Safeguard Your Legacy, with Texas Attorney Antoinette Bone

0:01 Over 40% of Americans pass without an estate plan leaving a legal mess and nightmare to their heirs to clean up. Expenses, time, frustration, emotion, and even those who have a plan often times find themselves in court because of inconsistencies or problems with the plan. I'm really excited to have you today a an expert in the field of both what to do when you're in probate and how to avoid probate through proper estate planning. Antoinette Bone from Antoinette of the Law Offices of Antoinette Bone PLC. Antoinette, thanks for coming back on our program.

0:30 Well, thanks for having me, Bill. It was a pleasure to be here again. So, let's talk a bit about that mess. You know, I imagine that your business is primarily about preventing people from having that mess, right? You're more on the estate planning and prevention side, aren't you?

0:45 Well, I try to be, but honestly, Bill, probate is like my largest practice area cuz people just stop dying.

0:54 You can't Yeah, people stop dying and then you they need help the faster that you get the estate plans written up, I think. Yes, so I do estate planning as well and that really does sort of help me in terms of probate and probate helps me in terms of drafting estate planning documents because I see a lot of the things that happen on the back end when you either don't have a plan or your plan doesn't turn out to work like you wanted it to.

1:26 So, I think that's important. I know there are attorneys who say they strictly do estate planning and others strictly do probate administration, others do litigation only. It seems to me with your side load, you don't see the effect of mistakes or the ways but the way that the mistakes I like that you do both. Tell me about one or two common problems that you see that preventable that it wasn't you know, they didn't come to you beforehand. The cows got out of the barn, but these are one or two mistakes that you see that people could easily solve if they spent a little bit of time with you.

1:55 Oh, honestly, the first one is simply having a plan. How about that? Having a plan, working with What a concept.

2:03 Plan or a trust-based plan, having something in writing. And you know, making sure that the people that you were leaving things to and that you were leaving in charge of handling your affairs once you're gone, know what's going on. And a lot of people seem to think their estate planning should be or needs to be secret. And most of the times it's just not the case. Certainly if you're naming someone to serve as a fiduciary, they need to know that you've named them for that job. This is not something that they should be surprised by because we want them to

2:48 Consent to it and understand what their role is before they are actually having to do anything. That's a good point because the reality is administering a probate to me, it just as a professional looking at it's really a business. Now, you can choose to do it for your family or do it for yourself if you're the only heir, but you're just running the business for yourself or your family, but really it's a business activity of sorts, right? You're marshaling assets, you're disposing of assets, you're managing them until you sell them. To me, and that and you brought the point, some people don't want to take on that responsibility. Maybe they're busy, they've family issues, they've health issues. So, talk about the importance of picking the right person to be the successor trustee or trustees versus just naming the one that you think is going to want the job.

3:36 Oh my goodness, I don't even know how much I can stress how important this decision is. Naming someone to serve as a successor trustee or the executor under your will is a big job. And it requires a lot of time from that person. And it can require resources. So, one, you want to make sure that your estate has the resources. And two, that the person that you're naming is suitable for the job. That they have the time for it. That they are going to honor your wishes. Because you know, documents can say things. They have words on paper. But sometimes what needs to happen is someone having the either fortitude or the willpower or the creativity to effectuate the words on the paper. Cuz sometimes the words don't fill in all the gaps. And you want to have someone that can really get things done and not be bogged down by indecision. And so, you know, there's you need to really think hard about who the right person is going to be. And you know, when you're going through the estate planning process, when you're working with your attorney, you know, they should help you think through that.

5:07 That's an interesting point because you know, there's two different jobs here. At least in California, probably more familiar with, obviously. You have the administrator executor of the will or the administrator of the probate, which is somebody named or somebody selected to run things for the probate. And then you have the attorney who's representing that the estate. And I think sometimes the administrator executor hires the attorney and doesn't understand where those lines are. There's a line between giving legal advice. And then there's a line over that, which is, well, it's not legal advice, but I'm here to help you because I'm I've been through this a few times. And there's another line that gets crossed, which is doing the job for the administrator. And most attorneys won't do that or, I think, rightfully, will do it, but they charge for their time. They're paying an assistant to do the work. So, how do you kind of make those delineations? How do you make them clear to the to the client up front? And then how does that get managed through your office?

