Divorce Rich with Jacki Roessler, CDFA
Welcome to the Divorce Rich Podcast! Join your host, highly sought-after speaker and experienced Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, Jacki Roessler, CDFA in this engaging and down to earth show. Along with her guests, Jacki offers clear and detailed advice to improve your financial decisions before, during and after divorce so you can survive divorce rich! New episodes are posted every Thursday! You can reach Jacki through her Michigan-based firm, Roessler Divorce Consulting, located at 600 S. Adams, Suite 300, Birmingham, MI 48009 or by email at jacqueline@roesslerdivorce.com.
Divorce Rich with Jacki Roessler, CDFA
Death after Divorce; Are You Prepared? with Karen Schultz Tarnopol
Unlock the secrets to regaining financial control after divorce with insights from our special guest, Karen Schultz-Tarnopol, the mastermind behind Heirloom Consulting. Karen offers her wisdom on the often neglected yet vital realm of estate planning and legacy management, shedding light on the intense responsibilities a trustee carries and the sometimes staggering 500 hours it can take to settle an estate. This episode is a treasure trove of advice for single individuals aged 40 to 65, who strive to protect their children and secure their financial future post-divorce. We promise a deep dive into the complexities of estate planning, ensuring you walk away with the tools to maintain control over your financial and personal decisions beyond your lifetime.
RESOURCES:
- To connect with Karen and Heirloom Consulting, click one of the links below
- To schedule a post-divorce transition blueprint meeting with Jacki (flat fee service for post-divorce clients), use the link below:
https://calendly.com/roessler-jacki/post-divorce-transition-map
Visit us at https://www.roesslerdivorce.com/ to learn more about Jacki's practice and to find valuable resources for your case.
Welcome to the Divorce Rich Podcast. I'm your host, Jackie Ressler. I've been a certified divorce financial analyst for 28 years, helping clients and their attorneys navigate the often complex and confusing financial issues in divorce. If you're in the process of, or considering divorce, now is the time for you to take a deep breath and give yourself permission to find clarity on the financial issues you're facing.
Speaker 2:Rich means many things to many people.
Speaker 1:I believe the best definition of being rich is someone who has access to many resources. Along with my guests on this podcast, I will be bringing you a wide variety of information so that you can make sound and informed financial decisions for your financial future.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome back to the Divorce Rich Podcast. When the divorce is done, I always encourage my clients to schedule a final wrap-up meeting with me. In fact, I think it's such an important part of the divorce process that I don't charge my hourly rate to encourage people to get that meeting scheduled. We sit down and review the final settlement and, more importantly in my opinion, I give them a post-divorce game plan. It's customized with their specific details and deadlines to get a long list of items accomplished.
Speaker 2:One of the items on my checklist that I know is often overlooked is the estate planning section. I make sure I say it twice Get your estate planning done. Do you want to be in control of what happens to your money when you die? Do you want to be in control of how your children are taken care of financially and the kind of care your pets have? Even I know my dog, Sadie. If something happened to me, I want to make sure she's taken care of.
Speaker 2:What if you're newly divorced and you become incapacitated? Do you want to decide now, while you're healthy and of sound mind, who will make decisions for you? It's not going to be your former spouse. Your divorce decree doesn't take care of any of those things. If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're going to love this episode. My guest is Karen Schiltz-Turnipel, who's the founder and CEO of Heirloom Consulting in Michigan. Just like I'm passionate about helping clients during divorce, Karen is passionate about helping people with legacy planning and trustee consulting, and if you're not sure what that is, we're going to go into a lot of detail about that in this episode. In fact, I hope that every client I've worked with this past year gets a chance to listen to this episode.
Speaker 3:Hi so welcome, Karen. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me, Jack let's talk about what you do at Heirloom Consulting and how you help clients. So I think we're one of the only companies believe it or not in the whole country that does this. But I started out Wowegal in the estate planning industry for many, many years and I worked with a lot of trustees and personal representatives and the one thing I always saw was, a they never really wanted to do the job, they did it out of respect for their parents or, b they weren't capable and in either case they really struggled, and so I was always there to help them, kind of guide them through the process. And after time I just realized that there's a whole industry out here of baby boomers whose kids need help, and I can't believe how many people need help. I got to be honest with you and people just don't want to be a trustee. It takes four to 500 hours to settle in the state.
Speaker 2:What Did you say? Four to 500 hours to settle in the state.
Speaker 3:Yeah, An average Having a second job right.
Speaker 2:For those of us that are completely ignorant what happens when you die, that you would need someone to take four to 500 hours to settle your estate.
