Cava Faulkner

You might think you can save time and money by using do-it-yourself estate planning documents you find online. You’re probably anxious to check estate planning off your life’s to-do list, and these forms offer a seemingly quick and inexpensive way to handle this important task.

You may even realize such generic plans aren’t as high quality as those drafted with an attorney’s help, but with your hectic schedule, a DIY will is just way more convenient. Besides, having “something” in place is better than having nothing, right?

Unfortunately, this is one case in which SOMETHING is not better than nothing.

Indeed, the false sense of security offered by DIY wills can lead you to believe you have things covered and no longer have to worry about estate planning. The reality, however, is that such generic forms could end up costing the loved ones you leave behind more money and heartache than if you’d never gotten around to doing anything at all.

In this way, DIY wills and other legal documents are among the most dangerous choices you can make for the people you love. In part one, we discussed the many ways DIY plans can fail to keep your family out of court and out of conflict, and here we’ll explain how these generic documents can leave the people you love most of all—your children—at risk.

It’s probably distressing to think that by using a DIY will you could force your loved ones into court or conflict in the event of your incapacity or death. And if you’re like most parents, it’s probably downright unimaginable to contemplate your children’s care falling into the wrong hands.

Yet that’s exactly what could happen if you rely on free or low-cost fill-in-the-blank wills found online, or even if you hire a lawyer who isn’t equipped or trained to plan for the needs of parents with minor children.

Naming and legally documenting guardians entails a number of complexities that most people aren’t aware of. Even lawyers with decades of experience frequently make at least one of six common errors when naming long-term legal guardians.

If wills drafted with the help of a professional are likely to leave your children at risk, the chances that you’ll get things right on your own are pretty much zero.

If your DIY will names legal guardians for your kids in the event of your death, that’s great. But does it include back-ups? And if you named a couple to serve, how is that handled? Do you still want one of them if the other is unavailable due to illness, injury, death, or divorce?

And what happens if you become incapacitated and are unable to care for your children? You might assume the guardians named in the DIY will would automatically get custody, but your will isn’t even operative in the event of your incapacity.

Or perhaps the guardians you named in the will live far from your home, so it would take them a few days to get there. If you haven’t made legally-binding arrangements for the immediate care of your children, it’s highly likely that they will be placed with child protective services until those guardians arrive.

Even if you name family who live nearby as guardians, your kids are still at risk because it’s possible they might not be immediately available if and when needed.

And who even knows where your will is or how to access it?

There are simply far too many potential errors you can make when you go it alone.

To ensure your children are never raised by someone you don’t trust or taken into the custody of strangers (even temporarily), consider creating  a comprehensive Kids Protection Plan®, which only Personal Family Lawyers® like us are trained and licensed to counsel you through and prepare.

If you have minor children at home, you should immediately use this resource to get started, and then schedule a follow-up visit with us to put the full Kids Protection Plan® in place.

Protecting your family and assets in the event of your death or incapacity is such a monumentally important task you should never consider winging it with a DIY plan. No matter how busy you are or how little wealth you own, the potentially disastrous consequences inherent in such plans are simply too great—often they’re not even worth the paper they’re printed on.

Plus, proper estate planning doesn’t have to be super expensive, stressful, or time consuming. Working with us as your Personal Family Lawyer®, planning will not only be as stress-free as possible, but we offer options for all budgets and asset values.

What’s more, many of our clients actually find the process highly rewarding. Our proprietary systems provide the type of peace of mind that comes from knowing that you’ve not only checked estate planning off your to-do list, but you’ve done it using the most forethought, experience, and knowledge available.

If you’ve yet to do any planning, contact us to schedule a Family Wealth Planning Session. This evaluation will allow us to determine if a simple will or some other strategy, such as a living trust, is your best option.

If you’ve already created a plan—whether it’s a DIY job or one created with another lawyer’s help—contact us to schedule an Estate Plan Review and Check-Up. We’ll ensure your plan is not only properly drafted and updated, but that it has all of the protections in place to prevent your children from ever being placed in the care of strangers or anyone you’d never want raising them.

No matter what you do, make certain you have a “something” that’s actually better than nothing. Contact us as your Personal Family Lawyer®  today, and we’ll provide you with that level of confidence—and so much more.

We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session, ™ during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before, and make all the best choices for the people you love. You can begin by calling our office today to schedule a Family Wealth Planning Session and mention this article to find out how to get this $750 session at no charge. Schedule online today.

