You won't believe how interesting estate planning can actually be

Welcome to the Healthy Rich podcast, a show about money for misfits!

I’m Dana Miranda, a financial educator and author of You Don’t Need a Budget.

In this episode, I talk with estate planning experts about:

🥑 How to make an end-of-life plan for any kind of family

🥑 Why a trust is for everyone — not just rich folks

🥑 How to leave your estate to your pets (you really can!)

🥑 Securing your digital legacy with the mishmash of technology that rules our lives

Mentioned in this episode

• Legado (not a paid partnership; I just appreciate the work these women are doing!)

• Password managers — here’s the one I use!

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You can always follow the podcast right here via email or Substack, or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. The transcript is below. Enjoy!

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Transcipt

(This hour-long conversation makes the email too long for your inbox, but you can read the full thing on the web!)

Welcome to the Healthy Rich podcast, a show about money for misfits! I’m Dana Miranda, a certified educator in personal finance and author of YOU DON’T NEED A BUDGET: STOP WORRYING ABOUT DEBT, SPEND WITHOUT SHAME, AND MANAGE MONEY WITH EASE.

Today, I’m sharing a replay of a live session from earlier this month on Holistic legacy & estate planning for every type of family.

In the session, I talked with estate planning experts and founders of the estate planning service Legado, Noelle Kimble McEntee and Ciara Lister. In this presentation, we answered questions from Healthy Rich readers about planning for the end of life and protecting your legacy — in any kind of family.

In particular, Ciara and Noelle recognize that estate planning is traditionally designed around an expectation of a certain type of family — typically a married couple, most often a cis man and woman, with children. But we know families come in all shapes. So we talked about some of the unique legacy planning concerns for nontraditional families have to think about — like unmarried couples, same-sex couples, polyamorous partners, trans folks, blended families, and foster and adoptive parents.

Like all Healthy Rich webinars, the full live session was free and open to anyone who registered. I’ll share some of the recording here, but you’ll have to be a paid subscriber to get the full 60-minute session. You can subscribe at healthyrich.co and find the full recording with video under Classes, or listen to the audio in the Substack app or through your private feed in any podcast player.

Planning for the end of life is a fraught topic for many families. And sometimes, money is the last thing you want to think about. I started my career, before I was in personal finance, writing about end-of-life traditions and services, and I learned the importance of having these conversations early and often with your family. I hope this conversation gives you some of the information and resources you need to get started — and I highly recommend Legado’s services to set up your plan easily and affordably online!

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Dana

Hello everybody! Thank you so much for being here to talk about estate planning. I know this is a big topic today, but we're excited to get into it, and hopefully it'll be a fun session, as much as it is informative.

I first connected with our guests through my advice column for The Penny Hoarder, because I get so many questions from readers about estate planning and wills and legacy planning, and usually it's after someone has died and they're kind of scrambling to figure things out. And so I've talked with both of our guests to try to answer the questions that people have and to try to give some information for other readers, to hopefully help people plan ahead. That's what we're trying to do today.

Our guests today are the founders of the estate planning company Legado. It's on a mission to educate people on why estate planning is so important, while also making it more accessible and inclusive. They started Legado in 2023 to make planning for the end of life easier and less taboo for everybody. And with their combined experience in the legal field, creating about 2,000 estate plans and years in tech and marketing, they were a perfect match to start making some change in this industry. So I would like everybody to please welcome to Healthy Rich Ciara Lister and Noelle Kimball McEntee.

Noelle

Thank you, excited to be here!

Dana

Hi, Noelle and Ciara. Thank you for being here.

So before we get started, I do want to give everyone a quick reminder: We are answering some reader questions. But a reminder that we're not offering individualized financial or legal advice today.

So let's get into it. Noelle and Ciara, I'd like to start by explaining exactly what we mean when we're talking about legacy planning or estate planning or end-of-life planning. What are the different types of legacies that people should be thinking about?

Noelle

I'll go ahead and take that. Very excited to be here. So I think in general, most people, when they hear the word legacy, they either think of someone that's super wealthy, so they have some sort of financial legacy, or famous in some capacity — they've done something that's very impactful in their field.

What we have realized is that the majority of people forget that they're actually able to create their own legacy. And everything they're doing on a day-to-day basis is is a part of that. Your legacy doesn't start the day you pass away. It starts the day you start living with it in mind.

And so the goal to really understand what legacy and estate planning is, is first to understand the legacy that's important to you, that makes you proud. So that could be a financial legacy, but it also could be a professional one. Are you a mentor? Are you always a part of your community? Giving back? Is your legacy that you're the type of person that will go around and collect all of the toothpaste tubes from your neighbors to make sure that they're recycled properly? And so the idea there is that a legacy is what you make of it. And estate planning is the entirety of how you document and communicate what your wishes and your legacy are, so that that's protected and it's passed on and not forgotten.

Dana

And we'll talk about some specific vehicles for that, because people had questions about trusts, and we'll talk about what a will versus a trust is later. But I'm curious if you could maybe add a little bit more there about how non-financial legacy planning fits into the work that you do, how that works with what we traditionally think of as estate planning, which I think is mainly financial.

