Creative Solutions for Life's Toughest Moments, with Attorney Paul Velasco

0:02 Really excited to have today one of my favorite past guest back on, Paul Velasco. When I was first working in the probate space, I went to different events to meet people, get the lay of the land. And I saw him speaking at an event in Signal Hill near Long Beach. It was P fact, professional fiduciary association. And he gave a lecture or talk on Heggstad petitions. And it amazed me how the command of this of the topic he had, he had samples of his filings, he was sharing it with a room where maybe there were five or 10, I guess, competitors or colleagues in the room. But it really does not because when you're as good as you are, you're an expert in certain things, you share things to stand out, that's how you build your business. I'm excited to have Paul Velasco, one of the top probate attorneys, litigators, and estate planners in Southern California back to the program. Paul, thanks for joining us again today.

0:49 You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Bill. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and to be on your program. Happy to talk about what I do every day.

0:58 You know, one thing is I have a list of questions we talked about pre a couple, but one thing I always want to that always amazes me was when I first met you, how open you were about what I thought was a very narrow and specific area of expertise. You know, not just talked about, but you literally gave out copies of your petition. and so, you know, to me I'm thinking well, for the people who are you know, prospective customers, that's great. For the competitors, they could just copy it off and say, "Hey, I have the same thing Paul has." Tell me your thinking by hand about that. You must have felt pretty confident or comfortable sharing those environments. I know you do it regularly. Talk a little bit about how what your thinking is behind that.

1:33 I do, I do. Look, I mean, there's just so much work out there, so much business for all of us to share. I don't really see people who do the same line of work as I do as competitors. To me, they're colleagues and friends. And in the world that we work in, the trust and estates world, it's a very small collegial world. We all work together, we help each other. We give kind of thoughts to each other about best practices and, you know, share information that we think would be helpful to each other. And so, I've always been about that, about sharing, not hiding the ball, whether it's with clients, which I think it's really important for me to clients to understand what we're doing, not just for the attorney to write all the documents and then, you know, they with all the legal ease and then that client's not understand what they're signing. I want them to know what they're doing and the decisions they're making cuz they're making the decisions. I'm putting it in writing, but it's important for me to know. So, getting knowledge out there to for everybody is important to me, whether I'm speaking directly one-on-one with a client or speaking with others in the community, other professionals, whether it's real estate or financial professionals, so that they understand, you know, kind of my world and what we do and best practices. And so, if we come up with something where we see a common mistake that people are making and problems with trusts, I like to point that out. Not just the problem, but I also want them to see what the solution is because it's simple. Now, these are documents that I file with the court and anybody could go down to the courthouse and pull them and see them. So, it's no secret what I do, but I don't mind sharing it at all.

2:55 If this can help somebody else in the future in their practice and help their clients, so that they can minimize problems later, I think that's great for everybody. So, I have no problem with sharing, you know, my work with other professionals.

3:06 And I want to thank you cuz you really inspired me to feel the same way about my business. When I do this podcast, I try to, you know, not hold anything back and share best practices because I want to raise the practice of all real estate agents and hopefully we can all do a better job and help the attorneys we work with as well. So, thank you for that piece. And again, that wasn't really what we scripted to start with, but I owe you a real gratitude a debt of gratitude for that. So,

3:27 Know I didn't realize that a lot of that stuff that I put out there, where I've given presentations to other professionals and to, you know, the different probate bars, I, you know, give materials to everybody and I didn't realize that that ended up like online. It ended up online. People can go and they read all these materials and I've gotten calls from others saying, "Hey, I saw this thing that you put together and I had a question about it. Can you give me a little bit more information?" Or they're asking for information. So, I realize that that information is out there and I'm great I'm I'm grateful that I can help other people.

3:57 I know that the week after I was at that event, somebody called me and said, "I can't you know, I have a problem because I trust we lost this property on the trust." And I said, "Oh, no, I know a guy who can help you with that." We referred him to you and you were able to file the proper paper and get that done. So, I know you know, again, for me it was it was obvious, but to see the other how you approach with other colleagues, I think it's just admirable. I think all of us need to raise our standards and the way to do that is by being able to share and hold each other accountable and then we all get learn and all get our standards raised.