The Netflix movie I Care a Lot provides a dark, violent, and somewhat comedic take on the real life and not-at-all funny dangers of the legal (and sometimes corrupt) guardianship system. While the film’s twisting plot may seem far fetched, it sheds light on a tragic phenomenon—the abuse of seniors at the hands of crooked “professional” guardians.

In this two-part series, we’ll discuss how the movie depicts such abuse, how this can occur in real life, and what you can do to prevent something similar from happening to you or your loved ones using proactive estate planning and our Family Wealth Planning process. For support in putting airtight, protective planning vehicles in place, meet with us as your Personal Family Lawyer®.

Note: This article contains spoilers for the movie I Care a Lot.

At the beginning of the movie, we meet Marla Grayson, a crooked professional guardian who makes her living by preying on vulnerable seniors. A professional guardian is a person appointed by the court to make legal and financial decisions for senior “wards” of the court, who are deemed unable to make such decisions for themselves.

Working with a corrupt doctor, Marla targets wealthy victims and gets a judge to order these individuals unfit to care for themselves and then appoint her as their guardian. From there, she and her business partner/ girlfriend, Fran, move the seniors into a nursing home, seize their homes, and sell all of their assets for their own financial gain.

Marla’s scheme takes a turn for the worse when her latest senior victim, Jennifer Peterson, turns out to be the mother of a Russian mob boss named Roman Lunyov. After Marla has Jennifer placed in a long-term care facility, Roman tries unsuccessfully to get his mother out of the facility, first by bribing Marla, then through the court, and finally by trying to break her out.

While this may seem ludicrous, this kind of abuse actually happens outside of the movies to seniors with significant assets, even those with caring adult children like Roman.

At this point, the movie descends into a violent back-and-forth between Roman and Marla, as they each try and fail to kill one another, until they both decide that rather than murdering each other, they could make more money by going into business together.

Fast forward to several years later, we learn that Marla and Roman have become millionaires after starting a global chain of senior care services, called Grayson Guardianships, which employs thousands of crooked guardians overseeing hundreds of thousands of “clients” all over the world.

Based On True Events

With its over-the-top violence, kidnappings, and Russian mobsters, some might dismiss I Care a Lot as nothing but Hollywood hype and find it hard to believe that an operation as sinister as Marla’s could ever actually exist. But the fact is, the movie’s writer and director, J. Blakeson, came up with the idea after reading news stories about very similar (less the mob and murder) situations. And knowing such things actually happen makes the movie even more terrifying.

“The idea first came when I heard news stories about these predatory legal guardians who were exploiting this legal loophole and exploiting the vulnerability in the system to take advantage of older people, basically stripping them of their life and assets to fill their own pockets,” Blakeson told Esquire Magazine. “They run through their money as fast as possible, store them in the worst care home, and just forget about them. Just park them and then move on to the next one, and that felt almost like a gangster’s operation.”

And while the real-life scams never reached a level on par with Grayson’s Guardians, one crooked professional guardianship business in Las Vegas did manage to bilk hundreds of unsuspecting seniors out of their life savings. As we detailed in our previous article, Use Estate Planning to Avoid Adult Guardianship—and Elder Abuse, a real-life Marla Grayson named April Parks, who owned a Las Vegas-based company called A Private Professional Guardian, was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison in 2018 after being indicted on more than 200 felonies for using her guardianship status to swindle more than 150 seniors.

In her case, prosecutors described how Parks, in a similar fashion as Marla, used a shady network of social workers and medical professionals who helped her track down her elderly victims. On the lookout for wealthy seniors with a history of health issues and few living relatives, Parks was often able to obtain court-sanctioned guardianship during court hearings that lasted less than two minutes.

From there, the guardians would force the elderly out of their homes and into assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. They would then sell off their homes and other assets, keeping the proceeds for themselves. Even worse, the guardians were often able to prevent the seniors from seeing or speaking with their family members, leaving them isolated and even more vulnerable to exploitation.

The Most Punitive Civil Penalty

What makes these cases particularly tragic is the fact that for the most part everything these unscrupulous guardians did is perfectly legal. As Blakeson put it, “They had the law on their side, and there was nothing you could do.” Although guardianships are designed to protect the elderly from their own poor decisions, guardianship can turn out to be more of a punishment than a benefit.

In a 2018 New York Times article detailing the state of the guardianship system in New York, Florida congressman Claude Pepper described guardianship as “the most punitive civil penalty that can be levied against an American citizen, with the exception, of course, of the death penalty.”

