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What's the Alternative? | Episode 2 | A Guided Legacy featuring Josh Kanter
6 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Banrion Capital Management’s What’s the Alternative Podcast! Join host Shana Orczyk Sissel, the “Queen of Alternatives” Founder & CEO of Banrion Capital Management, as she interviews leaders in the alternative investment space. Learn more about their firms, their passions and about the many different ways investors can use alternative investments to add value in their investment portfolios.
In this episode "A Guided Legacy" Shana is joined by Josh Kanter, Founder and CEO of Leafplanner to talk about something a little different, how a legacy planning tool like Leafplanner can help advisors deepen their client relationships and also create a more complete picture of the client's financial life.
The idea for Leafplanner arose after Josh went through his own complex succession planning situation. When Josh's father, Burton Kanter, a tax attorney himself, passed away in 2001, Josh left his job as a successful lawyer, to work full time managing his father's estate. Beyond the sheer complexity of his father's affairs, Josh struggled to fill in the blanks of missing information and a complex 10,000 page estate tax return. It took Josh more than a decade to settle the estate. The experience drove Josh to begin working with families to create road maps that went well above and beyond traditional estate planning. Eventually this led to the development of Leafplanner, a technology that creates a web of information and contacts for a family called a ‘Leafplan’, which documents a family business’s enterprise structure. It helps them with ‘connecting the minute details’ and seeing how every trust, bank account, asset and adviser relates to one another, according to the tech service. The platform also provides family members with advice around the discovery of information from the first generation, as well as ‘checklists’ as they go along. This guided approach to someone's legacy leaves no stone unturned. As Shana and Josh discuss in this episode.
Learn more about the software and schedule a demo: Leafplanner
Connect with Josh on LinkedIn: Joshua Kanter
Learn More About Banrion: Banrion Capital Management
Connect with Shana on LinkedIn: Shana Orczyk Sissel
Connect with Shana 𝕏: @shanas621
Important Disclosures:
The opinions expressed on the “What’s the Alternative Podcast” are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security.
It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. Any past performance discussed during this program is no guarantee of future results.
The guests featured on this program are participants on Banrion Capital Management’s platform. As such Banrion may receive payment for their participation as a platform partner.
Any indices referenced for comparison are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. As always please remember investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital; please seek advice from a licensed professional.
Investments are not FDIC-insured, nor are they deposits of or guaranteed by a bank or any other entity, so
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Transcript
Introduction to Alternative Investments
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Bonnie and Capital Management's What's the Alternative podcast. Joining host Sheena Orsik-Sicil, the queen of alternatives and founder, CEO of Bonnie and Capital Management as she interviews leaders in the alternative investment space. Learn more about their firms, their passions, and about the many different ways investors can use alternative investments to add value in their investment portfolio.
Meet Josh Cantor from Leaf Planner
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome everyone to our second episode of What's the Alternative, where we highlight folks that work with Bonnerian on our platform. And today we have kind of a unique guest with us. We have Josh Cantor from Leaf Planner. Leaf Planner is actually a software provider and provides some really interesting estate planning tools for advisors.
How Leaf Planner Supports Advisors
00:00:54
Speaker
We're going to spend some time talking to Josh about what really helped him and drove him to kind of build out this particular solution and how advisors who work with boundary and might benefit from working with a firm like leaf planner as well, not just in terms of, you know,
00:01:12
Speaker
coming to allocating to alternatives, but understanding the full financial picture of a client and potentially what that might lead in terms of growing your assets under management. But more importantly, what one of our key focuses here at Bonrion is helping you, the advisor, build and grow your relationship with the underlying client, not just through allocating to alternatives, but through understanding the complete picture of their financial situation. So I'd like to welcome Josh to the show.
00:01:40
Speaker
Dana, hi. Good morning. Thank you for having me. I am really appreciative of you having me on.