Speaker 3:So if you have a trust or a will, a full estate plan, you go to your lawyer. They set up this plan and you have everything organized and in order and everything is perfect. Your trustee or your personal representative, who you appoint to do the work of administering your trust, they could just go in and do everything you ask them to do. But in the real world that's not how things happen. People are quite unorganized as much as their professionals, or they think they're organized. What happens when they die is something needs to be decided on how to manage the house.
Speaker 3:Is it maintained? Does it need to be sold? Who gets all the personal property? How are you distributing the personal property? Do you need an estate sale? Do you need a clean out? Do you need somebody to just come in and clean the house? And sometimes people will buy the house with all the contents in it. So you need people to go in and figure out every single asset. Every single item in the house needs to be either distributed, sold or donated, and so every single asset could a gym membership hasn't been canceled and there's money on the table, or it could be unclaimed property. We find a lot of assets for people. Okay, we could have a mid-seeming heir. We find heirs. People have lost heirs of our. You know there's a million different things that need to be done to settle an estate.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so somebody who is single and is divorced, that does not have a partner, that's going to step into their shoes if they die unexpectedly? I think I've read in some of your materials online that we are all going to die At some point. We are all going to need someone to handle our estate and I think for a lot of people who are married, they assume that their spouse is going to. Whether or not their spouse has knowledge is a different story. What are the things that can be done if you are a single person? Let's say, our average audience member is between the age of 40 and 65. If you're single, what are the things that you should be doing to take care of your estate? Because I know most of my clients. All they want to do is protect their children.
Speaker 3:Right, that is such a fact. So people will put together an estate plan, which is essential. That's step number one. Call your attorney, get an estate plan. But aside from that, once you have the estate plan, if it's not funded so if you have a trust and your assets aren't in the trust bucket I'll say, then you don't really have a trust, you just have a bucket, right? So that's one thing that's essential.
Speaker 3:And, especially after you get divorced, you need to retitle everything into your new trust or your new estate. So that's one thing you need to do. And then you need to make sure that you have a team set up so if something does happen to you, you'll have a team ready to go and they'll hopefully know what it is you want with all of your assets and your dreams and wishes once you die. But even more important is to have your everything organized. We call this legacy planning and what we do is we get you organized from A to Z, with all your assets in a fireproof, waterproof case and digitally, making sure that if somebody is your trustee, they have all your account numbers, your social security numbers, your beneficiaries, everything they will need to know. We have it in this chart.
Speaker 2:Wow, and that's not a lawyer wouldn't do that, right. People will never do that. They will come to do it but they don't have time.
Speaker 3:Sure, they wish you did it. Yeah, because you're costing them a lot of time when you go in there with their questionnaire to do your estate plan and you have 10 out of the 400 items filled out that they need.
Speaker 2:What I think is very common is people think that their divorce decree actually has some control over what happens with their estate and if you don't change your beneficiary designations on your retirement accounts, your life insurance, and if you don't have assets in a trust, that there's a clear line of where that is going, it doesn't matter what your divorce decree says, because if you haven't changed your beneficiary and your divorce decree can say that your 401k goes to whoever you name, but if you leave your ex-spouse's beneficiary on there, that's who it's gonna go to. And now you've created a huge problem for your real beneficiaries if they need to go back and fight it when the divorce is done. People wanna put the decree in a drawer, they don't want to think about it and they don't go back and do these really important pieces just basic things to protect themselves. So it sounds like you can help with those kinds of things, or at least being a partner in that.
Speaker 3:Right and guiding them. He done the proper things. It would have been a lot easier for my mom, single parent, no kid, three kids, wow. So you're tired. You just got through a divorce. Sometimes it's a hairy divorce, but you can't stop there. You have to make sure your assets are corrected and your estate plan is corrected, or you could find yourself in a lot of trouble, or your family can when you die.
Speaker 2:I don't do that with clients, so I work with them during the divorce. I would love to send them to someone like you because I am always worried about them. I think that I'm very maternalistic about my clients and we work so hard to get them a good settlement and I always feel like I work with someone during the worst point in their life and I get to know them in a very financially intimate way that their friends, their family doesn't know. So I feel really protective of them. I would feel really great if clients worked with someone like you to kind of piggyback all of that and I think, again, there's just not enough awareness about the need to do that and how important it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree with you and especially, you know we were talking earlier about how people want to protect their kids. That's the theme that just keeps coming up over and over and over again, and I even see married couples where the spouse isn't feeling like the other spouse isn't caring for their children when they die, that they haven't set things up right. If you want to protect your kids, you have to go and do these steps. There's just no way around it. We're all going to die. Like you said, that's our tagline. We don't want to think about it. But yeah, yeah, I mean, no one wants to do it, nobody wants to talk about it. Think about it. We all know that. But you know what? Let's sit down and have some coffee. I'll type some things out. It'll be fine. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't have to be stressful, it's just conversation.
