Financial Planning for Retirement and Estate Planning: Using Pop Culture to Simplify Complex Concepts

Your will can be perfectly written and still do almost nothing you intended. That’s the hard truth behind estate planning when beneficiary designations, joint titling, retirement accounts, and real estate deeds aren’t coordinated with your legal documents.

We sit down with CPA and certified financial analyst Jesse Hurst to connect the dots between retirement planning and estate planning in plain English, including how pop culture can make complicated money topics easier to remember. We dig into what actually drives outcomes for families: a clean asset inventory, a beneficiary audit, and teamwork between your estate planning attorney, financial advisor, and CPA. If you’ve ever assumed “the will decides,” we explain why many assets bypass probate entirely and how that can unintentionally disinherit children, skew “equal” splits, or leave a trust unfunded.

We also talk through the human side: naming executors, trustees, and health care decision-makers, then having the conversations that spare your loved ones from guessing. And because tax and retirement rules keep changing, we break down how the Secure Act and the inherited IRA 10-year rule can create a tax hit for adult kids, plus why some families explore tools like trusts and life insurance strategies to manage timing and taxes.

If you want fewer surprises and a plan that holds up in the real world, listen now, share this with someone updating their will or trust, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. After you listen, will you review the show and tell us what part of estate planning feels most confusing right now?

If you would like to speak with one of our attorneys, please call our office at (503) 227-0200, or visit our website at https://www.pacificcascadelegal.com.

To learn more about Jesse and how he can help you, you can visit his website at: https://www.impelwealth.com/

Disclaimer: Nothing in this communication is intended to provide legal advice nor does it constitute a client-attorney relationship, therefore you should not interpret the contents as such.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Intro/Outro 0:01

Welcome to Modern Family Matters, a podcast devoted to exploring family law topics that matter most to you, covering a wide range of legal, personal, and family law matters with expert analysis from skilled attorneys and professional guests. We hope that our podcast provides answers, clarity, and guidance towards a better tomorrow for you and your family. Here is your host, Steve Altishin.

Steve Altishin 0:31

Hi everyone, I'm Steve Altishin, Director of Client Partnership at Pacific Cascade Legal. And today we have CPA and certified financial analyst Jesse Hurst to talk about financial planning for your retirement when you're making your estate plans and your wills, and how using popular music, film, cultural moments can translate some of the really confusing financial concepts into understandable and workable plans. So before we start, Jesse, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Oh, I am too.

Pop Culture As A Money Tool

Steve Altishin 1:08

So before we start in on the specific issue of being doing a Want of Will, can you talk a little just about your references to pop music and culture and how you got into doing that and even write a book about it?

Jesse Hurst 1:22

I started writing blog posts about 15 years ago and back when they were kind of more like e-newsletters. And I found that whenever I used some sort of pop culture, music, movie, TV, Broadway show reference, people remembered it more. They liked it more and so forth. So I came up with this idea. I called it Poponomic, pop culture references to frame economic investment and retirement planning sources. And I wrote a book that was released last September. It was a number one bestseller on a couple categories of Amazon for a couple of minutes. I've got a screenshot of it so I can say for the rest of my life I was an Amazon number one bestseller. So one of the things that really encouraged me, because I did it once in a while before, but I'll never forget in late March of 2020 when we were going through the COVID crisis, shutting everything down, two weeks to bend the curve and all of that. And then the CARES Act came out. Stock market created 34% in six weeks. The economy was shutting down, and we released the CARES Act, which was all the government stimulus money, stimulus checks, PPP loans. It was also the enhanced unemployment benefits. And at the same time, the Federal Reserve Bank kind of opened the floodgates of liquidity and cut interest rates to zero. And Steve Minutian, who was the Treasury Secretary and Jay Powell, who was the Federal Reserve Bank Chairman at the time, held a joint pet press conference. And they said this is an unconventional recession. It's an unconventional economic time, and we're going to have to fight this unconventional economic event using unconventional weapons. And the first thing that popped into my head was the scene in Animal House where they'd all just been kicked out of the frat house, where Otter goes, now we could fight them with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. So I wrote a blog post comparing the actions of the Federal Reserve Bank and the federal government to the Frat brothers in Animal House, and clients loved it. My wife thought I was out of my mind. She was like, you can't do that. And I'm like, no, no, it's funny. Trust me. So that kind of really kind of cemented in my head that that's that's a great way to make complex financial and economic topics fun for people.