Innovative Estate Planning Tools
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, first let's start with, Leaf Planners won a bunch of awards and I'd like to just highlight some of the awards you've won. Correct me if I'm wrong, you recently won an award this fall from Family Office Network. Family Wealth Report, yep, we won a, it was just this spring in May and we won,
00:02:11
Speaker
a Family Wealth Report Award, which we're really obviously excited about and proud of. And that was in the B2C client facing innovation category or something like that. I'm sure I've got the title wrong, but it was very exciting for us as we're pretty new and having that recognition that we were doing something really innovative to help clients and advisors.
00:02:31
Speaker
You definitely are doing something innovative. I think most of the advisors in our network are dealing with individuals which are kind of like the mass affluent, you know, average account size, anywhere between
00:02:44
Speaker
500,000 to $2 million total net worth of these individuals could be anywhere between 5 million and $10 million. And estate planning is an important component of the full picture of the
Understanding the Full Financial Picture
00:02:57
Speaker
client. But what LEAP Planner really brings to the table is interesting. And I think our listeners would love to know sort of what drove you to focus on building a solution to help with this idea of understanding the full financial picture and how that can help with legacy and estate planning.
00:03:15
Speaker
Sure. So let me give you a little background from me and my situation was wildly complex. So I hope nobody listens to it and says, oh, this only applies to that category of complexity. But I was originally a lawyer. I come from a multi-generational family of wealth myself. I stepped in to basically help my family.
00:03:35
Speaker
22 years ago, 23 years ago now, when my father got ill, he got cancer, we knew he was gonna pass away and I stepped in to basically help my family kind of navigate through all the things that come along with multi-generational
Josh's Personal Wealth Management Story
00:03:49
Speaker
wealth. So, excuse me, for us that meant
00:03:53
Speaker
We were filing 750 tax returns a year. That's the level of complexity I don't encourage anybody to take on and this certainly is not designed to only meet that level of complexity but really understanding why do 750 entities exist how do you manage all these different pieces of information and and put it all together and so one of the things that really happened in the wake of my father's death was
00:04:16
Speaker
designing this idea of how do you better communicate to family members, to advisors, among kind of the whole ecosystem, if you will, of trustees, executors, advisors, family, again.
00:04:28
Speaker
and really communicate a holistic picture of what is everything there is to know about the family, the family's relationships, why these different pieces were created, why you went into different investments, what your expectations were for those. So all the things obviously you guys and your advisors talk about with your client families. So it really was designed to
00:04:48
Speaker
to pull that whole picture together.
Evolution of Leaf Planner
00:04:50
Speaker
And if I fast forward then 20 years later, so a couple of years ago, we decided to say, how do we bring this to everybody? Because people were really getting a tremendous amount of value out of it. But I was working with, frankly, a handful of clients a year, and that's not touching as many people as we thought we should be able to touch and help with this idea. So Leaf Planner is the outgrowth of that.
00:05:12
Speaker
kind of a 25 year pedigree, if you will, but it's really been around for the last two years, 18 months that we've been live with families and really is designed to create this kind of holistic picture that hopefully we'll talk about here in a few minutes.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I've seen the demo for the software a couple of times. And I always liked it because it brings personalization where I think it's necessary. I think everybody thinks about estate planning as like the will and the life insurance policies and who gets what.
Leaf Planner Features Overview
00:05:44
Speaker
But one of the things I found so interesting about leaf planters offering is it goes so much further than that.
00:05:49
Speaker
You were showing me in the demo the ability to write an obituary and have it available there, information about what bank your mortgage is with, what the balance is, what the passwords were, and being able to keep certain parts of it locked so that not everybody has access, but should something happen, all of that information can be readily available.
00:06:11
Speaker
I'm dealing with the passing of a friend of mine, a close friend, and basically my best friend in the whole world, and very young.
00:06:22
Speaker
figuring out his financial picture is impossible because, you know, not everybody considers that they might pass away at the age of 46. And so, you know, having some of that available and making it more than just this idea of like it's a state planning, but more of, you know, providing information
00:06:42
Speaker
in case you became incapacitated in any way, not just if you passed, I think can be really helpful. So let's dive into it. Let's talk about what makes Leaf Planner different in your mind and how it goes beyond traditional estate planning and really starts to think about all the information as it relates to that person's financial picture.