Noelle

So I think there's a few things. Ciara and I always joke when we say, “Oh, we help with estate planning,” people immediately look at us and they're like, “I don't have a mansion. I don't have a wrought iron fence around my house. Like, do you see a butler?”

And we, we have to explain, like, no, no, no. It's an umbrella term for documents that articulate your wishes in case that you're incapacitated or for when you pass. And so those documents could be specifically around what things you want passed on to your future generations. What are some family recipes? What are some family values and stories that you want to ensure are continued throughout your line?

It could also include the fact that you want to ensure your celebration of life is a true representation of you. I think a lot of times people don't write down that they don't want a certain type of funeral. And then things happen where people aren't using the correct pronouns at someone's funeral, or the correct name, or they're doing a religious funeral that they didn't want. And so to me, the idea is really thinking of all the things that are important to you and what you want communicated to people so that there's no question, because once you're gone, people, they like to argue. And so it's best ensure that you're articulating your wishes for your pets, your loved ones and and how you want your memory to be to live on.

Dana

I love that more expansive idea, and it can really help people start to think about what they want to leave, the stories that they want to leave, because we hear that so often, how quickly stories and knowledge and traditions get lost in a family because people don't think to pass them on.

Noelle

Yeah. I mean, it's even to the extent, like you could go to your grandmother's attic and find her diary. My granddaughter isn't going to be able to find a diary. There's a ton of writing, but it's all digital. So how am I ensuring that that can be found? And without intention, it'll get lost.

Dana

That's great. And yeah, we'll get into the questions here in a minute, because we have a question about digital assets too, which I'm very interested to hear, how we can plan for that. But first, let's talk about legacy planning for non-traditional families. Estate planning is traditionally designed around this expectation of a certain type of family, which we typically think of as a married couple, most often a cis man and woman with children to pass some kind of assets on to. But we know that families come in all shapes. Even though legacy planning and estate planning have not existed for all types of families, all these all types of families have always existed.

So let's talk about some of the unique concerns that non-traditional families have to think about when creating a legacy plan within this system that is often shaped for families that don't look like them. I have on the screen some kind of specific situations, but if there's anything beyond this, that I haven't thought of, we can talk about that, too. But let's start with unmarried couples, because, well, that's personally interesting to me, because I am in an unmarried partnership!

Ciara

So actually, I kind of want to jump in and talk about something that happens all the time, I feel like people look absolutely mortified and shocked when I tell them this fact, whether you're unmarried or divorced, if there are children involved at all. So a lot of people will have a child with someone, they'll get divorced, or they'll have a child with someone and never get married. What they don't realize is, when they pass away, if they leave all their assets to that child, and that child is a minor, that money goes to the guardian of that child.

So now your money is with your ex spouse or with the person that you were never legally married to, and they kind of get to do whatever they want. The court will give it to them. They'll give them all the money. They're taking care of your child, and they’re going to take care of them financially, and that just gives all of your money to, theoretically, your ex. People don't realize that. You can leave everything to your kid, but your kid has a guardian, and they'll have full control over that, unless you take it out of court and have that trust in place.

Same thing if you're unmarried and children are involved, unmarried, same sex, anything like that, where you have families that are even blended, they don't follow that norm. There's an intestate succession plan. Every state has a plan that has been shaped by court cases, by probate, and it's going to tell them how they're going to play out. And go through this distribution, even if you have a will, you're going to be in probate court, and they're going to look at that and compare it to the intestate plan, and kind of go through it.

So the only way to make sure you know that you have the plan for an unconventional, not static, linear family, like a very, you know, two people and children, is to make sure that you've spelled it out exactly. Even more, if you can remove it from court by using a trust, you're going to get exactly what you want, because your trustee can do anything under the sun that is legal.

Dana

And that's why I'm excited. This is what I really got into with Noelle, and why I was excited to talk to you all is, I think a lot of people don't think about having a trust, because that sounds like something that's for very wealthy families. But I'm excited to talk about how that can fit for people. Can you clarify, Ciara, when you say intestate, is that the plan that is written down?

Ciara

Intestate is dying without any documents. So if nothing happens, obviously the court has to do something with your money and your stuff, so they call it an intestate. You can die intestate or testate — with a will — or you can pass away and have all of your documents outside of court.

Dana

What kind of special considerations do you see for same sex partners who are married, that might be different from people of different genders?

Ciara

I mean, the reality is, it's just like anything else, where it's something that hasn't been done in court often, so there hasn't been a lot. Their intestate is usually for static, husband-and-wife family who have children, because that's just how it was made, and that's the history of it. So they know where the assets are going to go a lot of times.

For one example, in Florida with guardianships of children, they try to favor the mother's side. Well, if there are two moms, how is the state of Florida going to decide who your guardian is and who is going to be the financial guardian of your child? If you guys haven't nominated it, and it's not that someone's going to be better or worse, but you know which parent will be that physical guardian. You know your grandpa, the child's grandparent, your sister, your brother, whatever it might be, you know, who should be watching that kid. You know, who should be writing the checks. And you can make your own plan to replace you. But the state has no idea, and they really don't know what to do in that situation, because it just hasn't been faced a lot. And their laws haven't adapted to it yet. And estate planning laws change SO slowly.