Be a Hero to Your Family

Welcome BoomXers. Let’s throw out the old playbook. It’s time to tear down the traditional way of looking at your life and money and leverage the laws of money to our advantage. That’s right. There are laws of money and those who learn and leverage the laws of money win. And sometimes when big. Stay tuned as asset protection attorney Darol, Tuttle, educator, and leader of the Boom X Nation shows us how. Beginner, investors, entrepreneurial fellow attorneys.

Are you ready? Are you ready? Let’s arm this bomb. Now, here’s the Boom X Show, The laws of Money.

Welcome to the Boom X Show, Laws of Money podcast. I am still your host, Darol Tuttle. In the last episode prequel number two, I shared the experience of my father dying and that death occurred in the last few months.

Professionally, I have been assisting people and the death process for about a quarter century. First as an estate planning attorney, as my game became professional up, I upped my level I focused more and more on taxation, but also in particular asset protection, as it relates to Medicaid, Copes, VA regulations. And so I’m an expert in money and I’m an expert in death, and money.

And I’ve had some personal experiences. I witnessed my first death when I was three years old and that particular event had an impact. Of course on me for the longest time I thought, am I really remembering this? Or I don’t remember other events younger than age five or six. Why am I remembering this event?

Is it because it was a dramatic, impactful event, but how does a three-year-old even know that? It turns out that psychologists have now confirmed that childhood trauma is something that can be recalled even at a young age. Now, of course I have reconciled that event. I wouldn’t speak of it publicly if I had not and have learned a lot from it, actually.

It is, the government put it this way, the government issues, a birth certificate to you when you are born and that certificate, they only issue another certificate about you. Again, there’s two government issued cert certificates about you, your birth certificate and your death certificate. So if the government thinks those two events are significant and notable to issue a certificate that looks very similar, actually, really the only difference between the two is the date of death block on the death certificate.

Then, we can acknowledge that the end of a life has a lot huge impact and can change the direction of a family, not just an event that ends a life. And that is really the theme of the law. The law transcends a lifetime. The law can assist you if you leverage it and understand it. You can use the law to extend the mortality of your wealth.

If you use your little noggin, however, the law has requirements. The law requires that these be met. Failure to meet the requirements of the law is at your peril. And so I will do my best. So you can make a well-informed decision. When I was three years old, I sat in a pickup truck and this would be back in the 1968, 69, and before seatbelts were a big thing.

So I sat in the middle seat of a pickup truck with my grandmother on my right and my grandfather on my left. And we were traveling from one town to another to visit relatives. And my grandfather began to complain of heartburn and pulled over to a little am, PM, whatever version they have of that in the middle part of Washington state, back in the late sixties and bought Rolaids.

I can remember that. And we got back in the pickup truck and we tooled on down the road. Didn’t make it very far until he pulled over again into a wide spot in the road. And then opened the pickup door, my grandmother and I remained in the pickup and he left the pickup door open. I would admit, I don’t remember this exactly.

Probably didn’t notice, but I don’t recall if the pickup truck was still running or not, but it was an overcast day. And my grandfather fell to the gravel ground, the floor, the ground, and never got up again. My grandmother couldn’t drive. She is a depression era person and I don’t know what the disconnect was, but she’s, I’ve never, she’s never driven a vehicle.

So she ran out to the road and waved a car down. This would be for cell phones, of course. And so there was a time period in which he just laid there and the ambulance eventually showed up. I can recall very vividly the EMT or whatever they called ambulance drivers back in those days, picked up. My grandfather, I recall that the, one of the EMT picked my grandfather up by his pat legs, not his ankles.

And that was it. And the point of that is not to be morbid, but to increase my credibility as someone who remembers the event, if you can remember it in detail it’s overcast day and this, that, and the other thing, that was let’s see. I was three years old. I’m now 55. So that 52 years ago, and I can’t 52 years, half a century, my grandmother is still alive.

She’s I believe around 98, 99 years old, she’s lived another half of a century alone. Not alone because what I’ve learned was that my father was a stubborn person who was not like many people back up today, but maybe even more so back then did not participate in any kind of financial planning or estate planning or any kind of planning at all.