5:57 Well, so in Texas, you have if you're like in a full-blown probate, like most of the procedures you have to have an attorney for. It is not pro se process here. There are a couple of procedures that we have available to us for probating estates that don't require you be represented by an attorney, but those are ones where you're not really in court. So, we have more than one type of probate process here. So, it's not just you have this one thing that you can do and then that's it. There's about seven sort of types of probates that or probate procedures that can be used to deal with someone's estate here in Texas. So, if we're in the situation where we are being hired by the executor or the administrator of an estate, then I mean, we represent that person. We do the heavy lifting for them. I like to say we're we are their probate easy button. So, we are drafting all of the documents, telling them what's next in the process, dealing with all the different types of situations that can come up that may not always be expected, but can arise.

7:19 And especially in a dependent administration. So, in Texas, a dependent administration is the probate process where there is court supervision. And those are incredibly expensive. They are very time-consuming. And people don't always necessarily intend on ending up in a dependent administration, but they can sometimes happen. So,

7:43 And careful so like we get those when there is objectors and you know, litigants and then the just to add just to add to all that the court then has more regulations on top of it. I feel like

7:57 We're going to burst on these people. They're just trying to get through this and on the other hand the court's trying to protect both parties and so it is a very can be a very complicated process. Now, but there's a line between legal work and say you know, there was a house be sold, cleaning up the house or managing estate sale, right? And so oftentimes I know that people come to me as a real estate agent and I'll say, "Well, I don't actually take off the junk, but I'll get you a vendor and some quotes and then you can do that." The attorneys seem to be not be you know, there's a range. Some of them get more involved and some of them kind of say, "Here's a list of things you need to do. Good luck. Call me if you have a problem." How do you manage kind of the mundane detailed tasks and training up the administrator to take on these tasks?

8:45 So that aspect of things. So, we don't tend to get into the weeds with that sort of thing. If we see an estate sale needs to happen, we will help our client find a company that can assist them with that.

9:00 Right. But like those types of activities are the ones that we're going to leave to the executor or the administrator to take care of.

9:10 Right. We will direct them in terms of okay, this is what you need to do, but ultimately in terms of actually getting the thing done, they are going to be responsible for that. So, we make sure that we nudge them and that they are actually getting the thing done because we want to keep the process moving.

9:32 In this age I think of do-it-yourself, you know, with between YouTube videos and ChatGPT, everybody is an expert. You know, I've been in real estate for decades and you know, I routinely have customers who don't ask me, "Hey, could we change this?" but tell me how the description should be or tell me how the procedures would should be. And here, you know, you went to college, went to law school of some sort, you took some sort of a bar exam, I imagine, you practice law before your own practice, you have your own practice, yours a work. And I'm sure you like me have clients say, "Oh, no, we should do it I read in ChatGPT we should do it this way." So, on one hand, I feel like I'm getting a more informed customer and they're kind of raising their hand saying, "Hey, I want to help. I want to be part of the solution." On the other hand, it's important to have that respect to the customer to say, "Okay, there's one quarterback on the team. On the real estate that's me, it's not you. On the law it'd be you, not them." How do you get that across? What's that conversation look like?

10:26 Cuz I suspect like you're a very nice lady, you have a great smile, but you're from a JAG officer, I know. There's a tough side and somebody crosses the line with you, they're going to get told what to do.

10:36 Yeah, they are more informed and often times just in all the wrong ways. Yes. So, you know, I've I have some colleagues who have had clients come to them with, "Oh, here's some language we can use in our trust and or whatever." Honestly,

10:55 The people that I have as clients don't tend to do that sort of thing, but you know, I'll look at what it is that they have and you know, and be very straight with them because that's just the kind of person that I am. I'm like, "Yeah, we're not using this." And you know, I'll explain why, but sometimes those types of things that clients come with just create more problems and work than they solve.

11:20 Right. It's like, you know, you hired me for a reason. If you thought you could do this on your own, why did you hire me?

