Getting Through the Administrative Tasks After Losing a Loved One, with Bill Solominsky

0:01 Okay, welcome to Executorium podcast. I'm your host Bill Gross @billgrossprobate on social media. We get together every week and interview professionals who help executors with various tasks both before and after loss. They help them be more productive, effective, more at peace. And so and they're all and all those are interrelated. And today I really have the honor of interviewing one of our directory members out of Travis County, Texas, Bill Solominsky, who is the reluctant executor. I should say the company or the business is Reluctant Executor. Hopefully he's not reluctant. Bill, how are you doing?

0:33 I'm doing well today. How are you, Bill? Good. Thanks for joining us. So, let's talk about from the beginning. What is it that caused you to get into the business of the reluctant executor? How do you describe what you do?

0:45 Sure. So, started this business the way I think many other people in this industry do and that's just through a personal experience, a personal loss. My background coming into this is it was not a traditional path. It was engineering and product marketing. I worked at high-tech companies. The trigger that led me into this was when my dad called me in fall of 2020 to tell me he'd gotten diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. that I live in Austin, Texas. My parents are in Pittsburgh, PA, where I grew up. I jumped on the plane when I heard that news and flew up there and one of the first things I just instinctively did was open up a spreadsheet on my laptop and sat down with my parents and asked them, "What type of information do I need to know?" this was a way for me to well, my thinking was it was a way for me to help my mom cuz we knew the stage four diagnosis was, you know, pretty terminal. and so thinking that I'd have to help my mom later, I wanted to know the ins and outs of how they ran their daily life. the things that came up were mostly around financial accounts, utility accounts. you know, they had always been very transparent with me in terms of finances, but I didn't know the details. I didn't know what cable company they had or what kind of plan they had. how they paid their bills.

2:20 Was it by check? Was it auto drafted? those types of administrative things, I wasn't sure how much both of my parents knew about those types of things. And so, just wanted to sit down with them and capture that type of stuff as a way for me to be able to help my mom when the inevitable happened.

2:41 So, now you've kind of learned kind of by going through this yourself, unfortunately, the overwhelming tasks that some families face. And as a result, you've created a service called The Reluctant Executor. So, describe kind of your offering. There's a whole range of offerings from you know, doing it for people to doing it yourself and coaching them in the middle. Where do What kind of services and help are you offering families that find themselves in the same position that you were in?

3:10 Sure. So, it's kind of twofold, right? It's the planning ahead of time. So, it's very similar to what I did with my parents. I will sit down with families. Hopefully, it's decades before they need it. but, sit down usually takes about 2 to 3 hours and just go through the common the common things that they'll have to tackle after loss and how they can prepare for it, what they can document, how they can find where those documents are, who to share this stuff with. But, also I feel that by sitting across the table from these families and having that talk and having that time to dedicate to them, they find things that even if they're prepared had slipped through the cracks before. you know, maybe properties they hadn't thought of, maybe oh, cryptocurrency. Maybe they didn't realize that was something that was important or it's you know, newer since they created the original plan. So, having that one-on-one conversation or the family the conversation with the family is a way to excuse me, to help prepare help prepare them in advance. and then the other offering is after a loss. So, even with all the preparation, there are still a lot of things unfortunately that you really can't prepare for. a lot of unexpected things happen no matter how prepared you are. you know, you could get a letter from the IRS that you weren't expecting, that happened to us. You can have a subscription that you may not have known about. different things that come up after a loss.

4:44 Where I help families there is basically if you get a letter in the mail regarding your regarding your loved one's estate and you don't know where to start, don't know what it's about, I could be the first person that you would call. to help do the research to figure out what it is, what you have to do, put all the processes in place. And the benefit of that is that it really saves the families hours and hours of time. As I mentioned, a lot of times they don't know where to start and they don't have the time to go through that or they just don't want to do it. A lot of times some of these some of these letters come months or even years after an estate is closed. So, this stuff can bring up you know, some sometimes painful or sometimes difficult memories again or just dealing with the grief in a different way again. So, where I can step in is helping the families by researching what needs to be done. in some cases I can handle it for them. but what the benefit is, is like I said, it will save the family hours and hours of time, as well as any kind of stress that that may accompany that that new process, that new task that they have to deal with.

6:01 So, let's talk about before a loss, the steps kind of that you help families make or they need to do on their own, one or the other. And the first one you mentioned a little bit about was creating a list, an inventory of all the assets and liabilities. What are some of the most common things or most important things that are missed? You mentioned cryptocurrency. in your experience, what are the one or two most commonly missed or important in creating a list of assets and liabilities for a family?

