Do You Really Have a Plan with Becky Easton, Esq

Most families think having a will, trust, or estate plan means they are “all set.”

But are they?

In this episode of My Parents Lied to Me, Nicole Porter sits down with estate planning attorney Becky Easton to talk about the real-life gaps families often miss, even when legal documents are already in place.

Becky shares why a will does not avoid probate, why trusts need to be properly funded, why beneficiary designations matter, and why families need to revisit their estate plan as life changes. They also talk about the emotional side of planning, including family conversations, guardianship for children, powers of attorney, personal belongings, and the unexpected items families may fight over after someone passes.

This conversation is a reminder that legal documents are only one piece of the bigger family preparedness plan. A true plan creates clarity, reduces chaos, and gives families confidence before a crisis happens.

Nicole Porter is the founder of Your Parent Porter™, helping families find the gaps between their estate plan, financial plan, home, wishes, documents, and real-life family dynamics.

Learn more about Nicole Porter and Your Parent Porter™:
www.yourparentporter.com
nicole@yourparentporter.com
Instagram: @yourparentporter

Guest: Becky Easton
Estate Planning Attorney, Life Plan Legal
Licensed in Arizona and Colorado
Email: becky@lifeplanlegalaz.com

Topics covered:
estate planning, wills, trusts, probate, powers of attorney, beneficiary designations, guardianship, family preparedness, adult children, aging parents, family planning, estate plan gaps, trust funding, probate avoidance, family conversations

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to My Parents Lie to Me, the podcast about navigating aging, loss, and all the midlife changes no one warned us about. I'm Nicole Porter, here with real stories and expert advice to help you face what's now and what's next. Hello and welcome to another episode of My Parents Lied to Me. I'm here with my friend and estate planner, Becky Easton. We just want to talk about I have a plan and how well that plan works out for everybody. So, Becky, welcome. Thank you for coming to tell some stories because I hear this a lot from people as I tell them about your parent porter and what I'm up to and how I help families fill in the gaps between all the plans. Because everybody goes, I have an estate plan and I'm good. After talking to you, we know that not everybody's good just because you have an estate plan. So take it away, introduce yourself, tell people who you are, and let's go.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks so much for having me here today, Nicole. I'm excited to get out and share the stories of why just a plan does, you know, I got one. We're good. Why that doesn't always work. So um, because that ends up being kind of, you know, much of my day-to-day, right? So I'm an estate planning attorney. I also work uh doing probate and guardianships as well. So I see you from ideally where you're planning, and we're trying to avoid going and getting into court and having probate involved or anything like that, all the way through to, well, either we didn't make a plan at all or we didn't quite get the plan right, and we have to involve the court in some way. So I kind of see a broad spectrum of uh families in you know different phases of their life. Yeah. So licensed here in Arizona and in Colorado.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

How could it be?

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Well, I'll just start with a couple questions. If you're licensed in Arizona, in Colorado, do you only service people that live in Arizona and Colorado?

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Well, good, good question with uh estate planning attorneys. Yes. You have to be licensed in whatever state you're like actually providing that legal advice in. Um, I do have a pretty broad network though. I'm part of personal family lawyers. And um, so we have attorneys, I believe, in almost every single state now. Um, and so pretty easy for me to help get you in touch with someone, no matter what state you're in, to help things.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

So if they have one in Arizona and they move back to say the Midwest to live closer to their family, is their estate plan still good? Yeah. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is I still want to check in with an estate planning attorney at some point. That's not necessarily the we've moved and now we have to do it like right now. There isn't necessarily urgency to it there. But there are things, especially when you're coming from Arizona and going somewhere else, you're probably not moving to a community property state because there's only seven of us. It's more likely that you're moving to a non-community property state where the rules are just a little bit different, right? And so you're gonna have wording and language in your trust that is designed to meet community property needs. Short answer, yes. If you sign it and it's valid, where you start, great, that's gonna work. But you do want to check in on them. And I think that's just part of like just a regular check-in, too.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

So and I did hear a stat that only 30% of families have an estate plan. Is that correct? Or what is that? Do you know that stat?