11:28 Right. Let me do my job. Right. Like I'm not trying to guide you in the wrong direction, but what you are trying to do is definitely going to lead you down a path that is not going to be beneficial.

11:41 Right. Right. And again, I think it's a fine line between a customer who's informed asking questions. And I'm all for that. You know, can we do this? Can we do that? Great. You know, great ideas. And my job to explain why either we can or can't as appropriate. But when they start telling me this is how we have to do it, I feel like Okay, I'll tell you what, you list the property and I'll go work with somebody else who needs my help because

12:03 Exactly. It becomes kind of challenging. Now, I know in your practice you deal mostly with entrepreneurs, high net worth individuals, you know, business owners. How is their How are their problems different than say a more middle class, you know, salary type who may need an estate plan, but doesn't have the same kind of needs?

12:24 Also, just a small correction. I don't really work with high net worth. I work with high income married professionals Okay. Who are not in the high net worth category. So, these people that don't tend to have that don't have taxable estates. They have some wealth, but they aren't, you know, they aren't multi-millionaires having more than $30 million in assets that we are trying to plan for. I mean, high net worth people, they do have very different issues. I mean, a lot of a lot of their issues are probably going to be tax-driven. And you know, they are very concerned about how their wealth is being transferred efficiently to their beneficiaries. And also, I think with every family, whether you've got a lot of money or you got a little money, there can be family dynamics that are that have significant impact on how you are approaching your planning. So, the decisions that you are making in relation to who's serving as fiduciaries, but how the assets are ultimately being distributed or not being distributed to someone.

13:42 People underestimate, don't think about, or don't even understand that they need to think about how their family dynamics impact the decisions that they make and the distribution of their property. And so, a large part of what I do or try to do with families is to help them to think about these things. I have a framework that I've developed to for that specific purpose. Because the decisions that you make about who is serving as your fiduciary is incredibly impactful. So, if they are making decisions medical decisions, you know, that may be contrary to what other family members may want to want to have happen. Or if they are helping to manage your assets as an agent under a financial durable power of attorney, you know, everybody you know, some people may think they are not doing the right thing and want to cause trouble. So, having and this is why, you know, estate planning really should not be secret. Because when you have secrets, you create a situation where someone can go rogue and it's hard to detect or impossible to detect until, you know, all the money's gone.

15:04 Right. But if you have people involved in what you were doing and they know what's going on and who's been appointed and what that person can and can't do and having the agent know what they can and can't do is vitally important, too. And so, you know, In terms of probate, the that's a much more public process just by default.

15:27 Right. There's nothing you know, private at all for the most part about a probate process because there are In Texas, there are things that we have to file that are going to end up in the public record. And it's simply a public process. And but if you want, you know, to have a trust, that is a private process. I tell people they should think about trust administration like a private probate. There's still things that you have to do. It's just that there's no court oversight and there's no filing of documents in the courts. So, you know, just family dynamics have a big impact on what your planning ultimately ends up looking like and how that's handled on the back end after you're gone.

16:13 One thing I've learned, the biggest challenge I started this podcast 6 years ago and you know, when we went to court, I imagined that if attorneys could get estate planning prospects to go to court for 1 day, the customers would beg the attorney to finish their estate plan. They would do everything the attorney asked them to do to get it done cuz they would not want to go back into court and go through the process. And yet, people, you know, procrastinate getting started. I'm sure your people call you, set appointments, and they cancel or reschedule numerous times. I'm sure you meet with them and you send them home with some work to do and they procrastinate. Some procrastinate getting the work done. I'm sure some of your plans to get them procrastinate getting it signed or executed or whatever. It seemed like the biggest issue here is getting people to do that which they know they should do. It's like everything else in life. We all should eat less sugar. We should all You all should exercise more. But getting people to do it is the challenge. Obviously you've been successful in the estate planning setting. What are kind of things you focus on to help get people from the time they commit to this getting started to hopefully getting a plan that's going to be effective for them and usable when the time comes.