Steve Altishin 3:40

I love that. I love that reference here in Oregon. It's a big deal because the movie was filmed at the University of Oregon.

Jesse Hurst 3:47

Yeah. That's right. I forgot about that.

Coordinating Values With Legal Documents

Steve Altishin 3:53

Making decisions about retirement and making your will. It comes to my mind that that can be kind of complex because you're talking about potentially different time frames, and there's then, there's now, when will then be now? Oh, yeah. Kind of stuff has to be brought into this. And it feels like it can make it pretty challenging to get a financial plan that can work with all those pieces.

Jesse Hurst 4:22

Yeah, it is. It's a complex topic. It's an emotional topic because a lot of a lot of times people think about their estate in terms of value. How much is this account worth? What's this house worth? What's this piece of real estate worth? But it's really about how are you using your resources to care for the ones you love? It's for the tangible personal property, the jewelry or the artwork or the collectibles or whatever. Who ascribes meaning to those and who are you giving them to and why is that important and so forth? So there's multiple layers to that discussion. And when we're helping clients develop estate plans, we really kind of try to lay out what their list of assets are, what the values are, what the titling are, what the beneficiary issues are. And we provide a net worth statement and a beneficiary audit to, and then we'll bring in either their estate planning attorney, or if they don't have one, an estate planning attorney that we refer them to. And what we find is that working in conjunction, all of us sitting around the table, you can end up with documents that are both legally correct and are tied to their financial assets in the way that titling and beneficiaries should be, but also reflect who they are and what they want from a value standpoint. And you come out with much better outcomes as a result.

Steve Altishin 5:55

Yeah, and we it's interesting, we find that getting the people involved is really necessary because I don't know how many trusts we've seen years later that was meant to do one thing, and a lot of it the times it's like avoiding probate, but it didn't work because they made a great trust and then they bought a house and didn't put it in it, or they bought this and didn't put it, and so they end up

The Unfunded Trust Problem

Steve Altishin 6:26

dying, and nothing is there.

Jesse Hurst 6:28

Yeah, I was gonna say, how many times have you seen unfunded trusts? Yeah, right? Or I'll give you a great example. This was the eye-opening one for me, was back in 1988. I'd been doing, I was brand new. I was I'd only been doing this about a year, and I got referred to this couple. They were both around 40 years old. It was a second marriage for her, it was a first marriage for him. And she had two children from her first marriage, and her parents had passed away, and she had inherited about $600,000 from her parents. So she went and the new husband agreed to this. She had a will done that said if she passed, a third of the assets would go to each of her two sons, and a third would go to her new husband. And she didn't want to leave everything, including all of her parents' assets, to her new husband because she was afraid. We call it, I hope I can say this on the on air, we we call it the gigolo and floozy syndrome, right? We it's like we're we're she was afraid he's gonna meet the first 21-year-old blonde and leave all the money to her. And so he was okay with this. But here's what was eye-opening. When I sat down with them with a good estate planning attorney that was a friend of mine, we realized that even though the will said a third, a third, a third, that their house was joint tenants with rights of survivorship deed, he was the beneficiary of her life insurance, he was the beneficiary of her 401k, they were joint tenants with rights of survivorship on their bank accounts and investment accounts. So out of this million dollar estate, now again, this is 1988, out of this million-dollar estate, if she had passed away the next day, 900,000 of it was going to go directly to him via beneficiary or titling, and the other hundred thousand was gonna get split by the will in thirds. So they had a perfectly good legal document that didn't accomplish any of what they set out to do because nobody coordinated it.

Steve Altishin 8:26

Yep, yep. And then that's that is so common.

Jesse Hurst 8:36

Yeah, it can elect against the will under dower rights and so forth.

Steve Altishin 8:41

All of that

Choosing Executors And Having The Talk

Steve Altishin 8:42

kind of stuff. It's really interesting. And the do you think it's important to the people who are going to be running it, the executors and the and the trustees and all of that stuff? I don't want to say vetted, but pretty much vetted, not just for if they can do it, but do they even want to do it?