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Um, it's some it's under 50% of adults that have any sort of planning, but I could definitely see that it being lower when you're considering a family group. Yeah. With estate planning, right? Like we're all gonna live long, healthy lives and you know, not need anything now in our, you know, middle years, right? Who needs that? Well, anyone who has kids and wants to make sure that your kids aren't going into the hands of CPS for a while while we figure out who the guardian should be or anything like that. You want to make sure also that they're not receiving money. Because unless you're 18 or 21 in some states, you can't inherit anything. You just can't receive the money, right? So you inherit, but somebody has to be in charge of it for you until you hit that age of majority. And why have to go through all of that on the back end now as they're trying to grieve the early death of their parent, right? We're talking about this. They've lost you as a child now. And then now there's somebody who the court has decided is going to manage their money for them. Okay. And then they turn 18 in Arizona, and you get all that money. It's like protected until it's not. And then what would you have done with a hundred thousand dollars when you were 18?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

At what age should families get an estate plan? Is it when they're younger, when they have kids, or is it when they are older and aging and should start thinking about those things?

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Yeah, absolutely. I think state planning gets the rap of being only for the elderly and uh the wealthy, right? Which, yes, it is for them, but it's also for you as long as you're over 18, right? Because at 18, now your parents aren't the ones making your decisions for you. You make your own decisions, right? You don't have that default anymore. And then as soon as you have kids, right, we all tend to think, oh yeah, I'm still really young, you know, no big deal. Uh, this isn't for me quite yet, or I don't have anything, you know, but you do. If something were to happen to you, you care who takes care of your kids. You care that your kid doesn't get a lump sum of money that's managed for them until they're 18, and then they get a lump sum, right? And you have the opportunity if we're being intentional about kind of building this end of life, right? Where you have that opportunity to figure out what would happen, you know? Nobody wants to be thinking about dying and not being here. But just like taxes, it's one thing that will always get you in the end. Death and taxes, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:41

When people tell me, I have a plan, how well does that plan hold up if somebody's got an estate plan? Everything's like goes smooth and people know exactly the family's wishes and abide by them. Like, how does this go down when people have an estate plan?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Yeah, I think you probably know the answer is no, there are still problems.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

I gotta I gotta get the legal advice here because Yeah, no. I I've been telling people, hey, you need more than this plan. So I wanted to talk about, you know, some of the things that do happen, even if you have a plan. There can be absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

I mean, at its simplest, you have set up a plan and then you never revisited it ever again, and your life completely changed, and it didn't do you any good, or it put the wrong people in charge of things, right? You had your parents listed because you were younger, but then now your parents are getting older, or you have kind of parted ways with them. You've gone no contact. Obviously, you don't want your parents listed on your estate plan. So that's the main thing, right? It just your life changes over time. And so, you know, even when you're young, unmarried couple have a kid, and only the one who was like on the house dies, right? And so now all of this stuff, because they weren't married, there's no default like all to your spouse. It's going down to your kid, who one situation was two. So we're not giving a two-year-old a how. Oh no. We just can't do that. Like, what is that? What happens with that? I mean, in that case, so we ended up having to go to probate because now again, mom isn't because they're not married, she doesn't have any sort of priority to even be the personal representative of his estate. And so we have to go to court to ask for permission to get her appointed. And that takes several thousand dollars. And then we this whole time, yeah. And then also, mom, there were a lot of hats, right? So mom also now needs to be the official conservator for her daughter, and we have to have some sort of agreement about what's gonna happen with the house. And, you know, what do we do with this money uh to make sure that the child's interest is protected as the person inheriting, but then also mom's made mortgage payments for so many years. How do you balance when you haven't made a plan? How do you account for that? Now you're a creditor of your daughter, right? And that's where we end up. And also, we see it in another story is a gentleman who put together his plan, not with us, with another attorney who did a great job initially. And most things were owned by the trust. He had gone through funding it. Uh, you hear about that a lot. And I kind of when you're thinking about a trust, right? You think about like a wagon or like a shopping cart. And you want to get all your stuff into the wagon, or it's not gonna work for you.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

It's gonna be I know not all attorneys do that, right? So some attorneys will fund the trust and others will not.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Yeah, yeah. And I we do for certain assets that are easy for a third party to do. So, you know, like the deed to your house. In Arizona, ADOT has beneficiary designation forms for your car that are super easy. Um, and like assigning all your personal property to the trust. So there are a couple of things that we handle, but when it comes to um updating your bank accounts, making the trust the owner, or adding a the trust as a beneficiary to like a 401k or something like that, anymore. That's almost all done online. Um and so I end up more doing the assist because I don't have any access to be able to do stuff like that. I will take a more active role with people if they'd like. Um, but yeah, you're right. Not every attorney does that. Um, I don't know. Everybody knows that they have to do all of those things.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

