After the Crisis: How COVID Changed Estate Planning Forever

In this episode, Peter Klenk explains how COVID-19 reshaped estate planning, making remote services, streamlined processes, and better organization the new standard. He also highlights why more people are turning to revocable trusts to simplify probate and make things easier, faster, and more affordable for their families.

Transcript

Hi, everybody. It's Peter Klenk, Klenk Law, here again to chat with you about death and taxes. Oh, like, good fun stuff. I got my coffee cup. You have yours, or a glass of wine depending on the time of day? Any time of day is okay for a glass of wine, right?

But what are we talking about today? Well, you know, it's been five years since the beginning, but, you know, COVID—who wants to talk about it anymore? But the reality is, man, it really changed how we do our planning and our process, really the process going through. It really affected people, so I kind of go over some of the highlights of that and what’s different and what’s changed.

Because remember, we were shut down, and that meant government agencies were closed. We couldn't file wills. It was, you know, clogging up things. It made everything delay. Real estate transactions were shut down. People were ill. It was very difficult to get access to them, get information about them. So a lot of things changed that way.

And one of the things is we all just realized that things should be done remotely, and it really changed it. If somebody calls me up right now and says, yeah, I really want to come in and sit down and churn through my stuff with you in an office in a closed space, I’m like, why? Why do you want to do that? We do everything telephonically. We can do it electronically. I can do this from Switzerland, right?

We can do all these things. We don't need to have you come in and park your car and get out of your car and dress up. So the reality is it really changed things, that we're just doing everything remotely and planning-wise. And that means we have to change our systems so that works well.

And we always have, actually—we have portals for our documents for people to download and look at and then transfer. And we do our process as you go through it. So you could be sitting around in your pajamas, and we can do it all. You don't even have to get out of your pajamas. So we've been doing that for a long time. That really changed the industry.

So you might say, oh, man, trusts and estates, what a pain? I gotta do x, y, and z. The reality is it's become much more smooth and easy because COVID made us, but it also opened everybody's eyes to the fact they just don't need to go in and see their accountant, their attorney, even their doctor as much anymore as they used to.

And then that leads to the real thing, is now the big kick is revocable trusts. You've probably been hearing about revocable trusts. Revocable trusts have been big eighty, ninety years in California, then they kinda shifted to New York and Florida. And the reason was the revocable trust is about avoiding the probate process, and those are the states where the process is recognized to be just horrible—the worst, the worst.

Other states, it's not as bad, but that's why it didn't catch on as quick. But what we see in COVID, like, we couldn't go file a will. No matter how easy it was, we couldn't go file a will. And that held things up, delayed opening estates, sales of real estate, you name it.

And now people just say, well, I just don't even want to deal with that anymore. There wasn't a reason to kind of avoid it before, but now we realize that there is. Things can happen, things can delay. Why not diminish the chances of there being complications? And that's what a revocable trust does.

So I'm not gonna go into a ton of time here talking about a revocable trust. There's things on my website. There's other podcasts you can listen to about those details. But the idea is, with a will, for it to be valid, you have to file with a county. It's not a will until the king says it's a will, right?

So you might have a piece of paper, but you can't do anything until the county approves it. That takes time. If they're closed, you can't do it, and it takes money. And with a revocable trust, you avoid that. You avoid the trip. And you don't reduce taxes, you don't avoid creditors—you speed the process up and make it cheaper.

It means a little bit more work for you up front, but for a lot of people in the past before COVID, that little bit of work was enough to make them not do it. But now people look and say, yeah, this is just not that big of a deal. Let's get it done. I just want to make everything super easy for my kids, as cheap and as easy as possible. And that's why you use your revocable trust.

So if you'd like to know more about that, of course, we can talk. We do—I mean, so many of them, I can't even tell you.

And then another thing that COVID did—it made people more organized. You can imagine during COVID, somebody dies and we don't know where their life insurance is, we don't know their homeowners policy, we don't know anything. And finding that data out when agencies and banks and everything were shut down was just impossible. It really made a mess of things.

Whereas we have a system that we've always used, where we have a bullet point system put together just with the basic information—where your insurance is at, where your bank is, who your financial people are, numbers. Nothing—when I say numbers, phone numbers, not account numbers or anything like that. Just the basics. And that's all you need.

And we would ask people to give us that data in the past, and most people gave it to us because it's a very practical way to make sure your things get done. But people are much more open to it now because I think they realize that, yeah, this is a thing that could happen. I might die and there might be some sort of crisis, or it might be difficult to find things, and this is just gonna delay and make things more expensive.

So of course, where I have my assets, what institution—you know, nothing too private—that's here. Why would I not share that? Wouldn't that make it easy, especially since that data doesn't even get shared until you're dead, right?

So that's it. You know, people doing things remote, doing things from your beach home while you're sitting around with a margarita in your hand and doing, you know, calling with me and doing your estate plan. Why—I mean, people sort of realized—why would I want to come to Peter’s office? That's a pain. I want to sit on the beach with my margarita. There it is.

And then, you know, getting things organized—it’s just not that hard, and people are just more open to it. And really, this whole avoiding probate and making the process easier and avoiding the necessity of filing things with the government office has just become much more tuned.

So that's kind of the summary. People are tuned to make the process easier and open up, and these are all good things, right? These are all good things that came from it because it means everything's easier and cheaper.

So that's it, guys. Just a short one, just to point some things out. I can't believe it's five years ago that this all started, right? Something else. If you have any other questions, if you'd like to brainstorm about your plan, of course, give us a ring. That's what we do—trusts and estates, and probate, and estate litigation.

It's been great talking to you. Take care. And like, like and subscribe so that as I have new releases in the future, you can find out. Take care.