Speaker 2:What other kinds of professionals do you gather on a team? So you've got estate planning attorneys. I would say I'm production right.
Speaker 3:So I've got you know all the different teams set up, all the different vendors set up, and I'm moving the pieces around making sure everybody's doing everything they're supposed to do.
Speaker 2:Okay, so communicating with each other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like the one point of contact so that they don't have to make 10 calls. Okay, they can make their. You know, obviously they're going to make the call to their estate planning lawyer, go in and see them and do their thing. Also their CPA and their financial advisor. But I'm going to make sure they're doing the steps and coaching them along the way and making sure they do the things Okay. And then when somebody dies, I'll obviously help or do the tasks that need to be done in a state administration. Okay, so sometimes you're the personal representative, sometimes I'm personal representative and trustee, sometimes I'm just the person who is their consultant, helping them get those things done or doing the work for them. I'll sell the house, I'll do the estate sale, clean out all those things, wow.
Speaker 2:So how many hours do you find yourself working with each case?
Speaker 3:You know it's always different. Every family has different needs. I have one client where I go to her house once a week and we sit and do different kind of. I set up her spreadsheets and her passwords and she's an elderly lady and she just needs help organizing. I organize all her assets and stuff. So she's a once a week person. And then I have other people like this estate liquidation it's going to take months.
Speaker 2:Is your ideal client the person who is still living or is your ideal client the family or is it F? The person is deceased or is it a combination?
Speaker 3:You know it's really a combination. You know, I started out thinking it was going to be one thing and it's kind of morphing into something else. So we're getting a lot of estate liquidation calls and house sale calls, which we seem to be really good at, and so we're kind of going in that direction. But I also love the one-on-one and holding someone's hand and I walk in and she cries. She's so happy to see me. I love the one-on-one and really helping somebody who's struggling. So I'm really kind of a two-sided person. I love both kinds of work. So we just mix it all up.
Speaker 2:So I have a burning question to ask you. This comes up in a lot of the cases that I've been involved with over the years, and I noticed on your website that you will help with people making a decision about what will happen to their pet. And for people who have pets I have one. I know you have a pet that's like my family, and I think people don't consider that when they're getting divorced, what's going to happen to my pet? If something happens to me, my pet's not going to go to my spouse. What can people do to prepare for that?
Speaker 3:So if you have a pet trust which can either be part of your estate plan or it can be an individual pet trust and you put money aside for your pet covers, their vet bills, it covers their burial, their food, their grooming, you know whatever you want to put in there so you just pre-put money aside, just like you would for a child, right? And they are like our kids, right? We love our pets. So it's just a matter of setting things up for them, just the same way you would for a family member. You have to choose a caregiver, so that may be a friend or family, but maybe not. I mean, if you don't, then where are they going to go, right? So you have to pre-plan that. If you don't, I mean, sometimes they go to humane society or somewhere else, and then you just don't know what's going to happen to them.
Speaker 3:We act as pet trustee, so we handle the finance of it, where we will pay the caregiver, pay the vet bills, pay all those things, make sure that your pet trust is followed. But that's just the financial part. We don't do the caregiver part. So there's only so many hours of the day, right, right, right. Oh, who has the time for that? Right?
Speaker 2:You would be in charge of paying the bills and doing all of that.
Speaker 3:Right. So you don't want your caregiver to also be your trustee, because there's a little bit of a conflict there, right conflict there. You want to make sure that everything is above board.
Speaker 2:I think this is a really interesting point for people to consider who have children that are, if they're minor children, they don't have any control, if they're divorced, over whether or not their former spouse becomes the guardian. I mean, they don't have control over that, but they do have control over the finances and how the money is handled, or the money that they're going to leave for their children. Can you talk about that a little bit? If you were sitting down with someone and they have minor children and they have a large estate, what can they do to make sure that the money goes for the children and not just to their former spouse?