Indeed, once you’ve been placed under court-ordered guardianship, you essentially lose all of your civil rights. Whether it’s a family member or a professional, the person named as your  guardian has complete legal authority to control every facet of your life. While guardianship is governed by state law and varies from state to state, some of the most common powers guardians are granted include the following:

• Determining where you live, including moving you into a nursing home
• Complete control over your finances, real estate, and other assets
• Making all of your healthcare decisions and providing consent for medical treatments
• Placing restrictions on your communications and interactions with others, including family members
• Making decisions about your daily life such as recreational activities, clothing, and food choices
• Making end-of-life and other palliative-care decisions

Additionally, though it’s possible for a guardianship to be terminated by the court if it can be proven that the need for guardianship no longer exists, a study by the American Bar Association (ABA) found that such attempts typically fail.  And those family members who do try to fight against court-appointed guardians frequently end up paying hefty sums of money in attorney’s fees and court costs, with some even going bankrupt in the process.

Protection Through Planning

Given the potential for neglect, abuse, and exploitation that guardianship affords, it’s crucial that seniors and their families take the proper steps to prevent any and all possibility of falling prey to such scams. Moreover, because any adult could face court-ordered guardianship if they become incapacitated by illness or injury, it’s vital that every person over age 18—not just seniors—take proactive measures to prepare for potential incapacity.

Fortunately, there are multiple estate planning tools that can prevent such abuse from occurring. With us, as your Personal Family Lawyer®, we can put planning vehicles in place and offer ongoing advisory and support that would make it practically impossible for a legal guardian to ever be appointed—or need to be appointed—against your wishes.

Next week, we’ll continue with part two in this series on the dark side of adult guardianship and offer tips for how you can avoid the potential for abuse using estate planning.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

Last week, we discussed the benefits of a unique estate planning vehicle known as a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust (LAPT). We referenced this planning tool in the context of how it could have protected Clare Bronfman, the heiress to the multi-billion-dollar Seagram’s fortune, who was manipulated into blowing much of her $200 million inheritance by financing the cult-like group known as Nxivm.

Yet Clare’s case was quite extreme in terms of both the amount of her inheritance and the circumstances that wiped out her wealth. Though an LAPT would have almost undoubtedly protected both her and her family’s fortune, this planning vehicle can benefit families with far less wealth than Clare’s—and offer asset protection from far less outlandish threats.

Indeed, LAPTs are primarily designed to protect your loved ones and their inheritance from much more common threats, such as divorce, serious debt, devastating illness, and unfortunate accidents. At the same time, LAPTs can provide your heirs with a unique educational opportunity in which they gain valuable experience managing and growing their inheritance, while enjoying airtight asset protection.

To demonstrate how LAPTs can provide protection to families of all asset profiles, here we’ll describe another true story involving a tragic—yet much more relatable—life scenario. While the following events are entirely true, the individual’s name has been changed for privacy protection.

Eric was staying at a friend’s apartment in New York City. The apartment was the penthouse of the building, and Eric decided to run himself a bath. While the bath was running, another friend called and invited Eric to go out with him, which he did.

At about 2 a.m., Eric came back to the apartment and discovered he made a  huge mistake and left the bath running when he left the apartment. The resulting flood caused more than $400,000 in damage to the apartment and the one below it.

While there was insurance to cover the damage, the insurance company sued Eric for what’s known as “subrogation,” meaning the company sought to collect the $400,000 they paid out to repair the damage Eric caused to the property.

Because the flood was due to his negligence in leaving the bath running—a simple, but costly mistake—Eric was responsible for the damage. Now here’s where the inheritance piece comes into play and why it’s so important to leave whatever you’re passing on to your heirs in a protected trust. If Eric had received an inheritance outright in his own name, he would have lost $400,000 of it to this unfortunate mishap.

However, if Eric had received an inheritance in an LAPT, instead of an outright distribution, his inheritance would be completely protected from such a lawsuit—and just about any other threat imaginable.

If you’re like most people, you hope to leave an inheritance for your children. Indeed, it may even be one of the primary motivations driving your life’s work. Yet if you don’t take the proper precautions, the wealth you pass down can easily be lost or squandered. And in certain cases, such as Clare’s, the inheritance can even end up doing more harm than good.

When it comes to leaving an inheritance, most lawyers will advise you to place the money in a trust, which is the right thing to do. However, most lawyers would have you distribute the trust assets outright to your loved ones at specific ages, such as one-third at 25, half of the balance at 35, and the rest at 40. Check your own trust now to see if it does this or something similar.