Holistic vs Traditional Estate Planning
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I think, first of all, everything I'm sorry about your friend I lost my best friend at 55 and that's a horrible, horrible thing to go through so I'm very sorry.
00:07:17
Speaker
I think, importantly, as you're describing, it's really about this kind of greater holistic picture. The estate planning, of course, is a piece of it. And really, when I talk about estate planning or a leaf planner talks about estate planning, it's really, it's not doing estate planning, right? It's really talking about how do you explain to the rest of the world, the rest of your family, your advisors, again, whoever is in that ecosystem, what the estate planning is all about.
00:07:41
Speaker
So some of that is gonna be the hard documents, right? Yes, as you said, we're gonna ask you, hey, Shana, please go get your will and your trust and your healthcare power of attorney and your general power of attorney and your life insurance trust, whatever pieces you may have. And estate planning is generally, I'd say, gonna get a lot more complicated again in a couple of years because I'm sure as all of your listeners know,
00:08:02
Speaker
Right, the, the lifetime exemption is scheduled to come back down so while we're sitting at this lofty $23 million level or whatever it is for a couple that's likely to shoot back down at the end of 2025 to 10 million or so and all of a sudden a lot more people are going to get trapped into that estate plan or that estate tax, you know, kind of quagmire then, then maybe are getting trapped today but
00:08:24
Speaker
So, yes, we're going to ask you to collect those documents but then what leaf planner is going to do we plan or basically takes what I would call an information approach and a multidisciplinary approach and so what I mean by that is that and you've obviously seen this in the demo is I'm going to say to you yes.
00:08:39
Speaker
bring me all of those documents or bring all those documents into Leaf Planner. But then Leaf Planner is also going to say, hey Shana, have you described why you chose Josh as your trustee? And that spiritual leader is going to be in there saying, have you thought about your funeral and your obituary as you mentioned?
00:08:55
Speaker
Wealth advisors going to be in there saying have you thought about the priority of asset liquidation to meet the estate tax if there is one and you're going to have context brought all of these things so you're going to be able to say. You know hey maybe you've got two kids and you want to describe why you chose.
00:09:11
Speaker
Susie is the healthcare power holder, but Billy is the general power holder. And maybe that's because Susie is a doctor and Billy is a lawyer. Whatever the reasons, you want to explain that because as you think about, as we all know, what drives families apart, especially in the wake of a matriarch or patriarch, you know, dying, is these relationships and the communication and the lack of communication or explanation of why mom and dad did X, Y, or Z.
Capturing Personal Stories in Planning
00:09:37
Speaker
So we want to capture that. We want to capture why this painting behind me is important to me because it hung in my dad's office and now it hangs in my office. We want to capture, we happen, as you well know, we happen to be big art collectors. So I want to capture all of my art-related relationships so that when my family has to manage the art collection in my absence,
00:10:02
Speaker
they know who to turn to and who to call. We wanna capture that your friend is the head of the regional bank. We wanna capture that your friend is the head of the local car dealer. Like whatever it is, we're trying to capture all of that context and those relationships and do it in a way that really can guide a family. And a lot of the families, of course, I look at me and again, our level of complexity. I had to give up my job.
00:10:27
Speaker
I gave up my entire career to come work for my family, which was not a bad result in the end, of course, but it was not where I intended to go. And I'm in a fortunate position that my family could afford to let me do that.