Speaker 3:Well, the very most important thing is to go to your financial advisor and reestablish your assets and make sure that your beneficiaries are set up for your kids or your trust or however you plan it. Because, like you said, if you leave it in your ex's name sorry, it's his what are you going to do? Have your little minor kids go to court fighting for their money? There's nothing you can do. So it's essential to just set it all up in advance, right when you're getting divorced. Just get it all down and suffer through. Just consider it a growth year and suffer through the year and push yourself and just get to where you need to go, so then you can just relax and everything's set up and you don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 2:There are so many things on people's minds after the divorce is done. It takes a long time to transfer assets from one party's name to another. It takes time if they're selling a house, all of those things that need to get done. I think the very last thing that people are thinking about is what happens if I die and I have minors. I very rarely hear people even bring that up, even though I know that their children are the most important thing.
Speaker 2:Like you said, people have a trust all the time. It's basically it's empty if you don't title your assets in the name of your trust. That's really common. I see that on the front end when people come to me when they're getting divorced and they have a trust set up but they don't have anything titled in the name of the trust. So again, their attorney did the right thing. The attorney did all of the estate planning paperwork, gave them instructions and they said thank you very much and they put it away and then they didn't do anything with it. So having someone like you is so valuable to coordinate between professionals, right.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, it just takes the uh, the weight off, knowing that somebody else is kind of keeping you accountable, right, um, you know, sometimes it's just a matter of me saying, oh, you just have to fill out this form, you know, go to your financial advisor and, just you know, have this form signed and you're done. You know, it could be something really simple to me, but not, it feels big. Right, exactly, not their language, right, it's not their industry. So you could be even a lawyer. I work with some lawyers who I'm their trustee and their trust, because that's not the kind of business they do. Right, they might be a real estate lawyer, they might be a doctor, whatever, Somebody who's a professional. They still don't know this language and it's a lot of work to learn the language. So it's just easy for me. I just go boom, boom, boom. Who am I going to call? What do I got to do?
Speaker 2:You know, let's just get this done, and so I think it just takes the weight off to work with somebody, To leverage someone else's knowledge and to take all of that time out of the equation. It's just kind of going straight to someone that can really get it done for you. How do people pay you?
Speaker 3:So we sort of have a variety of things we do pay you. So we sort of have a variety of things we do In a state administration. If we're doing all the work, we'll charge hourly. But the exception is if we're selling a house commission like any other broker, we do estate liquidation, we do a percentage, just like any other estate sale company. But then if I'm doing an asset search or an error search or helping fill out forms or something like that, it's hourly. And then for legacy planning that's hourly as well. But I do have packages where I know it'll take about this much time. I give you a nice fireproof, safe thing and a digital.
Speaker 2:It's so awesome.
Speaker 3:I know, put my little sticker on it. I bet the attorneys are so happy when they see that and this one guy was like I can't even believe what you did for this lady. You know she was somebody who had her papers all over the floor and he kicked her out and he said come back when you're ready. And so he called me. He's like I can't even believe she's the same person.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:What a great feeling.
Speaker 2:I've had clients bring in a suitcase, an actual suitcase, filled with their financial documents.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't have any feelings about your papers, I just go do, do, do garbage.
Speaker 2:You know this is what we have left Right. What a gift for people to do that in that situation, when you are already feeling overwhelmed by whether it's a death that you're grieving from a divorce, any kind of major transition in your life. It's hard to think straight and, like you said, someone who's never been through it before, even if they're a very intelligent person, they're good with the law, they're good with numbers. This isn't what they do every day, so there's no harm in getting help for that, especially when it's going to make your life so much easier and you get some control back in your life, right.
Speaker 3:And I always think about you. Know, whenever people choose their trustee and their personal representative in their estate plan, they're always thinking, oh, my spouse or my children, my adult children, but not realizing that they're going to be grieving when you die and they're going to be sad and they're going to be maybe even foggy for a year. And now they're tasked with all this work and all this stuff. They don't know how to do and you just like dropped a load on them, Right.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 3:And that makes it harder, right, and then sometimes the other spouse is 80, you know, not really in a position to be administering a state, so I don't know. I always go back to just be really careful who you're choosing, that's all.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to link all of your contact information in the show notes for this episode. Karen, is there anything that we didn't cover that you think is worth mentioning?
Speaker 3:No, it just doesn't have to be this hard. You don't have to white knuckle your way through this stuff. It doesn't have to be scary. I can hold your hand, you can hold their hand and we can make their lives just so much easier. It just feels so big. It doesn't have to be. You know, there's help out. There is all I will say. I love that.
Speaker 2:That is a great way to end, so thank you so much for being my guest and hopefully I can have you on another time and we can talk more. As we were talking, I was thinking of other questions that I would want to ask you, so you're a great resource, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen to Divorce Rich Podcast. If you like this podcast, please follow us on Apple or anywhere that you download podcasts and share this link with any friends or family that you think might benefit from this information.
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