4:25 Okay. So, speaking towards raising standards, you've also gone through a pretty significant rebranding, not just changing your name and your website, but really the I think acknowledging changes in your structure. Was Velasco Law Group announced VZ Law and I think that goes along with really kind of formalizing as a partner Laura Zolnekoff, who had a program I think or about ready to issue that episode. Talk a bit about the changes in your practice and where she fits in that.

4:50 Yeah, sure. So, back when I started the practice back in 2002, I had a partner. You know, we formed this practice together. We had both worked at individual law firms and actually one law firm together and that's where we met each other and we decided to kind of break out on our own and start our own law firm. It was just him and I he and I in Long Beach and we started our practice together. We worked together for 4 years. We were really good friends. We enjoyed each other's company. We very much respected each other in terms of the work that we did. He handled the estate administration side of things. I handled the planning and the litigation and it worked very well together, but after about 4 years we started to grow significantly. We had to add staff. We had to increase our office space and he didn't really want to go down that road. You know, he didn't want the additional responsibility of more staff and more overhead and he was thinking more like he wanted to go back to just be a solo practitioner to work as little or as much as he wanted to without having to feel like he had to keep up with me and all the work that I doing because I was doing a lot of the work in the practice. So, we ended up parting ways, going our separate ways, and I just stayed with the staff and the offices and just continued to grow from there. And over the years, we've grown significantly. We have about 25 staff who work with us. There's four full-time attorneys, three part-time attorneys, and all of us are dedicated really to trusts and estates work. And during that time, I hired an associate about 11 years ago, Laura Zolnekoff. And I really kind of took a chance. She was out of law school. I was really looking for somebody who had experience, somebody who can just come in and hit the ground running. I didn't really have a whole lot of time to handhold or do a lot of training, but I had faith in her and she really had confidence in herself. And she said, "Look, if you let's do the 6-month part-time thing and if you don't like my work, you can let me go." And we actually did that. And after 2 months or after a month, really, I knew that she was, you know, born for this and that she would be an amazing attorney. And she is, you know, my prediction came true. She is an amazing trust litigator. She's been heading our litigation department for the last 8 years. And she's just an amazing lawyer.

6:48 She's grown into that position. And she has, in addition to that, helped to grow the practice. She's a very great rainmaker. And she also has helped manage the firm, right? It takes a lot of time and effort to manage a bunch of people. And so, she's helped doing that. She'd helped to do that as well. And so, it was time that I recognized so a couple years ago, I added her as a partner to the firm. And we just last year, we just changed the branding to make it VZ, which is the Velasco Zolnekoff Law LLP, VZ Law LLP. So, same people, same staff, same, you know, great services that we provide to our clients, but Laura is now recognized as being, you know, a big part of that. And eventually, she'll take over the practice when I retire.

7:31 You know, when you when I met her, my stereotype is she seemed too nice to be a litigator, but I'm sure you cross her. Sure that there's some claws underneath those [laughter] furry hands of hers that I would come out. So, I don't want to want to cross her. I don't want to find out the hard way. I'm sure she's she can get me in a

7:46 Find out the hard way. Yeah, I really don't want to find out the hard Yeah, no. So, okay. So, let's talk about then maybe some advanced topics. I think, you know, we're lucky to have somebody who's obviously so experienced in committing to this industry. I think you know, my thesis when I started was that well, actually my research showed 90% of probate cases were handled by attorneys who did one or less the prior 12 months. And so, the problem is the average service then in the marketplace is a pretty low-level service. And then when somebody who does it full-time or exclusively or is the you know, the focus of the practice they stand out. You know, I can go, "Wow, this is this is a whole different cat than I'm used to dealing with." you know, my biggest problem in real estate is how do I politely argue with the attorney without arguing cuz he's only done one or two, doesn't really know what he's doing. In your case, that's not the case. And so, we had a chance to ask some questions and go a little deeper. One of the areas obviously I focus on is estate planning, which is avoiding probate. It's kind of the preventive version of the same issue.

8:42 Yeah. And I know that oftentimes you know, people mistakenly think if I have an estate plan, I won't go to court. Well, every trust that's been litigated is in court by definition. That wasn't true.