6:27 Yeah, cryptocurrency is one and it's cuz it's relatively new. Some other common ones that, people just really don't think about are, maybe not necessarily online subscriptions, but other subscriptions. Think about a gym membership. think about, you know, other types of, like out of the house kind of recurring payments. maybe a newspaper subscription. things that just end up kind of nickel and diming you. It's maybe just $20 a month, but it really adds up over time and it's not something that families go into estate planning really thinking about. So, when you go to estate lawyer to create your will, create your trust, you're thinking about your major assets, right? You're thinking about your houses, house or houses, your properties, your, say, retirement accounts, your brokerage accounts, things that, you know, are substantial to many people. But you're not thinking about all the paper cuts, the utility bill, whose name is it in? the, as I mentioned, a gym membership, a newspaper subscription, online, random subscription that you may have. those fall under the radar when you think about the larger estate planning picture, but I would argue those create the most paper cuts after the fact. It's just kind of recurring type stuff. You'll get your bill and they go, "Oh, why am I paying the next year, you know, $20? I thought I took care of this." And then you have to track it down. You have to track down whose it name that account was under. can't Do you have access to it? How do you even cancel it? so those are you know, I think some of the common things. you know, other things that slip through the cracks as I mentioned, cryptocurrency account. Oh, yeah.

8:15 Storage lockers, physical types of you know, I want to say assets, but you know, thinking about do you have a it and I'll use storage locker as an example. Do you have a storage unit somewhere? Maybe people know about it, but how do they access it? Are you allowed to access it? Are the right people on there? So, not just thinking about those major assets that you have, but thinking about all the other types of things that that that in your daily life you that you interact with and ones that other family members may just not even know about.

8:52 So, and thanks. and so when you people have an estate plan, is the goal to end up with a plan or before a loss if there's a situation, is the goal to end up with a plan? Is it a working process? Is it something that finishes? Is it something that's ongoing? How do you see your role in that process?

9:17 I see myself as my role is to really inspire families to get started. kind of knowing that you can't really capture all 100% of things that you're going to have to deal with after a loss, getting at least 60% of it, 80% of it documented and shared is going to get a huge leg up on reducing the stress afterwards. So, my role is to help families set aside that time, that 2 to 3 hours to just get started. Capture important things as much as you know about. and then there is a life-changing event, you should be kind of well-versed in what to do to capture the new information. probably don't need to call me unless there's something really major. But really getting the family started. one of the biggest problems I've seen out there is that people do get inspired. They'll go download checklists, they'll download an app, they'll buy one of the books to capture everything. But then they don't follow through and actually fill the book out or fill the app out with the information. So, I feel like that that that's that's a great start, but you really need to have that that inspiration and the set aside the time to actually go ahead and fill that out. And that's where I see my service helping families the most is to be able to focus solid 2 hours to just get something started.

10:52 I find that oftentimes people say they're thinking about something, but they never really think about it because they are you know, they're thinking about thinking about it. And that actually taking a couple hours and putting a plan down, it may not be complete and exhaustive, but I think as you said, at least it's a good start and they probably hit the high points and they'll hit some points they otherwise might miss under the stress and it just seems to me to be a you know, time well spent. Putting ahead time on almost anything I think is time well spent. So, oh I know that your website is The Reluctant Executor and there you have among other things to help keep people up to date, you have a newsletter people can up for, is that is that one of the services that you offer and you find people help or help by that process?

11:40 Yeah, the newsletter I send it out every two weeks. It's it's a free newsletter and what I try to accomplish with that newsletter is to tell and share real life experiences, real life stories either from myself or from families I've worked with on some of the things that you just maybe a little bit further out there that you that you don't expect to happen. and so just a way to inspire families, you know, if you're thinking that estate the closing estate is in the state administration is going to be pretty straightforward work with an estate lawyer or go through probate. these stories not I don't want to really say they're horror stories, but I think they'll open some people's eyes into some of the other situations that they may not be expecting.

12:32 And so you can sign up at the website is reluctantexecutor.com. I put on the screen Bill's contact information, phone number as well as the website reluctantexecutor.com is the service and again that's found on the Executorium podcast. One of the benefits of Executorium is it has among other things a directory of service providers, government resources as well as some great information and learning. If you go to the directory of resources and you click the browse button, it'll ask you your county. If you put in this case Travis County, Texas, you'll see under a street estate administrative services there's reluctant executor as well as other services and this is true for each county across the country. If you're a provider, feel free to reach out to other providers to add them in here or if you're not on here, it's a free listing in one county. Feel free to put yourself in and if you click on reluctant executor, you will get Bill's website as well as a map and contact in this case a link to his LinkedIn. So, a link to his LinkedIn. Is that Is that his collector's LinkedIn? Anyhow, Bill, thank you so much time for sharing your service, make yourself available, and serving the executor community. Really appreciate your support.

13:41 Thank you a lot, Bill. Pleasure to be here. And as always, I'm Bill Gross and this is the Executorium Podcast. We do this every week with a new episode with different providers. You can get to the conversation on our Facebook group, which is Executorium Podcast. That's the name of the Facebook group. Go there. If you're looking for a particular area that's not serviced or you have questions or you're looking for referrals, love to have you participate. Again, we do this episode we do a new episode every week. Please check it out. If you like this, please like it. If there's a topic you want to see or a service you want to see, please put in the comment sections or send me an email or text me. I'm @billgrossprobate on social media and as always, make today your best day ever. Thanks so much.