan around. And so we've talked about that as, you know, in business planning.
We've talked about Taylor. We've talked about family law planning. If you know, you know, prenup, separations, agreements, planning before separation.
There's a lot of stuff you can plan and agree to and keep private rather than putting it all on display in the kind of public arena. And, you know, we've talked to Ashley about estate planning, try to avoid probate. But but here, you know, our example, our 42 year old who passed away way, way, way too early without any notice.
He left his family with a lot of trouble because he hadn't planned. And that's no knock against him. That's the way these things go.
But to the extent that you can stop what you're doing and think about it. You know, when I was growing up, I felt like trusts were for rich people. Right. Rich people had had trust.
But that but that's not the case. And I know we also help people administer trust. A lot of folks will create a trust and not have a son or a daughter or a spouse who can who can run the trust, administer the trust.
So we will do that a lot for folks, too. But I was going to ask you, Cassandra, and then this public versus private discussion that we're having. If you have to if you're passed away and your heirs have to go open in the state for you, whether there's a will or not. So they have to just do some state administration. What kind of information is public? So a state administration files, the entire file is public. So some of the counties have E-filing now. So a lot of this is also available.
Just click the button on anyone's browser. So your heirs, whoever whoever your heirs are through intestacy, their ages, their addresses, what your assets are and the exact value of each asset. What your debts are, the claims against the estate. So it's it's a lot of information that's public, even down to the bank account statements. The the account numbers are redacted and on the online filings, you can't pull those bank statements.
But in the physical file, which is public, those are accessible as well. So, yes. So, yeah, there's a lot out there. I saw I'm a big, big wrestling fan, you know, but somebody wrote a book about Ric Flair. It was like it was supposed to be like a biography of Ric Flair. And they did it just everything was just based on files that could pull in the Mecklenburg County courthouse. So any estate that he was a beneficiary of divorces, guardianships, any kind of civil lawsuit. It's all public record. And the guy wrote an entire book just based on what he did off the public record. So it's.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then so I'm happy to keep talking about what's public or not public. But I'd also like to jump back to your example of a 42 year old man who's passed unexpectedly with some debts. There are some tools at our disposal as or at anyone's disposal in filing estate administrations. If the person has a spouse or children under 18, there are ways to protect a spouse or minor children from creditors up to a certain extent. So it depends on what assets exist, what debts exist. But through a spousal allowance, a spouse can be assigned the first sixty thousand currently at sixty thousand of personal property. And that's able to be protected from most types of creditors. There are certain types of creditors, such as medical creditors that can get at a spouse regardless of a spousal allowance being filed.
So there are certain types of debts that a spouse takes on no matter what, essentially. No, it's you know, and again, if all this property was in trust, if all this property was positioned in such a way where it did not become an asset of an estate, you know, that that really helps. It really helps in everything that we've been talking about.
It really helps keep it. You know, your heirs are going to move easy. Your family is going to just move. It's a tough situation, but they'll be able to continue on without the angst of having to deal with what you deal with every day. We're here to deal with that angst for you. But that that is something even for my clients that they they know their estate administration is happening. It's not completely out of their minds, unfortunately, until it's closed. And some of the clerks and courts runaways behind some of this can can take a while, even with, you know, good attorneys in your corner helping you through the process. So we're here to help.
But to be possible. Well, Cassandra, it's good to talk to you today. I always appreciate you joining us.
And thank you, Cassandra. Nicholas, fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm, joining us on the program of state administration. Again, talking about the different levels of law there. Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer are your managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm. And of course, they are the hosts of this show. And the power behind the program is Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm.
We are going to take a short break, come back on the other side and wrap this up. Now, if you've got a legal situation that you're facing, remember, you can always call Whitaker and Hamer. They've got offices conveniently located for you in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia and in Morehead City, where you can find Cassandra Nicholas. The number to call is 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.
Leave your contact information and briefly what the call is about and an attorney will return that call from Whitaker and Hamer. And you can always email your questions to the show, info at judicacounty.com. That's info at judicacounty.com.
And we will answer those questions on a future broadcast. We'll wrap up more Judica County coming up. Music We are back on Judica County Radio. Your hosts are Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners again at Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm, practicing attorneys here in the great state of North Carolina. They've got offices located in Raleigh, Garner, Cleveland, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia and in Morehead City and that's exactly where you can find Cassandra Nicholas, fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer.
Again, she's down at the coast at Morehead City. I'm Morgan Patrick and we talk legalese each and every week and we have been focusing in on self-employed estate planning. We had a checklist early on in the show, Q&A about estate planning. Josh, we've got a few more minutes. Let's wrap it up. Well, before we get too far, here's what I want to do, here's what I want to do.
Morgan, I want to play, we're going to have different theme songs every week now because that's what Joe likes to do. Alright. And I want to play our two choices. We're going to call them choice A and choice B. Okay. And if you feel particularly, if you're listening and you feel particularly moved, I want you to tell me which one you like better.
They're both kind of country. We're going to mix it up. But can we do that?
Can we play, can we play version A? Okay. And since we are pre-producing the show, how can our listeners let you know what they like? They can call our number.
Alright. Call the number. 800-659-1186.
That's 800-659-1186. You can vote for A or you can vote for B. Here is A. There's Josh and Joe on the mic today Talking about the law and sports and ways Morgan's on the panel keeping in control They're the best by far, no one else on the road With Judica County, it's where we turn For legal talks, they've got the Bern Josh and Joe, they always learn Morgan too is their stern concern Alright.