8:53 True. One of the common areas is not thinking through this the order of succession. You have a husband and wife, they write a plan, they're together, they're holding hands, they're in love, everything's great. But unless you know which one goes first or which one gets incapacitated first, talk a little bit about the importance of planning and thinking about the different the different options or scenarios that can take place.

9:12 Yeah, of course. So, estate planning is a big part of our practice and it's and it's so important to Yes, you're right. the idea behind a trust and doing a trust to make the main purpose is to avoid courts, avoid probate. But there's more than just probate. There's also litigation that can happen when things go wrong within the trust or people have disagreements or they're contesting the trust. things can go wrong when the planning is not done correctly and the trust does not actually reflect what was intended. And so when there's ambiguities in the trust, when things are not clear from the trust, we end up in court anyway. It may not be probate, but it may be in the trust court to interpret some provision that if you interpret it one way it's going to help one person, if you interpret it another way it's going to help somebody else, everybody lawyers up and now we're in court fighting over something that really could have been prevented if it was handled correctly in the beginning in the estate plan in the trust itself. So it's really important when doing estate planning that you go with an expert, somebody who knows what they're doing, somebody who does trust regularly. My recommendation would be a certified specialist in estate planning, which is important. Because that person is going to give you going to know all the different scenarios, the different ways that a trust can be set up. And when I meet with my clients, it's important for me to know their information, their background, not just their financial information, but also their family information. Many of the clients that come to me today are blended families, right? Children they have each of them are married, this is the second marriage, they both have children from prior marriages, and those are really important to plan properly. Those where mistakes are often made and when the first spouse when the first spouse passes away, where everybody lawyers up because it's not done correctly or there's problems with the trust. And so it's really important to make sure that the trust reflects what they both want, that these clients when they came to me, that they were making these decisions together, that they had options and that they knew the consequences of each option, and then they made a decision that they thought was best for their family. So one of the biggest mistakes that married couples make when they do a trust is not understanding what the trust really does. At its core, a trust is a contract between them. They're making this contract together in which they're stating, "We're going to transfer all of our assets into this trust, and this trust is going to control their assets in three different time frames of their lives." The first time frame is during their joint lifetimes. And literally, the trust has provisions that say, "During our joint lifetimes," and essentially what it says is, "These are our assets. We're still the owners.

11:36 We're putting it in the trust. These belong to us. They're for our use and benefit. This trust is revocable. We can amend this trust at any time. We can cancel it. We're in control." That's phase one. And all trust for married couples say essentially the same thing. The second phase of a trust is what happens when the first spouse passes away. There are different scenarios, different options. The question is, "Okay, does the trust remain revocable? It was revocable when they first created it, but when the first spouse passes away, can the survivor still make changes to it?" can the survivor use and spend the money in the assets in the trust freely? Are there any restrictions? What if the survivor remarried and they wanted to include the new spouse in the trust or leave it all to the new spouse and cut out the children? Would that be possible? All that depends on the type of trust that that married couple chose. And there's different options. I'm going to talk about those options in a second. The third phase of a trust is what happens when they both pass away. Where do the assets go? Who is it left to? How is it left to them? And there are common mistakes made in that area, too. And I'm going to talk about the two most common mistakes in those two phases, the second phase and the third phase. So, let me go back to that second phase. What happens when the first spouse dies? So, there's there's three main options and I'm going to keep it short as I can just to talk about the basics of the each option so that you understand it. The first phase The first option is what's called an AB trust. An AB trust is that when the first spouse dies, that one family trust that was together, that one trust, now is going to divide into two trusts. So, the fi- survivor has to follow the instructions in the trust that say, "Okay, at the first death, create two trusts, two sub-trusts." So, it's now going to be the Velasco Family Survivor's Trust and the Velasco Family Decedent's Trust. And essentially, it's a 50/50 split. If everything was community property, we put half of the assets in the survivor's trust, half the assets in the decedent's trust, and now it's 50/50. Now, it's no longer one family trust, it's two. But, the survivor is still in control of both trusts as the trustee. But, these two trusts have different characteristics.