And I think that's where a lot of people have trouble too is because they're like, oh, we have a trust, but they didn't know to fund it and they didn't know to move everything in there and not just the house and the cars and the things like that, but there are a lot of other things that you need to personally put in the trust that a lot of families miss.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Yep. Yeah. And I mean, we heard a lot with the California wildfires about claims being denied because their house was in the trust, but the insurance company didn't have the trust listed as an additional insured. Oh, yeah, that's you that's something that you you don't normally think about. You know, did they get their claims approved? Yes. But it was just hoops to go through because initially the right person wasn't saying, hey, the house burned down. Right. So that's crazy. Yeah, there are. And then a lot of that. Yeah, right. And a lot of people like again with the kind of set it and forget it mentality of estate planning, you're like, oh, I did it. No, it's good. It's over there on the shelf. You know, you like I said, your life changes. So unless you're picking it up periodically, you don't really know if it's still doing what you want it to do. Right. Your assets probably change, not keeping just a running tally of the assets that you have. Because I mean, firstly, you know this firsthand, right? When someone dies, you're like, Well, what do you have?

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yeah. I didn't know what any of it was. I mean, my parents just had a will, they didn't have a trust or an as or true estate plan. And I do want to definitely talk about that, the difference between an estate plan and a will. Sure. Can you try to break that one down real quick? Because I think a lot of people think a will and a trust are the same, or will and an estate plan are the same thing. My parents had a will, and you know, we didn't have to go to probate for anything because my brother and I got along. I think they had the beneficiaries properly done. Yep. But I know that people say, Oh, I got this will, but that doesn't keep you out of probate.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

No, yeah, that's such a common misconception. A will just tells the court who to appoint and what that person should do with your money. It's not getting you around it. That's basically just your application to the court to say these people should be in charge. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And um, so a will is definitely going to be part of your estate plan. When you're more concerned about avoiding probate, right? Then that's where, as your parents did, they really leaned on beneficiary designations as a part of their overarching plan, right? They relied on a will that fortunately didn't need to be used. You guys didn't have to go to probate because they did a good job of making sure that their assets had beneficiaries on it. And the kind of initial issue with that, if you don't have children who can foot the bill for a little while until they get those beneficiary distributions, then what are they supposed to do? You know, how are things getting paid in the meantime? And should that money actually be coming from you and not having your kids like agree and then have to split it, right? Because there's nothing worse than getting a distribution and then being like, oh hey, we need some more money for some stuff, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Well, I think my parents put us both on the bank accounts. So when that happened, you know, we just had to take the death certificates and we had both had access to the accounts. Or my brother was on it. I forget. I forget exactly what it was. We did not the bank did not hold us up. So we used mom's money. We used mom's money to pay for the things. So that was nice. And again, like I said, my brother and I got along, and I've heard um about people that they go end up going to probate over some of the stuff in the house. Somebody would tell me about a boogie board story. Somebody had a boogie board and the boys wanted it, and they ended up having to spend like $10,000 probate to go divide the assets properly because it wasn't in the estate plan.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yes. That and this is something I've actually started reiterating with my clients now is that it's about the stuff. Yes, people will always fight about money. So just say yes, probably there will be money strife unless I figure this out. But there's gonna be stuff strife, you know? Like who gets the hedgehog tape dispenser, right? If I don't address that, or know for sure that nobody cares and they're gonna take it to goodwill anyway, like who gets it? You know, my mom did this like totally unprompted from me and everything. I I loved it. She has a pepper mill that's in the shape of a bird. It's super cute. We like fun kitchen stuff in our family. My oldest niece loves pepper bird. And it's one of those things where, as a child, as adorable as she was, she's like, When you die, and we're like, Oh, well, okay. They had bought it overseas, and my mom, they were going back on another trip. And my mom came home with two other pepper birds, and she was she gave me one specifically, and she gave my sister one specifically, and she was like, These are the things families fight about. And so ours is Sadie's, and these two, you have your own.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

So that was so sweet. That was so sweet because I have heard another story about you know, grandma's toaster. Like the kids had an emotional attachment to grandma's toaster because they had all these memories of grandma making them breakfast, you know. Wow. So crazy things can happen. And uh, I think that's why it's so important for an estate plan, no matter what your age.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Yeah. To realize that there is so much more to it, right? Right. Powers of attorney, yes. Will, yes. Trust, probably. But then after that, are your beneficiaries updated? How is the ownership on all of your assets? What hedgehog tape dispenser type things do you have the next time your kids are at your house? Can you just have them walk around and let you know if anything is special? Because you might have no idea. Right. My parents have a bunch of um series cells from Disney. Um, because we were big Disney fans. Uh so we have a lot of the original like animation cells from different cartoons and whatnot. And fortunately, I think my sister and I are on the same page about wanting different ones. But I'm like, you know, we do need to sit down at some point and inventory these. Right. And get on the same page about who cares about the right ones.

