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 wins and sometimes win big. Stay tuned as asset protection, attorney Darol Tuttle, educator, and leader of the Boom X Nation shows us how. Beginners, investors entrepreneurs, 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'm your host, Darol Tuttle. And I got to say, boy, did I open up a can of worms? Yesterday. I decided to send an email that had been recommended to me to send seven months ago.
And I had recorded the second episode of the Boom X Show laws of money podcast about the death of my father. That particular episode was recorded six hours after I learned of his death and is only my reflections, visceral reaction about the news. I did not have a close relationship with my father.
And so the Adobe Audition recording software rolled and I spoke nonstop for that entire episode. And it is, as I spoke, there have been no edits. And I showed, share that episode with my friend of mine, who I trust and has good opinions. Thanks because I woke up the next morning and I thought to myself, oh my goodness, did I really say all of that?
Aren't there rules about respect for the recently deceased. Will I be struck by lightning? And I felt self-conscious. I've always been a direct person however, I also greatly value etiquette. But I published it and her feedback was, oh my goodness though. That was so powerful. You've got to send to your email list a link to that episode so they can hear it and then you need to follow up every single week with a story of settling everything and your reaction, and how does probate work in general and estate administration so that people can learn. Now, my initial reaction was heck, oh, what's wrong with you? I'm looking at try to monetize my father's death.
And I didn't. And in fact, not only did I not do that, the event of his death caused a long sequential analysis of estate planning in America today, and my place in it and decided to essentially close my law firm that I've run. I've owned this firm and operated it since 1996. I've had one job as an adult.
And not because of my father's death that only prompted the train of thought that led to bravery. Like taking the action, the bold statement of thinking and looking at the way we deliver legal services in a new way. And it's frightening because you rely upon. I don't care how brave you think you are and what great accomplishments you think you have accomplished.
Of course, there's going to be some for boating, apprehension, anxiety, even as you wonder, like how will I make income? And how will my, okay. I forgot to turn off the volume of my computer. And did you hear that little sound in the background? That was the sound I have been hearing all day long reactions to the email that I sent.
They're still coming in the next, 24 hours later. And the email that I sent that has prompted this flooding of my inbox with a messaging of, oh my goodness. Darol, here's my story. Here's the relationship I had with my father. He too, made life difficult. He too failed to be a family leader. It's just it's actually, I'm a little overwhelmed.
I have never in my life communicated. I make a living talking. I'm a lawyer. All lawyers make a living selling words. That's what we do. And with a podcast and writing and blogging. In fact, there's an app that I use when I write it's called Grammarly. It's a great app. It is more enhanced than the correction and spelling error type application that comes that you're used to on Microsoft word or whatever.
And I'm a fan of this app, I've upgraded to the premium. It's that good. And it has been helping me. But basically I use it because my brain goes faster than my fingers. And behind my recent cursor, there is just carnage related to the proper spelling of words and I don't care. I use the app to see there's another one.
Did you hear that? That is literally another response to this email. I'm going to let that thing play so we can just see how man o'clock at night. There's still this importing of communication about relating to tragedy. But back to Grammarly, what I did not know about Grammarly is not only was it helping me correct typos, it was and now analyzing my writing and then giving me a report card back.
And I get the report. I don't know, maybe it's monthly. And it says I've always been about 95, 96%. I am more productive than 96% of other Grammarly users. Like all of the users that they have. I'm like, wow, that's that means I talk a lot. Right.
And I use more unique words than 96% of the users. Now keep in mind that the Grammarly application only is only tracking the words that I type when I'm on the internet. It does not track to words that I type when I'm using a desktop applications, such as word or whatever in the last 12 months, I've typed over 1.1 million words.
I don't know. That sounds like a lot to me and never in 1.1 million words in 12 months, have I ever written anything that has been as impactful as the email that I sent. And it's quite inspiring to me, but you don't want to hear is Darol you're so brave. Of course, I don't feel brave.
Sometimes I feel the opposite of brave, but I think what they mean is like you are opening a discussion. These are almost exact words of methods that came in about 20 minutes ago, you were opening up a much needed discussion and I'm like you're right. I have never in my life, heard anybody publicly just say it.
My parent who's past was a jerk. It's okay to say that it's okay to share that. And people who had loving parents who have done things correctly, of course they don't, they can't relate to that really. I'm not saying it's, I'm actually curious based on the emails I'm getting into my inbox, it's a much bigger demographic than I had previously thought.
Now the thing that I'm curious about is are people there's emotional carnage, but there's also financial carnage. The message that came in 20 minutes earlier had indicated that when the father died, the family leader, he had done no estate planning. And the family was left in financial chaos.
There's only a meager life insurance policy. He died young and unexpected and mom had fallen into a deep state of depression, which is only natural. And it changed the course of that family. If you listen to episode three, that's exactly what happened to my family. When at age three, I witnessed my grandfather die.
And when one of the things that really wore me down as an attorney was, I felt like I was, I can be a persuasive person. I am above average at least. I think so my practice was very successful. So I had the skill set of persuading people to take action. But yeah, it was a tug of war.
It was like a mental and emotional exertion to, to help a family leader get to, yes. I want to hire you to install an asset protection plan. And at the time, sometimes I found it fun. I admit it to try to convince somebody of anything. Over time, it just became exhausting. It shouldn't have been that difficult because as between, it's clear from my perspective, based on my own family history and the, how many clients have I seen suffer and pass away in their eighties or from disease or from in my, I don't even know.