13:45 The first trust, the survivor's trust, remains revocable. The survivor, if they wanted to make a change in the future, they can change it. Even though when they created the trust originally, it said they were leaving everything equally to the to the children, the survivor can change that. If the survivor wants to include a new share for the grandchildren, they could do that. Survivor wants to include a new spouse, they could do that. If the survivor wants to cancel that trust, revoke it, and start a whole new trust with those assets in the survivor's trust, they could do that. In other words, there's no restrictions in the survivor's trust. Survivor can use them, spend them, or give them away however they choose. That's the survivor's trust. The other 50% of the estate is held in the decedent's trust. That trust became irrevocable at the first death. Survivor cannot change that. So, whatever they had said in the beginning when they created that trust about where the assets go at the second death, that's going to be set in stone now. But, that doesn't go to those kids yet. It stays in trust for the survivor because what if the survivor needs those assets? If the survivor doesn't have sufficient funds in their trust, in their survivor's trust, to maintain their accustomed standard of living, they can reach into that decedent's trust and use those assets, too. But, only for that reason, for their health, support, or maintenance. Otherwise, if the survivor has sufficient money in that survivor's trust, that's what they're going to use, the survivor's trust.

15:04 But, it's there as a backup document backup option. If they need it's there for them to use. That's why it doesn't go to the kids yet. Then, when the survivor dies, all those assets that were left that the survivor either didn't use or didn't use at all, those go to the deceased spouse's beneficiaries. And that cannot be changed. That is an AB trust, right? Now, that type of trust is very popular 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when the tax laws were different. because it the idea behind it was to maximize the amount that you could pass to your children tax-free by splitting up the trust. Well, today the tax laws have changed significantly. And so, you don't necessarily need that AB trust to accomplish the same tax goals that you did before. You can do it all by just making it much simpler. But, just one more thing about that AB trust is that it has some administrative burdens. When the first spouse passes away, the survivor's going to have to do that split. They're going to have to re-title all the assets from the Velasco Family Trust into the Velasco Family Survivor's Trust, the Velasco Family Decedent's Trust, so they get split and re-titled. Everything gets re-titled. There that B trust also file has to file a separate income tax return. So, you can see that there's some complexities there. There's some work that needs to get done at the first death that many times survivors don't want to do, right?

16:22 And so, when they see that and they what the survivor has to do, many clients balk at that and say, "I don't I don't want to do all that. That seems too complicated for me." But, that's the first option that people have to understand what the consequences are, what happens at the first death with this type of trust. So, that's option number one. Option number two is much simpler. It's just called a simple trust. First spouse passes away, everything just passes to the survivor in a simple survivor in a single survivor trust. Nothing changes. All we do is we take the deceased spouse's name off as trustee of all the assets in that trust, and the survivor just continues with it. But, that trust is revocable 100%. The survivor can change not just their 50%. They can change the entire plan. They can cancel that trust completely and start a whole new trust. So, there's no restrictions on how the survivor can use it, spend it, give it away. So, first spouse dies, the survivor has clearance to do whatever they choose. So, if they decided to in the future get a new spouse and they leave it all to the new spouse, they could do that. And so, when clients hear that, they don't really like the sound of that, right? So, over the years, when I And these really, if you go to any other attorney, those are the only two options you have for a married couple, either a AB trust or a simple trust. And over the years, my clients, when I explained that to them, they didn't like any of those options. They didn't like the fact that with the AB option, it's just too complicated. We don't want to go through that. But, they also didn't like the simple trust that just gave the survivor carte blanche to do whatever they chose. And it potentially cut out the children and leave it all to a new spouse. So, we listened to our clients and we made changes to that. And so, we have a third option, which I refer to as the hybrid trust option, because I took the best of both worlds and I created into one trust where the option from the simple trust. So, what I did was I said, "Okay, what do we like about the simple trust? We like simplicity. Clients like simplicity.