And so it fell upon the family to figure out of bury him and where to bury him and what to do with his meager assets that he had in there. The result was that my grandmother spent the rest of her life dependent upon relatives, family members in particular, her four daughters. And so my grandmother has always been a part, a big part of my life, but as a widow who was without the love of her family home would have been homeless.

Now, fast forward to the man that I am today, about the same age as my grandfather died at age 54. I am 55. The ironic part of these ages that I’m throwing out to you is this. I shared last episode that my father died a few months ago.

However, in the preceding 12 months, two other men important to me had also died. One was my cousin. So my, my cousin was a person who was close to me as I was growing up as closest thing as I’ve ever had to a brother. I’m an only child, but my cousin was like a brother to me when we were children. And he died unexpectedly, as you can imagine at that young age when he was 55, but I was 54, the same age, my grandfather died. And within a few months of my cousin’s death, a close friend of mine passed away in a car accident. And he was 55 when I was 54. The uptick and mortality for white men, especially white men who are in professional services is huge over 55 for men, things start to go wrong and I’ve experienced it.

These three men, not my father, but my grandfather and my cousin and friend died at the same age, basically without any kind of warning suddenly. And I was, I can remember so clearly a law school professor, he taught administrative law. He had to been one of the most boring people I’ve ever met.

It was absolutely torture to make it through that course. He was such a bad teacher. I can barely remember anything, but he says he made one sentence that I’ve always remembered. And for that, he perhaps maybe has made a bigger impact on me that the teachers that I did pay attention to. And I can remember him holding the podium left and right hand in law schools saying you should never reason anecdotally you should reason empirically.

In other words, don’t make it session based upon a story based upon averages and numbers and what science research tells us about aggregate experience, not just one experience. And so to a bolster, my argument, I will point out that I’m also a death attorney. And so I have represented hundreds of maybe over a thousand clients in my career on this topic.

And there are definitely patterns. More of my clients had passed away in their eighties than their fifties. I am here to tell you what’s devastating is a death that you do not expect or disability that you do not expect, or just normal age related dementia in which the planning process breaks down my four decades.

My family when they lost the financial leader, who was my grandfather, disarray, ensued and impacted my grandmother and even my own mother and therefore me. Because of reliance upon one person who essentially held it together only during his lifetime, through the force of his personality.

As soon as his heart stopped beating, as soon as he fell to the gravelly ground, that day on an overcast road in central part of Washington state, everything changed. The course of people’s lives changed. He looked at money as ending with his lifetime. And it did. I don’t want that to happen to you. I do not want that to happen to you.

If you want to know why my grandfather died. I have an answer. My grandfather’s last name was Kelly and he had blue eyes and reddish hair, which means that he was Irish of Irish descent. That is well-documented. Irish people in the middle ages due to an iron poor diet, maybe at the potato famine. I don’t really know, but a mutation occurred for survival purposes and Irish Americans have a high prevalence of a disease, a blood disease called hemochromatosis, which is Greek for iron overload disease. I may make sense. I am poor diet. There’s a mutation and you just cling on and hold on to every little speck of iron that you can ingest. However, when the potato famine is over, now you have a problem because there are Irish descendants who accumulate iron and if they are not treated, they die. If a male on average of age 57, my grandfather died at age 54. Of course he was undiagnosed untreated. But I know now that he passed away from iron overload disease, because the cause of death is usually liver cirrhosis failure or a heart attack. And I have inherited gene from my grandfather and I have inherited this lovely Irish blood disease, but I’m treated and diagnosed and I have a normal life expectancy.

Once again, another example of medical science denying us, or at least me, my genetic right to be dead in two years. Now I get to live another 20 or 25, 30 years. If I treat myself well and longevity for money can be a problem. We’ll talk a lot about that on the show and my views on how to deal with it.

But that was the cause of my father’s death. And let’s look at this part of the podcast episode is public service announcement because I have something to say about medical science as it handles and diagnosis, this particular disorder that was so impactful and devastating on my death.