So apparently I'm a stern concern. I like that at the end of that. That's choice number A. And again, if you want to vote for A, just call 800-659-1186 and just say, I like A. That's 800-659-1186. Here is selection number B.
Outlaw poppin' in Judica County Josh and Joe, they're the best Morgan on the panel keepin' the grease Law and sports is all they've been Judica County, the justices smile Every case and game makes you smile Children don't relate, they'll be appealed To Judica County, it's all a real deal Alright. So we have two with more of a country western theme, choice A and choice B. If you want to vote for B, just call 800-659-1186 and just say, hey, we like B.
That's 800-659-1186. You've got two choices, A or B. And again, you guys are leaning towards B. I like A. I mean, right now. I mean, we're going to have different themes.
Cassandra, do you weigh in at all? I like A. Pretty. I think B sounds more like just the old guy in a bar, like, you know, like a Johnny P. Chick. I like that. Well, we're going to have to do some with some extra verses because Well, the fact that you brought up Notorious and you brought up, we're going to have to have, we're going to have to have something probably from the 90s or early 2000s.
Hip-hop culture. I like it. We'll mix it up.
We'll mix it up. But yeah, Morgan, we still are doing, you know, we've been doing this for a couple of weeks now. We haven't been together. We had some encore shows that we that we replay because we haven't been together in a couple of weeks because between COVID and everybody getting sick, we just we couldn't all get together at the same time because Cassandra you you were sick there for a little while. I was on vacation. Then I was sick. It's been a time over here.
So so we haven't we haven't been doing that for the past couple of weeks. But again, we're going to do that five five free consults and you can call us for anything. You know, you can call us for family law, you know, real estate, estate administration, probate estate planning. You know, anything that you have going on, one of our attorneys will sit down with you for free and kind of get you going in the right direction. See if we can help you see.
See what you see what you need. But but do you want to get everybody thinking about estate planning? Because like Cassandra said earlier, that really affects everybody. And again, the more you have, the more real estate you have, the more, you know, corporate entities, LLCs that you have. The more reason to do it, because once you're once you're not here, we don't we don't know.
We don't have that knowledge that left when you left us, you know, and and piecing that back together is difficult and it'll never be perfect. But the more that you can let you know if you have kids that are close to being adults or adults, you know, the more that you can keep people informed. You don't have to tell everybody all of your business.
Right. But you definitely need people to know what's going on and and and I've liked the suggestions I've seen online of having multiple people with knowledge of where to access the information, like a shared Google drive of all of your estate planning with the information about assets and everything. Yes, your kids could probably steal your identity, too. But if you trust them enough to execute your estate plan, then you should probably trust them enough to know where to find that information.
So however you want to leave that information, make sure it's accessible. When I'm doing a state administration consults and encounter someone who's passed, who had good estate planning, had their will, had their trust, I always make sure to express to the heirs that I'm consulting with that that was like a very thoughtful gift from the person who passed away. That they went through the effort during their life to make sure that that their assets and this process wasn't a burden for for their loved ones. So if that spurs you into action, that's great, knowing that you're doing something that is a thoughtful gift for your heirs. And we've tried we've tried really hard at the firm.
You know, again, the firm is celebrating its 20th year this year. Yeah. So we've we've been at it for a little while and we have a lot of smart people under one roof.
And when you do when you have that, you're very fortunate when that happens. You know, we have attorneys like Cassandra who are very good at what they do. And when you put when you put everybody together, you really can make you can streamline these type of things.
Right. So in estate planning, we get a lot of information from you up front. We usually talk to you on the phone after that to make sure we understand what you want to do.
And then we're all going to sit down in person and get everything signed and talk about it. But we try to make it so you're not making two, three, four trips to our office. We try to make it as easy as we can for you because it's it's no fun. You know, I don't think any attorney advertising their estate planning services can say it's a it's a fun process because you really do have to think about some things you don't want to think about. But we do try to make it as easy as we possibly can, efficient and respect your time. And but definitely something something everybody needs to take a look at. Judica County radio focusing in on the self-employed, the estate planning checklist. Very important for everybody out there, especially couples. As you start to age, know where everything is, have a plan.
And again, it's easy if you get to this early, be proactive about it. Now, the five complimentary consults we want to remind you, you can use that for estate planning. If you want to get started, all you've got to do is call 800-659-1186.
That's 800-659-1186. Secure one of those five complimentary consults. You can use it for anything legal if you've got questions. But certainly we've been focusing in on estate planning and just having that checklist and making sure you're dotting the I's and crossing the T's and making it easier on your spouse and your loved ones.
If indeed something happens and you pass away unexpectedly, make sure you have that estate plan. All right. Another edition of Judica County radio is in the books for Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer managing partners. Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm hosts of this program and also fellow attorney Cassandra Nicklaus joining us on the program this week.
I'm Morgan Patrick. We'll see you on the radio next week. Judica County is hosted by attorneys licensed to practice law in North Carolina. Some of the guests appearing on this podcast may be licensed North Carolina attorneys. Discussion on this podcast is meant to be general in nature and in no way should the discussion be interpreted as legal advice. Legal advice can only be rendered once an attorney licensed in the state in which you live has the opportunity to discuss the facts of your case with you. The attorneys appearing on this podcast are speaking in generalities about the law in North Carolina and how these laws affect the average North Carolinian. If you have any questions about the content of the show, you can direct such inquiry to Joshua Whitaker at JMW at MWH Law Lawyer.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-09-21 14:26:19 / 2024-09-21 14:49:38 / 23