Jesse Hurst 9:02

Well, and and I think one of the worst things that people do is they will sometimes name people in documents, give them enormous powers, and not even notify them that they're named in the document. They find out at the time that they're named. Or else, worse, right? Like I've even seen where parents will name an adult child as their healthcare proxy, healthcare power of attorney, whatever, and never have a conversation with the child about what their wishes are if they get into that situation. And then the kid's afraid, doesn't know what to do. Do I does mom or dad want the plug pulled? Do they want life, you know, life-saving, heroic measures taken or whatever it is? So if you're gonna give somebody with, remember the line from the old Spider-Man movie, with great power comes great responsibility. And it's like if you're gonna give somebody great power and and responsibility, have a talk with them so that they know how to exercise it.

Steve Altishin 10:04

The other kind of interesting thing is that they have the money or they have the assets, and they can be diverse as heck and they have a plan. But what they have doesn't really fit into, or can that even happen, fit into the plan they want to do? I mean, is do you find sometimes that doing their estate plan may actually involve changing their financial plan?

Jesse Hurst 10:34

It

Retirement Goals Drive Estate Choices

Jesse Hurst 10:35

depends on what their goals are, right? Like I've had clients, I have a client right now that we just completed, they've been clients for 20-some years. He's 65, she's 63, and we had built into their plan, and they've got super significant resources, but they're mid-seven figure investments, they're five, six million dollars of investments, they're debt-free, and so forth. And one of the things we've done is we've built into their plan certain levels of charitable giving that they want to do philanthropically each year. And then they've got two children, they have twin children, son and daughter, that are 33 years old that they want to do family gifting each year and so forth. And so we've been running retirement plan projections, showing him retiring at 57, 58. And then he keeps working more years. He's he just turned 65 and he thinks he's finally going to pull the trigger and retire. And we just ran the updated retirement plan projection for him yesterday, that he wanted to know do they have the bandwidth to do additional gifting now that they have multiple grandchildren to help fund the grandchildren's college education plans? Well, it turns out, under very conservative assumptions that we used in the plan, that they can confidently do that. And I think that's going to be what allows them to then finally say, okay, we have enough and we're going to pull the trigger and retire because we can do everything. Our financial plans now morphed from just doing philanthropic to doing philanthropic and our kids to doing philanthropic, our kids, and now our grandkids, and we can do that confidently, and I think that's going to allow them to make that decision.

Steve Altishin 12:16

Oh, that's great. The other thing is having assets is like we had someone who had they wanted to give everyone the same amount. My four kids each get a quarter. It's great, but they had like three vacation homes. Not necessarily a lot of investment accounts, and it became very difficult, and then it became ugly because it's what do you do with those properties to make that split work? And is there some point where maybe as you get older or closer that you want to start making your financial plan able to do what you want your uh what you want to do?

Jesse Hurst 13:04

Well, and

Keeping Inheritances Simple And Fair

Jesse Hurst 13:05

this that's a great question, right? Because I had a uh I have a situation that I'm working on right now where one of my clients, who's a large regional bank employee who's been there for 33 years, he's within a year or two of retirement, 58 years old. His dad passed away years ago. His mom has been remarried for a number of years. Mom, him and his two siblings. Stepdad had three siblings from his first marriage. Stepdad just passed away in October last year. So now everything's gone to mom. And they're having this very kind of discussion. Mom's now in an assisted living facility, but there's one piece, everything's in financial assets other than one piece of property. And one of the six kids wants the piece of property, and they were trying to figure out how to make the one kid that wants the piece of property, make him the payable on death beneficiary of that deed, and then equalize the rest of the assets through the estate, through beneficiary designations or through a trust to the other five kids. And I was like, guys, you've heard the term Occam's razor, right? The simplest, the simplest solution is often the best solution. I'm like, why don't we just title everything, either title or make beneficiary mom's trust for everything, have the six kids be the equal beneficiaries. So let's just say, for the sake of argument, that there was $1.8 million in mom's estate and you've got six kids. That's $300,000 to each. And though the one kid wants the one piece of property, part of his $300,000 distribution from the trust, that kid might get a $200,000 piece of property and $100,000 of cash, where the other five are going to get $300,000 of cash. Let's just make it as simple to administer and the least amount of fights possible. I don't want people down the road arguing about valuations and who got what and so forth. I've seen more families torn apart by that kind of stuff than you can imagine.

Steve Altishin 15:15

Yeah. We have difficulty. Everyone is, all attorneys have difficulty convincing a lot of their clients they need a will because they don't have enough money.

Jesse Hurst 15:26

Need a will or need a trust?