unknown 18:08

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Well, I think that's a great story, you know, kind of leading into what I do and how I can help families with that because you're talking about a personal thing between you and your sister. And it's not like you get to have all those conversations with your clients about, you know, hey, are you guys fighting over the peppermill? You know, because you don't know about the peppermint. You're the estate planner. You don't know about those things. And I think that's where I'm a great partner. So I can talk to your clients and get more personal and in-depth with them. You can tell them to make a list of all their personal belongings and all the things that are meaningful. Um, but do they? It's a whole nother thing. Um, I can be that person who reminds them, like, hey, have those conversations. The siblings need to talk about it. And it's not a morbid thing. It's just to eliminate chaos when there's a crisis. And that's really what your parent porter is all about and why our partnerships are going to be really great. I know that I'm going to meet people that don't have the estate plan and hadn't even thought about those things. So I can be a great referral partner for you to say, hey, I know somebody in Arizona or Colorado that can help you take care of all that. So yeah, I wanted to just to show that an estate plan is more than just a will or just a trust or just an attorney. Like there's so many more facets to it, and it's very unique and independent on the family. So just tell me what your services are and what you specialize in, who your favorite clients are, and then say how people get in touch with you, and we'll just wrap it up.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

All right. Um, I didn't grow up wanting to be an attorney because I thought all you did was like go to court and argue, right? And like somebody's gotta do that, but that feels terrible to me all day, every day. And I just didn't realize that transactional attorneys were a thing, and so I could help you stay away from court, ideally, right? I really love working with people who like work hard and play hard. Like they're just fun with an energy, and you know, you know, you need to get this done. That's not first on your list or anything, but uh midlife people are most of my clients. I do really love when I get to work with a family and actually sit down. So after we've done the parents planning, they're like, oh, we want to bring the kids in, and they live in Arizona, they need their planning too, or they just need to understand what's going on. I love an awkward family meeting. So it's great. You know, sit down, everybody come on in and let's talk about the plan and let's talk about things like the peppermill. Let's have these kind of conversations, put them in your mind, because otherwise, you're never gonna think about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

No, I think that's really cool that you bring, get to work with the whole family because I talked to a friend the other day and she's like, we have our estate plan done. She's like, Yep, you know what? And I went and pulled it out and she's like, we haven't talked to our kids about it. And she's in her 60s, and our kids are older, you know, they're old enough to have those conversations. She's like, but we've never talked about it. So bringing that to my attention. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

I love with their estate planning attorney. Yeah, I know. I mean, you just aren't again back to set it and forget it. You're like, ooh, I did the thing, check. You know, my goal is to work with you over time, right? Because again, your life's gonna change. So checking in regularly. Has anything happened? What do we need to do? And um, well, how to get in touch with me. The firm I'm with is Life Plan Legal. And so Becky at lifeplanleaz.com is a great email address. And where's your office located? Our office is located in the East Valley on Power, just north of Guadalupe. Okay. And uh yeah, perfect.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

Well, thanks for sharing a couple stories. I get people thinking about all the opportunities and possibilities and gaps that there may be in having an estate plan and why it's so important to talk to somebody and keep it up to date. And I'd keep providing resources so people can find the one they want to work with best. You know, I'm my background's in real estate. I know there's a zillion realtors, and I'm sure there's a zillion estate planning attorneys, but I think it's finding those people that you know, like, and trust. And, you know, there's somebody out there for everybody, and everybody has their their specialty and expertise. So Becky's been great. We've been networking in the same circles, and we're just surrounded by a lot of great women. So I know that she gets to work with a lot of very cool people. So I wanted to bring her on here and introduce you to her. And thank you, Becky, for coming on today.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

And this is fun.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Yeah, thank you. Again, my name's Nicole Porter. My business is your parent porter, and I help people find those gaps in their plans. I will talk to you again soon and have a great day. You too. Thanks for listening to My Parents Lides Me, where we face the realities of aging, family change, and midlife reinvention with a little grit and a lot of heart. If today's conversation helps you feel less alone, I would love for you to like it, share it with a friend, and hit follow so you don't miss the next story or tell that might help you navigate with that. Because even if our parents didn't tell us everything, we're figuring it out one chapter at a time.