Music means we have to take a break, just hang tight.

We’ll be back right after this. From years of hosting the Boom X Show I know that often listeners feel like they’re sipping water from a fire nation. You might have a question. You might have a suggestion, but how to reach us. At one point we considered using 20 express. Carry a picture. Give another idea.

Also, we looked briefly at smoke signals, but in the end we decided that a free online community would be far easier. That’s why we created a community of BoomXers a nation. I know we’ll call it. Boom X Nation. The free online community BoomXnation.com is a perfect way to ask questions about the laws of money, about upcoming events, about financial wealth, building an asset protection.

Without cleaning up after pigeons and feeding horses and sending letters through the mail membership is now open and free at Boom X Nation. All you have to do is register at BoomXnation.com. Once again, that’s BoomXnation.com

Welcome back to the Boom X Show. I’m still here. Please take that commercial seriously. I’m a promo. I’m going to talk more about what it means to be a hero to your family. What we have put together for you at BoomXnation.com or you can go to boomxshow.com to learn more about it. But it involves education, it involves digital courses and a wonderful solution to all of these problems actually.

But when I was a younger man, I decided that I had to serve my country. And I’m so glad that I did that. That was an event that changed my life in so many ways. And in such a positive, hard sweat, I’m not saying it was easy because it was not to have her back in 1984. That’s the old I am boot camp.

I learned that man, I could run like the wind blows back then still can actually it was 120 pounds. I’m in Puerto Rico right now. And I had to pick up, got the hat, got to pick up a friend of mine at the airport and she is British, but currently lives in Australia. And some, for some reason I was sharing this story of being 120 pounds at boot camp.

I don’t know why it came up, but it did. And I set up 120 pounds and she commented. I’m used to kilometers. Is it kilometers, kilograms, whatever metric system. They use now I’m embarrassed. Cause I could, that’s like how distinct the two systems are. She said, she, I don’t know what 120 pounds is.

And so I said, okay. Imagine a skeleton with some organs, a brain and some skin on it. That’s a hundred twenty pounds, but when you’re that light, you can run like the wind blows. And I was able to in the PT test, physical fitness test for our basic training. I was one of the few people who obtained a perfect score and as I’ve aged I’ve just really enjoyed suffering like an animal.

And so I’ve run marathons and ultra marathon. And then I took up bicycle racing, which is the most grueling, dangerous, painful sport you can imagine. And it saved my life and here’s why, one year I ran the Seattle marathon and it happened to be two days before I was scheduled to take a blood, to offer my blood for a life insurance policy.

And a few weeks after I submitted my blood, the results came back and I was denied insurance. I’m an estate planning attorney. I, we use life insurance for irrevocable life insurance, trust wealth replacement, as an alternative to long-term care policies all the time. And I know. If you just run a marathon and you’re going to die, dude, this is like super bad news.

And what was weird is I had just had a physical a month prior in which I was given a clean bill of health and compliments on how fit I was. So I called the doc back, said, I want my money back because you said I was good to go in life. Insurance policy says I’m going to die any minute. What’s up. What’s up, dude?

Of course they said, well, come back in. And here’s what I learned, health insurance will pay for some things because based on percentages, there is a test of testing blood during a physical for ferritin, which is an iron protein is not usually part of what the insurance will pay for. And therefore physicians, when they do a physical don’t check for it.

Well, 10% of y’all probably have iron overload disease. And there is no general screen for it. I was lucky because only, but for the life insurance denial, would we have gone and done a fuller blood panel. So I get the call. Here’s the way it went. So Darol, I got your results back. I got good news and bad news and I’m like, did you literally just say that to me?

Like, where’s your bedside manner? Okay, give me the good news. Good news is you’re not dying. You’re not going to die. The reason your blood enzymes were all messed up for the life insurance test is you just ran a marathon. Your body started to cannibalize itself. I love that. That is cool, man.