I have been an objective observer of that process for decades and consider myself an expert in death. And so I know what the consequences is of this attitude that is resistant to, what spending money dealing with a white collar professional.
I don't understand fully the mentality, but gosh, darn it. The messaging confirms my own observation that mentality is in a sense, is victimizing family.
I have decided to change the format of my podcast. Yeah. Like a slight modification, every podcast episode, I had intended to have a law of money sequentially and then a companion course. So there was a companion course to this podcast. The companion course is free. And the idea is when Jack Tar comes out and so it's the first law of money. You can't take it with you. Well, that's a quaint expression that we've heard countless times that is just trying to draw attention to the folly of materialism. However, there are actually rules of law, like the code that backs that statement up and there are two in particular.
One is the most generous provision in the tax code. You can't explain that provision in a hundred podcast. They're like, you have to put a little bit of effort into it. And so the companion course is my show notes. The companion course also includes what law are you talking about Darol.
I want to know how to avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital gains taxation. If you think I'm kidding earlier today, I had a meeting with a family and on the table, it was $400,000 of tax that was inevitable if we did not account for capital gains in the context of aging and long-term care costs.
And you're down in the weeds when you have something like that. But if you know the law, you can reach down into it and pull out these little hidden gems. And so the companion course is designed to be a little more educational and less entertaining than the podcast. I'm not sure that podcast is entertaining, but I'm trying my best.
Cause I'm telling you something. It is not easy to make a legal topic of any sort interesting. Because lawyers, man, we just cannot think and act like normal people. So the podcast course is out there. Go check it out. You can go to boomxshow.com. There's a link right to the free companion course. Yay. However, that does not speak to the greatest obstacles to the law. And that is the human brain. I can think of two cases in which they were in both cases, a little old lady, husband died. Woman's in her eighties. And to avoid, in one case it was over $500,000 in tax. There were some steps necessary to fund a tax saving trust.
You don't need to know that detail, but there was a decision lawyers, cop. This is a difference between normal people and lawyers call it post-mortem planning. Okay. So post-mortem, that is Latin. It means planning after you die. Why don't you just say that? Like we have this option available. When your husband dies, but no, we had to say post-mortem planning.
No wonder nobody likes attorneys. There are attorneys that listened to this podcast, so they know what I'm talking about because we had a, it's a disclaimer trust. Who the heck? Come on. It's the pull, the pin, pull the trigger rather when it happen trust wait and see contingency. And so in two cases, So Myrtle, your husband died.
Do you want to save $500,000 in tax? All we have to do is step one, step two, step three. In two cases with full cognition, the widow's decided no I'm going to, I'm going to pay a print. I'm going to pay about $500,000 premium to not be inconvenienced. That's perfectly fine because you have made a well-informed decision in which you analyze your family, the hoops you had to go through.
And at a certain point, you have to leave it behind and your kids are independently wealthy themselves. I support that 100%.
Now that is almost a life lesson. It's not a rule of law. We talked about tax savings. We talked about disclaimer, we talked about post-mortem planning, which is 100% legal. However, on the human being side of it, she had a decision to make that was emotional. And so one of my goals on the show is like, what are the obstacles to intelligent, mature, responsible decision making?
Like, why is it that chief justice Warren Burger of the United States Supreme Court, the late just chief justice died without an estate plan. How is that even possible? Lost a 40% of his estate of the estate to probate and estate tax back then the estate tax credit amount was very low and there's no indication of his thought process.
So one is left to just wonder why did my father fail? Why did my grandpa, why are all of these people flooding my inbox, describing the consequences to them because another person didn't do something and was also a jerk. My dad was a jerk.com. And so here's one, if you are I have become interested in the psychology of getting to yes.
And so I read articles and as recreation my original thought process was I'm going to just try to understand the psychology so I can increase the number of people I convince to stop doing nothing and protect their family. I closed my law firm so now I'm interested in it as a subject matter. Like why is it that people fail when presented with an opportunity to walk through the process with a professional.
And don't, I know what you're thinking. I have accounted for the fact that they just didn't like me. Like my, I didn't my shoes weren't the right color or my, whatever. However, here's one for you. How to make a correct decision decisively. Now there is a personality type. I think I'm going to say that there are four personality types just to make it simple.
And the mind map that I have, one of the personality types that I look for is a very strictly linear thinker and not to pick on engineers right now. There are people chuckling in their cars and on the treadmill in the gym because they either are an engineer or married to one, and they know exactly how this conversation is going to finish. But there are some people whose minds and their intelligence have to understand a problem as if it were a system of physics or engineering.
Step one, all the way to the end. And become paralyzed more or less until they have sequentially walked through what they viewed to be the steps and reached the conclusion. Physics by the way, is the only discipline that can accurately predict future. Law and physics, that's a bad combination because the law does not look forward one second really. The law is to the future, because we are looking to the past and leveraging statutes that have already been written and court opinions in cases that we rely on as mandatory interpretation of law, all that occurred in the past. So while it looks backwards, physics, if I shoot a cannon out of this Canon at a velocity with the wind, and they can tell you where the Cannonball.
In the physical universe at some point in the future. That's amazing. Now physics is sequential fire. They have formulas for that. The law is a patchwork of chaos, federal law, state law, city law, common law back to the middle ages. And so it becomes difficult for a linear thinker to get to yes because they want order and the law is controlled chaos.
So here's a exercise that I developed to help the linear thinker make the correct decision. It goes like this. Imagine the client's name is Bob. I say Bob, because in one day last year, I had two consultation meetings with two gentlemen. They were both named Bob. They were both engineers. Yes. That was a particularly bad day for me.