But giving outright ownership of the trust assets in this way puts everything you’ve worked so hard to leave behind at risk. While a trust may protect your loved ones’ inheritance as long as the assets are held by the trust, once the assets are disbursed to the beneficiary, they can be lost to future creditors, a catastrophic accident or illness, divorce, bankruptcy—or as in Eric’s case, a major lawsuit.

Rather than risking their inheritance by leaving it outright to your children at certain ages or following certain life events, such as graduating college, you can gift your assets to your children at the time of your death using an LAPT. When you gift an inheritance to your kids via an LAPT, the trustee of the trust owns the assets, not your children.

Therefore, if your kids ever get divorced, file bankruptcy, have a major medical issue, or are ordered to pay damages in a lawsuit, they can’t lose their inheritance because they never owned it in the first place. An LAPT can be built into a revocable trust, which becomes irrevocable at the time of your death and holds your loved one’s inheritance in continued trust for their lifetime.

A trustee of your choice owns the trust assets upon your death. Because the LAPT is discretionary, this individual has the power to distribute the assets at their own discretion, instead of being required to release them in a rigid structure. This discretionary power enables the trustee to control when and how your kids can access their inheritance, so they’re not only protected from outside threats like ex-spouses and creditors, but from their own poor judgment as well.

And if you’re afraid that a trustee would keep your beneficiary from using the trust assets, you can build in protections to ensure your beneficiary has flexible use, unless there would be a significant risk of loss if he or she did. You can even allow your beneficiaries to become Co-Trustees and then sole Trustees of their own LAPT.

And contrary to what some might think, LAPTs are not just for the mega wealthy. In fact, the asset protection they provide is even more valuable for those leaving behind a modest inheritance. With less money to pass on, it’s much more likely that the inheritance could be totally wiped out by a single unfortunate event, as opposed to a much larger inheritance, which might survive even multiple mishaps.

Additionally, you can use an LAPT as a unique way to educate your children about investing, charitable giving, and even running a business. This is done by adding provisions into the trust allowing the beneficiary to become co-trustee of the trust with a person you’ve chosen and trust to support their education.

In this way, the beneficiary would become co-trustee at a predetermined age or stage of life and be able to use and control the trust assets under the supervision of the other co-trustee you’ve named to guide them. You can even allow the beneficiary to become sole trustee later in life, once he or she has been properly educated and is ready to assume full control. As sole trustee, the beneficiary would be able to resign and replace themselves with an independent trustee, if necessary, to provide the ultimate asset protection.

There are several different ways we can structure the trust to meet your family’s unique needs, so be sure to ask us what options might be best for your particular situation.

If you wish to protect your child’s inheritance from all possible threats, while incentivizing them to invest and grow the money rather than squander and waste it, consider including a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust in your plan for the ones you love. Indeed, the trust’s highly flexible structure, combined with its bulletproof asset protection make it one of the most valuable gifts you can give your loved ones.

We offer a complete spectrum of legal services for business owners and can help you make the wisest choices on how to deal with your business throughout life and in the event of your death. We also offer you a LIFT Your Life And Business Planning Session, which includes a review of all the legal, insurance, financial, and tax systems you need for your business. Schedule online today.

Because we spend so much of our lives working, it’s practically guaranteed that you’re going to develop close bonds with your employees. And this is a good thing. Having a friendly relationship with your team members based on mutual respect, care, and concern can make the job more enjoyable for everyone—and even boost performance and productivity.

But there’s a huge difference between being friendly with your employees and developing a genuine friendship. When it comes to things like spending lots of time together outside of work, introducing them to your family, and sharing intimate details about your life with one another, that’s a whole different ball game.

Indeed, these relationships can be so challenging that many people—both bosses and employees alike—will tell you that such friendships simply aren’t possible. And more will tell you that while they may be possible, they’re not worth the potential risks.

Since real friendship involves such deep aspects of human nature—emotional stability, power dynamics, and personal integrity—whether true employer-employee friendships are possible really depends on the individuals involved. But regardless of who we’re talking about, these friendships are sure to test your ability to maintain strong boundaries like almost nothing else.

If you’re considering developing a genuine friendship with any of your employees, you may want to proceed with caution and first consider the following seven issues.

One uncomfortable fact of employer-employee friendships is that not everyone can handle them. This goes for both you and the employee. It takes an incredible level of self-awareness, honesty, and emotional maturity to make any friendship work, even without the added complication of doing business together.