Endurance athletes. We, you have to understand our mentality. I go, okay. So give me the bad news. The bad news is because we did the full blood panel. You have hemochromatosis. And I’m like, get out of here. First of all, I don’t even know what that is. And I, of course didn’t really believe it. Until I got off the phone and called a buddy of mine, reached the age where hanging out with doctors.

Some of them are specialists. This guy was a pulmonologist and a wicked smart dude. And he had graduated from Berkeley. And that sounds good to me, Berkeley. That’s where the smart kids go. So I call him up. He is notorious for his bad bedside manner and. I said, look, the doctor said I had hemochromatosis iron overload disease.

Do you know what that is? Yeah, sure. I know what that is. They stared that in medical school, I’m like, well good on where you pay attention to that day. Yes, I was. Okay. Well, good. He goes, what was your ferritin? And so I said 967 and his response was holy Blake. I’m like, oh no, that at that moment I realized in that moment of candor, a good friend of mine reacted that way.

And so let’s wrap this up. If you’re Irish American ask to have a ferritin test, if you’re not Irish American, just realize, but for an odd set of circumstances, I too would have been destined for a death. Like my grandfather, I was diagnosed in my late forties. So there you go. I am treated now.

I have full life expectancy. If you ever meet me, my blood disease is not contagious. You can shake my hand. However, what if I had died? Suddenly the long silence you are hearing is the resonating importance of that question. What is the one thing that we can do to be a hero to our family? You might be the expert in your family.

On annuities, maybe you like deferred taxation, you might know everything to know about the stock market timing and buying this, that the bond, the mutual funds, you might know the difference between qualified and non-qualified accounts. You might know that you receive a step-up and capital gains tax treatment basis.

If, and when you pass away, I doubt you. That amazing capital gains tax savings, the crown jewel of gifts and the tax code is twice as good in a community property state is a non community property state, and you could establish a trust in a community property state. Okay. So those complicated tax rules aside. Maybe your brain is like investing in the most awesome, expensive, hard drive in the world.

But man, if you can’t take that hard drive out and pass it on to your surviving spouse. So she knows what an annuity is or he knows what a qualified account is. You just made a bonehead air that is going to bring you back to square one in some cases, or at least make it stressful and miserable in all cases. The mistake that was made is just there are four components meeting the legal requirements, having an investment policy statement that is customized for particular purposes, educating everybody in the family

so they know what’s going on and then continuity. So it continues forever and that requires dissemination and communication to the family. So they know what to do and when to do it and how to do it. Don’t look at your money as temporal ending with your life. Look at it as something that can go on and on for your descendants if you love them in concept or in reality. Now the thing is I can’t blame my grandfather too much in 19 68, 69, who knew anything back then, there wasn’t the internet wasn’t easy. I do by my father. He was a computer programmer. He had a company that he was a pilot by trade, but he was a computer programmer and had created a flight programming and weather analysis system.

That was amazing and, but yet he could not leverage the internet to help his family upon his death because he refused to do because that’s just the way it’s going to be. Stubborn, private, weird, archaic, non-productive and in the death embarrassing mindset that caused him to fail and to victimize his family, myself included.

I’ve seen my clients come into my firm. I’ve seen, I can think of Just case after case of people just refusing to pull the trigger and move forward. I don’t want that to happen to you. And so let’s second, make it easy. What is the one thing? The first thing that you can do that is easy, that takes care of education and continuity, which in hindsight, it should, the first thing you should do is continuity planning, education and continuity planning before you get to technical estate planning.

Estate planning is pushed down your throat because lawyers want to charge you a bunch of money for expensive pieces of paper, with fancy words on it that can, that are important. The law has requirements that must be met, but the most important thing that you can do that it’s so easy with the system I have set up for you.

I mean that sincerely, I wish you could see my face. With the system that I have set up for you. It, this is the one thing I wish my grandfather had done. This is the one thing I am angry at my father for not doing. And here’s the way it works. You gotta take a break. We’ll be back right after this.

Hey BoomXers Darol Tuttle here.