Steve Altishin 15:28

Uh well, just either. Anything. They say it's kind of like I don't have enough money.

Why Everyone Still Needs A Will

Steve Altishin 15:33

We just don't have enough yet to even start to do this. What would you tell them?

Jesse Hurst 15:37

Oh, uh well, I think the first thing I would tell them is if you have stuff, you should have a will. And I remind them the will is like your letter to probate court judge that says, Dear judge, pay my debts, pay my expenses and taxes, and distribute whatever is left that goes through the probate estate to these heirs and beneficiaries. But on the flip side, our goal is to use non-probate means, whether it's titling, deeds, beneficiaries, whatever, or trusts, to distribute as much of the assets as possible on a non-probate basis, but you still need it as a backstop. And I know this is going to sound wacky, but we had this happen about four years ago. We had a client of ours whose aunt, who was 88 years old, still very sound mind, independent, still drove all that, lived independently. She had all of her assets in a trust, and she was out driving, and she came to a two-way stop, and somebody on the other side didn't realize it was two-way and slammed her and killed her in the automobile accident. Well, there was wrongful death proceeds that came into the estate. Well, those wrongful death proceeds weren't titled to a trust. So we needed the will as a backup for managing the probate estate on that side. But you've got to have it just as a backup just in case.

Steve Altishin 17:00

Yeah, things happen.

unknown 17:01

Yeah.

Giving Now Versus Leaving Later

Jesse Hurst 17:02

Yeah. And one of the other things that we're finding it's it's been interesting is we've been having a lot of conversations with some of our more successful clients. So if you looked at our client base, I'd say we're probably about 50-50, where we've got about 50% that have accumulated enough resources to successfully retire and live comfortably, but don't have tons extra, right? They have enough to live and be fine. I probably have another 50% that have accumulated probably far more than what they'll need or ever spend. So then the question starts coming down to when do I give? Do how much do I give? Do I give while I'm living or do I wait for kids to inherit it when I die? And I'll give you a great example. I have I have a mom and dad that were clients of mine. Mom will turn 88 in May. Dad passed away a few years ago, and mom and dad's estate is about $2.8 million. And they've got four kids, so it'd be about $700,000 each. Now the oldest of the kids are now 61 and 59, the husband and his wife, the son and daughter-in-law. And they are debt-free. One was a public school teacher, so she's got a public school teacher pension. They've got both social securities and so forth. And they've got about almost $4 million of investment assets on their own. And they made the comment to me the other day. They were like, hey, when 88-year-old mom passes, whether it's two years or five years or 10 years down the road, I'm probably going to inherit six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars. And it'll be nice, but it won't change anything because we're already debt-free and we've already got $10,000 a month of pension and social security and four million dollars of investments. He said, I wonder what how much it would have changed life for us if mom and dad had given us some gifts along the way when we had a mortgage and two kids we were trying to put through college. And then in their head, now they've got two children that are 30 and 27. And they're saying, Do I want to do the same thing to my kids? Or do I want to give them some money along the way to help them with first-time home purchases or saving for their kids college educations? And then how do you do that? How do you use those resources today to help them today without creating a sense of entitlement or expectation? They're really interesting conversations to have. And it's partially money, but it's partially value system.

Steve Altishin 19:38

Yeah, it sounds like your philosophy, let's find out what the goal is, and then make the financial plan work with that goal rather than oh, this one's hot now. Let's do a financial plan and then you can decide what you want. It feels like it's the right way flipped.

Jesse Hurst 19:57

Yeah. And we're lucky that we have really good relationships with probably at least a half dozen really good estate planning attorneys in the greater Akron, Northeast Ohio

Building The Right Advisor Team

Jesse Hurst 20:09

area that understand that and are willing to collaboratively work with us so that we come out with really good outcomes.

Steve Altishin 20:16

Yeah. And you talk about that a lot. When I talk to you in your book, it's finding the right people to help. Not just a financial advisor, but like I said, an attorney, an accountant, all these things are really important to have and be able to work with each other. No question.

Jesse Hurst 20:37

And it's the same with other ancillary advisors, whether it's the property and casualty insurance agents, whether it's the people who do the Medicare supplement plans, whether it's if they need banking services or they're they're selling one home and financing, buying a new home, and we need bridge financing to get through using lines of credit or whatever. It's really helpful to be able to have, and it's one of the things I always tell people, right? One of the things you get when you work with me is you get the 38 years of relationships that I have with other people all over the community that comes with it, that probably a financial advisor who's been doing this for five or seven years doesn't hasn't accumulated yet.