17:19 Right. So, actually I have very few clients that have like not finished their planning. Nice. I tell people up front that hey, look this process is going to take about, you know, 8 to 12 weeks and this is what the flow is. So, we help clients move along. You know, we will have our design meeting. We'll send them the documents to review. We'll give them 10 14 days to review those documents. If we haven't heard back from them, we're calling saying, "Hey, have you reviewed the documents? We need to set our review meeting." we'll have our review meeting and you know, hopefully people actually read the documents. And many people don't read the documents and honestly

17:59 No. People don't read documents? I'm a real estate agent. We give them a thousand pages to buy a house. You tell me they don't read every single page? Are you kidding me?

18:09 You know, they and so it makes it difficult for me as a practitioner when clients don't read the documents because I can't answer questions that I don't know exist. And at the review meeting, I mean I'm not going over every article of the trust in detail. It's if you don't have questions, then it's really a high level overview of what the document says and if later you have a question about, "Oh, I read this in article 7.6 and I'm not quite sure what that means." Well, you know, when we get to the signing meeting, if that's the kind of question that you have, it's kind of a late in the game for having that kind of question because for in my process, I'm not the one I you know, doing the signing meetings. I have a notary that I've trained to do all of those and I tell clients up front, you know, you're not going to be able to ask any questions at the signing. The signing is simply that. It's for signing documents. It is not the time to ask questions because the notary can't answer them and you cannot rely that I am going to be available. And typically, I'm not going to be available because the reason I have a notary do these meetings is so that I can do other things.

19:21 Right. So, my schedule is typically going to be booked with something else, and I'm not going to be available to answer questions. So, you know, doesn't matter what estate planning attorney you work with. When they send you the documents, read them.

19:37 Wow. Your questions in the margins. Believe me, we want you to do that. It makes the review meetings so much more productive and easy when we are when we have questions to answer.

19:49 So, what you're saying is when somebody spends I'm sorry. Yeah, if you have a somebody spends thousands of dollars to hire an attorney to prepare documents, you should read the documents that you paid for.

19:58 Yeah, you really should. It would be so enlightening. The other challenge we have, I think it's more in California, but I believe it's still an issue in Texas, is we get people write great plans and they execute a great plan, but they don't put the assets into the plan. They don't fund the plan. In California, most commonly, you know, almost everybody owns a house should transfer it into the trust in order for it to get maximum benefit. And that requires commonly some sort of a grant deed or quickclaim deed that has to be prepared, has to be signed, notarized, and then has to be recorded in order to be effective. And as well as it is, and any Realtor® who's been in business a long time has had this experience where we'll say to the customer, "Hey, I see that your whole title in your name." "Oh, no, we have a trust." "Really? I checked public records before I came." "Oh, yeah." And they run and get they pull out this beautiful book, and it has all these instructions on the top pages. "Don't forget to sign and notarize this and take this to county recorders." And I say to them, "Well, you didn't do that. Therefore, it this is not in the trust." So, talk a bit about that challenge and how you try to help customers through that. I mean, on one hand, you can't baby sit them, you can't order them. On the other hand, you wish you could. I'm sure you wish you could get a gun to their head and say, "Just do this right now."

21:13 But, you can't. What do you do? Well, we do it for them. So, at the signing, the deed that's transferring their house into their trust is already prepared. It is one of the documents that they will sign. So, the notary will get it back or she'll scan a copy because we don't actually need to keep the original. We will file the document into the public records for them and send it back.

21:39 Duh. Why doesn't every attorney do that? Nowadays, you can do it online. It's not that hard. I know. I don't I don't know. It just seems like the right thing to do to make sure the trust actually exists.

21:50 It just like a minimum standard to me that you should notarize the deed. You should prepare the deed, notarize the deed, and file the deed. If you can't do that, you're not really helping your customer.

21:59 Yeah. I think that is true. You know, it certainly creates an issue of having a trust that's unfunded because often times, you know, and like we handle funding as a separate process. But, as part of the flat fee that people are paying, getting the house transferred into the trust is going is a part of that. So, because we want to ensure that the trust actually owns some assets and it exists. You know, it's nice to have it's a nice binder that has a bunch of papers in it. But, again, if that trust doesn't have any assets, now you got to go through probate.