18:22 When the first spouse dies, they don't want the survivor to have to go through a bunch of work to change titles to everything, to rebrand the trust, to change the titles to all their properties and accounts, to have to file a new tax return every year for that trust." They don't want that. They want simplicity. So, what do we do? We created a trust that just said at the first death, everything just stays in the survivor's trust. Okay? But, we modified it to say, "The survivor cannot revoke that survivor's trust. It's got to stay in place." Where before, in the simple trust, they could change it, amend it. This The survivor cannot revoke. It's got to stay in place. In that sense, it's irrevocable. First spouse dies, everything stays with the survivor. The survivor has the freedom to use and spend the money for whatever they need. They can't cancel the trust. They cannot take assets out of the trust and leave it somewhere else, but they can leave it in the trust and use it for whatever their needs are. Okay? That's what they want to do, provide for each other, right? But then, where does everything go then at the second death? Well, each of the spouses are going to tell me, "What do you want done with your 50%?" So, at the second death, it's going to say the spouse the wife wants their her share to go to her children. The husband wants his share to go to his children. And so, at the second death, each spouse's wishes will be recognized. Whatever they wanted to do with their half, that's how it's going to go.

19:41 The survivor can still change their wishes. If they want to make a change in the future that cuts out a child and puts it to somebody else, they want to include a new spouse, they can do that, but it's only going to affect half. That's like the AB thing.

19:56 Right. And then, the deceased spouse's portion cannot be changed. So, if the survivor now wants to add a new share for the grandkids, well, they're going to make a change to their trust. They can amend that, but it's only going to affect 50%. The deceased spouse's portion is still going to go the way that it was originally written. So, that's like the AB, but without all the complications that comes with an AB. So, that split comes at the second death, right? So, essentially, that hybrid says this, "Honey, if I die first, I'm leaving it all to you in the trust. You use it and spend it for whatever you need, but you can't cancel this trust, and you can't take assets out and leave it somewhere else. You got to leave them in the trust while you're there while you're alive." When you pass away, you can change it to put your half wherever you want, but my half, you got to give to the kids the way we set it up originally. That is the hybrid, right? And so, that gives clients another option. So, they have the simplicity of a simple trust where there's not going to be a whole lot of work after the first death, but protection for the children that survivor can't just change the entire trust. So, that's an option that our clients have, and many of our clients choose that latter option, and it's been working for the last 12 years. It's been working exactly the way we intended it. So, those are the different ways that a trust can be can be set up and I'll tell you when clients come in and I'm doing a trust review where they had a trust done by some other attorney, they come in and they have me review the trust and I go over these different options with them and I ask them, "Do you know what your trust says? When your first spouse dies, what's going to happen?" And to a person, they all say, "No, we don't know." And then when I tell them what option they have, it's an option that they would not have chosen themselves.

21:29 And so, it tells that they probably were never explained to them what happens at the first death and what's going to happen with the trust. So, it's really important that people recognize not only what the different options are, but what the consequences of each option are and then what's best for their family. So, that's what we

21:45 It's so hard to for people to even imagine the options and then to think about the consequences. I know a common case I see is husband, you know, has family, raises has kids, wife passes, he remarries, and so, he wants to leave the house to his wife to live there as long as she wants. Of course, he wants to take care of it. It's his wife. They lived together and he loved her and whatever. But when she's gone, she wants all your go he wants it all to go to his kids, which makes sense, too. The problem is, you know, 10 years go by and that house that used to be a modest house in Mar Vista worth half a million dollars is worth like two or three million dollars or more. And the kids are just aching for that money cuz they're living they're you know, whatever, they're living at their at their means and they're looking at this fortune and they see step the step monster, as they refer to her, she's a demon from Hades living in their in their rightful inheritance and she didn't do anything other than she lived healthy and she's going to live to 90 years old or more.

22:44 True. And you know her husband want that to happen, but it's hard to tell the kids that. So, you know, one of the challenges I'm sure is you must have people come to you 10, 20 years later and the plan all worked the way it was designed, but the consequences are maybe not what they anticipated. you know, can you account for that change or you just have to walk people off the ledge and just say there's not much you can do if that's how it's written?