Steve Altishin 21:18

And that's what breaks down most of these trusts, you know, living trusts, whatever, is that they don't have that. So you get, you know, somebody gives them a great plan, it's all work, you know, it's all you know, great estate plan, but they don't know how to make it work because they don't know these people. So they just sort of sit there and then things fall through the cracks.

Secure Act And New Tax Planning

Jesse Hurst 21:46

Yeah. So, and I know we're right at time. The one other thing that I would say is kind of interesting, another conversation that we're having today that we used to have in a slightly different context 25 years ago. You remember. From prior to whatever it was, 97, 98, the estate tax exemption was at $600,000 per person for years, right? And then it moved up to a million, and then it went to $3 million under W and it went to $5 million under Obama. And today we're at $15 million each. So a lot of our clients that did a lot of this more complex revocable living trust, A B trust language, and so forth, today it's not as big of a deal unless you have complex beneficiaries or complex assets that you need to figure out how to deal with things. But I will tell you the one last thing that's really interesting is in today's world, a lot of our clients come from corporate America, corporate Akron, which would be big corporations like Goodyear or SUMA Health System or First Energy or whatever. So you got clients walking out with 401ks, and some of them still have old defined benefit pension lump sums. And they might have two, three, four million dollars of qualified plan assets that under the Secure Act that went into effect in 2020, they now to a beneficiary, whereas the beneficiary used to be able to stretch those over their entire life expectancy, have to take them out over 10 years now. So we have clients that 25, 30 years ago used to have irrevocable life insurance trusts to pay estate taxes. Now they're doing irrevocable life insurance trusts, taking like, let's say you had a $3 million 401k IRA, they're taking 2% of that a year, buying life insurance so that they can create a tax-free asset for their next generation that's not, that doesn't have to be paid out over 10 years, and it's not subject so that they can manage it in a trust over lifetime without because you sit there and you go, hey, if my 45, 50-year-old son and daughter-in-law, who are making $250,000 a year, inherit this IRA and have to pay it out over 10 years, it's going to put them in maximum tax brackets and stuff. So I guess my point in all of that is the rules are changing, there's complexities, and there's unique family situations and assets. And I think the best way to manage this is to have a really good uh uh you know attorney, estate planning attorney who can work in conjunction with somebody on the financial planning side so that you end up with a with an outcome where both you you know, where we legally accomplish what financially you want to do for the benefit of your family.

Steve Altishin 24:35

I love it. That's the best way to do it. Yeah, we are unfortunately out of

How To Reach Us And Wrap

Steve Altishin 24:40

time, Jesse. So thank you so much for being here to talk. It was really good.

Jesse Hurst 24:44

I'm glad we had the time to do it today. It was fun, and time flies when you're having fun.

Steve Altishin 24:49

Time flies when you're having fun. I love it. So before we go, Jesse, tell people how they can get a hold of you.

Jesse Hurst 24:57

Yeah, my firm, Impel Wealth Management, I am Amazon Mary, P-E-L, Impel Wealth Management. You can just Google it, ImpelWealth.com. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm I've got 7,000 plus people who follow me on LinkedIn. My pop economics book you can find on Amazon, and you can find Jesse Hurst author out there on Facebook, Instagram. We're pretty easy to find, and we love helping people. So uh let us know if we can help you.

Steve Altishin 25:23

Oh, perfect. Thank you also, everyone who's joined us today. Anyone with further questions on today's topic, you can post it here. We can get you connected with Jesse, or you can connect with him all by your own. And until next time, stay safe, stay happy, and be well.

Intro/Outro 25:40

This has been Modern Family Matters, a legal podcast focusing on providing real answers and direction for individuals and families. Our podcast is sponsored by Lander Home Family Law and Pacific Cascade Family Law, serving families in Oregon and Washington. If you are in need of legal counsel or have additional questions about a family law matter important to you, please visit our website at landerhome law.com or Pacific Cascade Family Law.com. You can also call our headquarters at 503-227-0200 to schedule a case evaluation with one of our states' attorneys. Modern Family Matters, advocating for your better tomorrow and offering legal solutions important to the Modern Family.