22:41 That's the most aggravating thing. You know, like if I could speak at the you know, American Bar Association, if there's one thing I would like to eliminate is that I understand business you know, trade their businesses and need to get paid and we all do. And it's not always their fault the customers don't follow through. But, it just seems to me if you get paid thousands of dollars to prepare a plan and the customer's house isn't in the trust, you haven't given the customer what they paid for. You gave them a lot of paperwork that didn't do any good. And I you know, I don't mean to make a moral judgment about it, but just as a businessman, it just doesn't feel like we've served our customer, which has to be the goal.

23:16 Yeah. And I understand what you're saying. And for like transferring the house, I think that's easy and low-hanging fruit for the attorney to be able to do. But there's some aspects of funding that are not easy for us to be able to do.

23:29 Correct. Like you know, if you were going to transfer title of your bank account into the trust, which you can do, and does it always make sense to do that? Probably not for most people. But assuming that you wanted to do that, well, that's really not something that is easy for the attorney to do because the bank has their documents that they want you to sign and immediately you as the owner of that account, you have to be the one to sign them. So, it's things like that you know, we can help clients navigate by telling them what they need to put on the bank's documents so that the you know, the bank knows that this is a trust asset. But we literally really cannot get that done for them. And then, you know, making changes to beneficiary designated assets as well. We can help them fill out the form that the financial institution may provide to them, but we can only help them if they reach out to us and say, "Hey, I really don't understand this." or I you know, I need some help. And these days, like financial institutions are doing a lot of things online, and that makes it that can make it more challenging for us to also help the client fill out things, but we can provide them with the wording that they would need.

24:51 You know, it's so funny cuz I was on a call like this once. I say, maybe with you and attorney. And afterwards, I went online and said, you know what, I had this funny feeling about this one stock account that I just opened. And I went into it and sure enough it just had me, it didn't have any I'm married, I have you know a child, a adult child and a son-in-law that I would you know put in line. But it didn't have any of that in there. It was it was blank. I'm thinking how did how did it happen? Now the company's gone through I'm sure several platform changes in their software and who knows if I forgot to do it, if they forgot to do it. It just took a minute to correct it. But it has to be corrected otherwise you end up with an outcome you may not want. And for people who get divorced and have you know ex-wives and children from ex-wives and all that, it's you know, not to say you shouldn't give money to your ex-wife. If you want to, great, designate her. But if you don't want her to Well, some do and some don't. I you know, whichever whatever makes you happy, do that. And then the problem is what you know, after they're gone, I had a case like this where the man had a wife out of wedlock. I'm sorry, had a child out of wedlock. And then he got married and had another adult child. And those two children of course hate each other. In fact, the father had disowned the first child which you know, I'm not judging him but I'm just saying that was the fact and these two girls hate each other. When he passed in California law intestate the prior child was entitled to half of the estate. And you know, it might be true that was his intention. We'll never know. But cuz he didn't take the time to fill it out. And I just can't tell you the hatred that the other daughter had because knowing that her father had done this and I you know, I again, I'm not here to judge other than to judge him and say just put it in the plan whatever you want. If you want to you know, write her out, write her out.

26:35 You want to add her in, add her in. But don't leave it to them to fight over cuz they both hire attorneys and then it's just a mess. Yes, it's I mean granted they already didn't have a great relationship but that type of situation just further damages

26:51 Yes. The that dynamic which you know, just it didn't have to happen. Yeah. Been dealt with an entirely different way to maybe in that case at least one person's feelings might have been hurt, but

27:08 Oh, yeah. Oh. At least we know definitively what the person wanted. But yeah, and I tell people if you don't have a plan, that is your plan.

27:19 Well, if you don't have a plan, the state of California has a plan for you. You know, our plans usually aren't very good. They have a plan for you. And you may not like that plan, and your

27:29 Family may not like that plan. They probably won't either. Again, I think it should be mandatory to take any estate planning prospect to court one day. I don't know what it's like in Texas. In LA County, we have the largest probate court in America, and it's just an assembly line of frustration and exacerbation exasperation, and I think we just have to be there for half an hour. Any client would say, "Okay, I'll sign whatever you need. That's fine. Please, give it to me. I'll do it right now."