We all want to take care of our families. Being a hero to our families can sometimes be a little bit intimidating, conquering the paperwork, understanding the account statements. What is the first step? For years I would say you have to meet the laws requirements. You must first start with legal documents.

Well, of course I would say that I’m a lawyer, but now in hindsight, I realize that meeting the law’s requirements without the proper system in place too, in a sense, have a place for the legal documents to exist and reside along with your financial information, along with all of the important information about you and your plan to build family wealth is meaningless, but where to start, start by first organizing and conquering paperwork clutter.

That’s why I put together the BoomX Vault and Everplans system. This online and completely secure digital portal allows you to upload all of your important information. Your financial information, your legal information, your legal documents on top of it, I’ve added the ability for you to add family members, decision-makers to the portal, the financial command post, shall we say so that when the time comes, everyone has the right information at the right time.

Let me show you how the boom X vault Everplans system work. Go to boomxshow.online to learn more. I have added helpful step-by-step guides, checklists, and then online community. That’s boomxshow.online, boomxshow.online.

Welcome back. The one thing, the easy thing that you can do is go to boomxshow.com. Go to BoomXnation.com it does not matter. Boom X vault I have made for you and the Everplans system I have made for you. We have different membership levels and all you have to do is go there and watch a little video in which I explain it and then decide, can you put a little effort into uploading to the system?

The vault. Any legal documents that you have right now, does it matter if they need to be revised later? Just forget about that part. If you don’t have legal documents yet forget about that part. I want you to have them, but if you don’t have them yet, just don’t worry about it. But let’s imagine you did upload your last will and Testament.

So it’s in this portal, your power of attorney. If you end up splayed out over I5 or whatever highway is near you in a car accident. Like my friend was and survive. When you get to the hospital, the first thing they’re going to ask you is what is your name? The second thing is they’re going to ask you, is there a power of attorney?

So we choose the decision maker. Who’s calling the shots, who do we need to contact? Do you have property agreements that’s important and who are the names of all the people that we should notify that you’ve been in this accident? Who are the decision makers? Who is your financial advisor? Who’s your lawyer, what’s their phone number.

Then I want you to upload this is my account statement. And if you don’t have an account statement, at least say I have a life insurance policy at John Hancock. Did you know there’s over $65 billion of unclaimed property in America today? 65 billion. Because people forget, I am not kidding you. I’ve seen it over and over again.

You cannot believe it. But people forget because of dementia that they own assets. And they never told anybody, annuity companies, life insurance companies only send out a written account statements usually once a year. And now everything’s rolled over to paperless. How many times have you forgotten your password to an account?

Do you have passwords written on a piece of paper somewhere hidden under a desk in a file cabinet. Do you? I bet you do is that list up to date? We have a military grade encryption system for password security and one of the levels we have assistance. So you can easily upload everything to make continuity easy.

For example, in Washington state where I’m from, did you know that 70% of Washingtonians prefer to be cremated, but in Kentucky, only 30% want to be cremated. If you pass away, what’s the plan do people know? Do you want to be sprinkled at sea? If I was in Puerto Rico and passed away? Absolutely. If I was in Kentucky, apparently not.

There are only two types of people in the world, Elvis fans and Beatles fans. If you want a Memorial and your daughter’s a beautiful fan and you don’t say you better be playing the king of rock and roll. Guess what’s going to be playing at your Memorial. So let’s make it easy for our family.

Let’s give them instructions on what to do, just because about estate planning and capital gains taxation does not mean that your oldest son, who you want to be in charge of the funeral and the probate and administration, doesn’t mean they know.

Now you do have to invest a few hours to upload this information, but I’ve given you the template and I’ve given you all the information that you need to make it happen. Go to boomxshow.com to learn more. I want you to be a hero to your family.

The second law of money, without a captain, the financial ship will ground upon the shoal. Your family is like a ship’s crew, each hand has a role that is unique to them. But the crew is part of the ship and the ships rudder must have the captain. Have you had a family meeting about the family wealth? Does each member of the crew know the destiny?

The route can all navigate by the stars. If not why not maybe, the second law of money, the ship. always needs captain.