You’ll first need to be brutally honest with yourself. If you have any self-esteem issues, problems with boundaries, or find that your judgment is easily clouded by emotion, you may want to keep things purely professional. For example, would you be comfortable firing your best friend? Could you remain truly impartial when deciding whether to promote your friend versus another employee? Could you give your friend honest feedback in areas that he or she needs to grow?

If those questions gave you any pause at all, that’s a red flag that you might not be ready.

The person you befriend should possess the same stable character traits as well. Indeed, given the power imbalance, he or she might need to be even more mature than you.

Since you can’t gauge the full range of someone’s personality right away, consider taking the friendship slowly and get to know one another on a professional level first. If the potential friend has a habit of being overly sensitive about criticism, seems emotionally needy, or likes to gossip, it may be best to steer clear.

With so many potential pitfalls surrounding friendship, it’s essential to establish clear ground rules right off the bat. Some people find it’s easiest to simply not talk about work outside the office at all, keeping the professional and personal aspects of the relationship totally separate.

That said, it’s inevitable that work-related issues will come up at some point, so you might want to  clearly note that some topics must be off limits. Obviously, all matters related to compensation—pay, raises, promotions, bonuses, performance reviews—should be a no go.

The same goes for talking about other employees or colleagues. Such gossip hinders your ability to remain an impartial leader, and at the same time, it can jeopardize the employee’s ability to effectively work with colleagues. Depending on your operation, you should carefully consider exactly what things you should and should not share, always erring on the side of caution.

Don’t be surprised if laying things out in such a frank matter scares a few people off from developing a true friendship. But that just means they probably weren’t in it for the right reasons in the first place.

We offer a complete spectrum of legal services for business owners and can help you make the wisest choices on how to deal with your business throughout life and in the event of your death. We also offer you a LIFT Your Life And Business Planning Session, which includes a review of all the legal, insurance, financial, and tax systems you need for your business. Schedule online today.

Because dealing with cryptocurrency can be a complex affair, online scammers have developed complicated cons similar to traditional pyramid and ponzi schemes. People have lost a lot of money in such scams, and unless you’re well-versed in the technology, they can be difficult to spot.

One giant red flag to watch for is giving your money to others who invest/trade for you, or if you only get paid when you recruit new members.

Also avoid buying upfront “packages” (The Gold Package) promising varying returns. And if you see the words “This isn’t a pyramid scheme” in the marketing materials, you may want to look a little more closely!

Unless you get to hold the keys to your private wallet containing your crypto directly or trade via a reputable exchange like Coinbase, you very well could be dealing with a scammer. And while plenty of people will make money in cryptocurrency pyramid/ponzi schemes, many will lose. That could include you or people you care about, if you get involved in crypto this way.

While new cryptocurrency can be created without any public investment or offering, many use an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to fund their startup initiative. ICOs are basically IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) for cryptocurrency and a highly effective way to crowdfund vast sums of money extremely quickly. In fact, recent ICOs have raised millions of dollars in mere minutes.

This speed comes from the fact that ICOs are barely regulated—a good thing if you’re looking to raise money quickly and avoid the rigorous and time-consuming regulations involved with traditional capital raising. But it can bad, too, as the lack of regulation is a big neon welcome sign to scammers.

The lack of legal oversight has resulted in numerous fake ICOs being created by crypto con men, who go to great lengths to convince potential investors of their fake coin’s legitimacy. If you’re just getting started with cryptocurrency, it’s probably best to avoid ICOs until you really understand what you are investing in. In fact, that’s a good rule of thumb with any crypto investment, if you don’t understand the technology beneath it, start by learning that—and understand “what this crypto actually does”—before you invest. Contact us if you’d like help with that.

Of course, not all ICOs are fake, and if you’re tech-savvy, they can be quite lucrative. In fact, many tout  ICOs as the future of venture capitalism and fundraising.

But no venture capitalist would ever fund a startup without proper vetting, and the same applies to altcoins. Check the background of the people directly involved with the project and those serving as advisors. Use Google and social media like LinkedIn to verify these are real people with stellar reputations, and their advertised skills and knowledge match those found on online resumes and CVs. And make sure you understand what the cryptocurrency proposes to do and that you believe the team behind it can accomplish that goal, as with any business investment you would make.

And as with any investment, beware of deals that promise unrealistically high returns and/or just sound way too good to be true—that’s sign they likely are.

If you’re serious about adding cryptocurrency to your family’s investment portfolio, take the next step in your education by contacting your Personal Family Lawyer®. As your trusted advisor, we’ll help you incorporate cryptocurrency into your family’s financial and estate planning, so you can get the most bang for your crypto buck. Schedule online.