23:08 Well, yeah. I mean, you're talking about like after the fact, after somebody has passed away, are there things that can be done? Sure, there's things that can be done. So, for example, with that whole AB thing, many clients have trusts for from, you know, the '90s or the early 2000s where those trusts were very prevalent. And so, her spouse has now died, the client comes to me, and I let them know, this is what has to happen. You had an AB trust. We have to help you with the allocation of the assets. And again, most of the time they don't don't want that, you know? They rebuff that. They just say, "Well, do I have to do that?" Well, yeah, the trust is a contract. You've got to follow what the contract says. Or you're or you're in breach of contract. Unless the children all agree that you don't have to set up that B trust. If everybody agrees, so there's a probate code provision that allows the beneficiaries and the creator of a trust to modify the trust as long as they all sign off. And so, we can prepare a modification agreement that the entire family signs off on where that the mom does not have to or the surviving spouse does not have to do this AB allocation, that everything can just be allocated to the survivor's trust. And if there's concerns about, you know, the survivor changing it, we can include a restriction that the survivor can't change or can only change up to 50% or we can add provisions that address their concerns. But yeah, that's that's the way that you do it is afterwards, if there's issues that come up, you know, when you say an irrevocable trust, it's kind of a misnomer because yeah, it can't be just revoked by the by the creators, but there are ways to still modify or revoke an irrevocable trust. There are different ways in the probate code that allow you to do that. So, depending on the circumstances, we can explain those options to our client and, you know, use the option that best fits their family circumstances. But ahead of time, ahead of time, what you have to do is walk the clients through these scenarios, just like the one you mentioned where you have this family home that often is the largest asset of the estate, holds a lot of the value. The survivor is still young and will live for many years and it's basically the surviving spouse's children are not going to inherit until that spouse passes away.

25:07 So, we talk about different ways that it can be set up. Maybe the survivor has a right to live there for 5 years. And then after 5 years, you know, with the consent of the their survivor and all the children, that house can be sold or it can be downsized or it just sold and that 50% goes to the survivor, 50% goes to the children. There's all different kinds of options that they can choose from. They just have to be walked through or told what the possibilities are. you know, most of the time people just want to leave it for the survivor. They're saying, "Hey, we built this together. These are our assets. The children are just going to have to wait till we're both gone." And that's okay. But as long as we set it up in such a way that those children are not going to be cut out because I've seen what you just said many times also, where the first spouse dies, the survivor has the right to change the trust, the marry a new spouse and you know, as we get older, we become susceptible to the influence of other people and sometimes those changes happen, you know, without you thinking about it ahead of time. I can't tell you how many times in meetings with my clients when we talk about this AB division and how the survivor has the right to change it and they can leave it all to the spouse. Everybody says, "Oh, well, I'm I'm not going to get remarried, you know, after I

26:17 Right. Or I trust I trust my spouse. He would never do that. It's not about trust. And you don't know what the future holds for you. Things are going to change. Your life will change when your spouse passes away. Your relationships with children may change, especially if you have a new partner and those two part those two do not get along. Things can happen, things can change that you never really thought about before. So, your life can change in ways that you didn't think about and so you have to address those issues within the trust to say, "Well, if this does happen, I just want to just protect it my half." That's what the hybrid trust does. It gives flexibility to the survivor to still use the assets for what they need, but limits their ability to just give it all away to somebody else.

26:59 It's so true about planning to remarry. My father passed when he was younger and my mother was widowed and I remember when she was at my house, I was playing a Frank Sinatra song, The Second Time Around, which is about getting married a second time. And I was just singing cuz I love I love Frank Sinatra and my wife's and my mother said to me, "What do you think if I got remarried?" I thought, "Well, I don't know, Mom. I guess it's your choice. I Like why are you even asking me this? I You know, whatever, Mom. You're going to do whatever you're going to do." In fact, she did. She remarried and she married a wonderful guy and he was a state planning attorney, as it turns out, and introduced me to some of these issues. But, yeah, you know, I would have She would have said she never remarried. I would have guessed she never remarried. But, you know, two or four years of loneliness and you used to being with somebody, you never know how these things change. And it's not that she disrespected my father's memory, the opposite. She actually married a guy who was very similar to my father and actually knew my father, kind of. So, it was very interesting. So, it seems to me that, you know, the practice of law, when I talk to successful practitioners like you and business people like you, that more and more the business includes kind of the far edges of the business, meaning 20 years ago, I would think the business was more just about doing estate plans, that idea that you had one was sufficient. Now, with technology and chat GPT and paralegals and online services, some of the business is being done being done improperly, being done poorly, even if it's done well, those edge cases aren't being handled.

28:19 The Heggstad being an example. I think also the AB trust options not being sufficient for all the circumstances. How much of business is now focusing on kind of these edge cases and fixing problems versus just generic doing estate plans?