27:54 I guess now you can do is you can zoom in on those calls and see them, I guess. But this not the same as when you're sitting there and you're watching this process and these heartbreak stories one after another. It's really something. Okay, last question. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but my fantasy when I started this was to help create a movement of people, you know, every homeowner in California for sure should have an estate plan that probably includes a trust. Anybody who has kids should have the documents required for an estate plan to for medical decisions and personal decisions to help parent their children in case they're not around anymore. And it just seems that, you know, there's low-cost solutions that are in my opinion ineffective. I had a statistic that the online estate planning solutions, 90% never get executed. And I believe it having talked to people. I see it all the time. What do we do? Isn't it You're a member of the bar? I'm not asking you to take on the whole state of Texas or the United States bar movement, but how do we get people to realize that it's not that much work? It's not that much time. It's not that much money compared to the money you'll spend if you don't have a plan. How do we do that? How do we effectively get people motivated to take some time and plan ahead?

29:06 Oh, I wish there was a just an easy answer for that. I think part of the problem is what people are really uneducated about the nuances of estate planning, but also just wholly uneducated about probate and what that looks like and what it requires. You know, having a more educated client is better for me and most I think estate planning attorneys would say that. We I do a lot of educating in terms of what I do when I do estate planning. Just basics about estate planning because people just don't know. You know, with these online platforms, yes, they are inexpensive. But when you are going through answering the questions, you know, people just they don't know what they don't know.

30:09 And the platforms, I don't think are designed to educate people about their decisions and if they have a question about something, they either can't get an answer or oh, lo and behold, you have to pay extra to actually talk to someone that can answer your question.

30:26 Right. So, you know, people should start looking for ways to educate themselves not on TikTok listening to someone who is not an estate planning attorney talk about estate planning.

30:44 Because those people only are going to know enough about what their situation required, not about the whole spectrum of sort of estate planning decision points and how family dynamics are impacting those things.

31:04 And so, you know, drafting Yes, you can go to a bunch of places to get words on paper. But what you are really paying for is advice and guidance. And you're not typically getting that with online platforms.

31:23 Right. And with people who are dabblers in estate planning as well. That's another one. That's another one. Lawyer the crim- criminal lawyer that also does some estate planning.

31:34 How much of their practice is actually devoted to estate planning? And are they just doing wills? Do they do trusts as well?

31:43 You know, a lot of people, you know, want to limit their practice to just doing wills because that's what they feel comfortable with. But if they're just doing a will, are they going to recognize that you might need more than a will?

31:55 Right. And if but if they are just I do wills and you came to me, I'm going to give you a will, it doesn't matter about anything else. This is what I do, so this is what you get.

32:07 Right. A lot of people come to me, they want a trust. I'm like, "no, I look at their stuff. I talk to them." And I'm like, "Yeah, I don't think a trust is, you know, what's the best fit for you."

32:18 Well, obviously, you're very well educated in this stuff. We can go on this very deep topic. We can go on forever, but I have to respect for your time. Antoinette Bone, thank for educating us again on kind of perils of not planning and how important it is to plan. If you want more information from her, Law Office of Antoinette Bone is bone law.com and we have that up there. There's a phone number on the top right if you want to become a private client. And then down below we have the contact information as well. You can info her at info@abone law.com. And if you're, you know, driving, can't write this down, reach out to me, I'd be more than glad to make an introduction and get you guys together. And so then again, thank you so much for being on today. Really appreciate your time and everything you do as far as serving your clients in the state of Texas.

33:03 Well, thanks Bill for having me. And for actually this is Probate Weekly. We get together every week with a new episode. Usually speaking to probate attorneys, estate planning attorneys, probate litigators. Today a great one out of the state of Texas. I'd love to get your feedback or comments. If you have any, please let me know. You can like this, subscribe, send me a comment, reply, put in the social media. If I can help in any way, please reach out at Bill Gross Probate in social media. As always, make today your best day.