28:34 Yeah, so I would say that, you know, we do a lot of litigation and when I say litigation, I mean just court work, right? So, a lot of times it's not just two parties who are in dispute, but where there's just problems with a trust and you end up having to go to court to interpret the terms of the trust or to fix a problem that was that that took place at the planning or the drafting level. So, it happens often. So, I would say probably of all the court cases that we have, probably 25 to 30% are fixing problems that could have been prevented in the draft at the drafting stage. And just resolving that. So, not necessarily disputes or disputes that resulted from the ambiguities in the trust. And now we're litigating over those or we're asking you the court for instructions, right? I just had a situation where father he passed away. Well, what happened was he and his wife did a trust together. They have two children together. And they did that trust, and it was an AB trust. And so, and this was back in the late '90s when the wife passed away. And the allocation wasn't really done correctly. And so, it wasn't clear whether it was done fully. Were all the assets divided into AB? Cuz that that then remarried. And they didn't really change the title on the property. It was all just still in the family trust. It didn't go into A or B.

29:53 And so, you know, 20 years later, father has now been remarried for some time. He's sick and he's going to revise his trust to provide for his new for his spouse for his second wife. And he sold the house that was the family home and used that money to purchase a new house. And then he put restrictions on it, basically saying that the survivor had the right to live there for the rest of her life and could use the funds for whatever her needs were. And that may have been what he wanted to do, but the question is is that should it should that have been divided into A and B?

30:25 Mhm. In which case he would not have been able to give her a right to reside on the B portion. Right. or was it properly all of the survivor's trust? And because of the titling, because the lack of allocation between A and B, proper allocation, those were all issues that are up in the that were up in the air. He also failed to fund that B trust with anything or that that trust with anything other than the house. He wanted to leave her the right to use the money that the trustee had to use the funds to maintain the property, but there were no funds.

30:52 Wow. Right? So, there were these issues that we were we just resolved that case. It was in court and in Shasta County up north and we ended up resolving it. We represented the children, somebody else was representing the spouse, and we ended up getting a resolution that we thought was fair for everybody. But, those are the kinds of disputes that happen because at the planning stage or lack of follow-through on the administration when the first spouse dies, things can happen and then it just spirals out of control and then it costs not thousands, but tens of thousands. These clients have spent tens of thousands of dollars disputing these issues.

31:25 Disputes are not cheap. Once you Once you have a dispute, it's kind of like a gunfight. Once you go to guns, it's a whole different You [laughter] know, baseball bats, knives, okay, one thing, but somebody can get injured, but you pull a gun out, the whole thing just kind of falls apart.

31:37 Exactly. Look, Paul, you're also very easy to talk to you. You're one of my favorite sources of information in this industry. I've gone a little bit over the time we allocated, so I just want to thank you so much for, like I said, I think really raising the standard and being an example for me in our industry as well to raise our standard, focusing on expertise and sharing information and hopefully amongst each other we can all learn from each other and grow as well. So, I just want to thank you for being on the podcast again as you've been a regular, been so kind to join us. if you want more Paul Velasco, you can go now to vzlawoffices.com, or Paul and his contact information's on the screen, 562- 432-5541. If you're driving, you can't get that, feel free to reach out to me. We I'd be honored to make that introduction as I have in various cases. Paul, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate today and continued success and good luck with the new branding and with the partnership. May it continue to flourish and help you achieve your goals as well.

32:32 Thank you, Will. I appreciate the opportunity to appear on your show again and I want to acknowledge you and all you do for your community. I mean, you're probably the most knowledgeable real estate professional that I know about probate. And I would even compare you to other attorneys who don't do probate, you have a lot more knowledge and experience with this than anybody. And you know, I highly I highly respect your knowledge and your authority that you have.

32:58 Well, thanks. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Very kind. And for the rest of us, this is a Probate Weekly. We do this every week, a new episode. We don't often get probate attorneys with that kind of background experience and success. But today we had Paul Velasco. We have a new episode every week. Feel free to join us. Subscribe, like. If you have suggestions of who we should interview, reach out to me. If I can help in any way, reach out at Bill Gross Probate on social media. And as always, make today your best day ever. Thanks so much.