00:10:40
Speaker
But that's not normal. Normal is the client that you're describing where you've got a half a million, a million dollar account. You've got a net worth of $5 to $20 million or whatever it is. And nobody in the family is going to give up their life to come basically sort all this stuff out. So when you think about how complex we really all are, and we are complex, whether it's that you've got a home and a few investments and a couple of trusts
00:11:09
Speaker
you've got vendors and you've got utility accounts and you've got passwords and you also have stories. You want to share those stories. Here's grandma's necklace that I'm leaving to my daughter and I want to leave it to her because of X, Y, or Z, whatever it is. So sharing that whole picture, I hope I'm describing this holistic picture, is really, really important. And then on the advisor side, we're hoping that
00:11:36
Speaker
that really helps the advisor have, again, a better picture, as you described, of the whole family, of having a relationship with the whole family and lots of different ways that we can talk about, obviously, how Leaf Planner helps the advisor have that deeper relationship with the family and various family members.
Challenges Post-Death and Leaf Planner's Role
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think you touched on this. Most people only think like estate planning and you have to worry about how you structure things once you get over that exemption limit. You mentioned 23 million, but that has fluctuated over time. But as I have dealt with family members passing, and again, my friend's recent passing, there's like this period of time after the death where whether they had a will or not,
00:12:26
Speaker
doesn't always matter because sometimes even if they had a will or didn't have a will there's this need of like who pays the mortgage payment to the bank after they pass because it still needs to be paid but I don't know where his bank account was I don't know what the account number on the mortgage is I don't know who holds the mortgage
00:12:45
Speaker
I don't know who the utility bills have and who his landlord was to let them know if they rented like who, you know, so-and-so passed and we have to clean up the house, who should get the little things you were just talking about, things that maybe don't have a lot of like financial value, but they have sentimental value. So as you're cleaning out the house, like who should get fixtures or is there certain, you know,
00:13:10
Speaker
clothing or jewelry that had sentimental value to specific family members or friends and wanting to make sure of that. Having some idea of how they would want to be celebrated in their memorial, you know, how they would want that, who was important to them, you know, maybe they had no will, so they had no trustee or executor named, but maybe there's somebody that they
00:13:35
Speaker
if an untimely passing would want to have kind of be that person and have those communicated. And you touched on something that I think is important because I think the average advisor who's dealing in this mass affluent, you know, when you're starting to think about maybe this is a person who's the first person in their family to have any wealth that requires planning, right?
00:13:58
Speaker
and they have children, and maybe they have a couple life insurance policies, one for one child, one for the other, they have one through work. Once they pass, it's like, where are they? I'm going to pay for the funeral, but is there a life insurance policy that will pay out to cover the cost, so I'll be reimbursed? Things of that nature, like I said, things people don't think about, like who paid the mortgage? It's in the account.
00:14:26
Speaker
What it also helps you do as an advisor is get to know what's important to your client and ask the right questions and develop a relationship that goes beyond just managing their assets. And I think, you know, we talk about this all the time at Bonrion when we talk about, you know, what types of alternatives your clients might want and how
Understanding Client Values for Better Relationships
00:14:45
Speaker
to use alternatives to grow and build a relationship with your client to find out
00:14:49
Speaker
what makes them tick, what things they value. I think what leaf planner does by giving this complete picture and then going above and beyond just traditional estate planning provides that opportunity. So why don't we highlight some of the ways that it can do that and some of the things that like
00:15:06
Speaker
come up even with the best laid estate plans as issues. The cars, the bank account, to pay the mortgage, the tax bill that they get from the town because they still own the house, things of that nature. Let's touch upon some of the parts of Leaf Planner's solution that addresses that, that can facilitate those conversations.
00:15:31
Speaker
You just hit so many things I wanna talk about. So I'm gonna share some stories and I'll try not to carry on for too long. One thing I can't of course resist saying is if you have advisors who have clients who don't have a will, I understand that's still a problem to get people to do a will. My only comment about that is everybody absolutely must have a will and they must have a revocable trust and they must have a power attorney and a healthcare power. There's some basic,
00:15:59
Speaker
estate docs that they're not expensive to get put together. And people who don't do a will fail to realize, if I don't have a will, I do have a will. It's just that the state provided it for me. And the state's going to tell you exactly how your assets are going to pass. And typically, it's not what you would have wanted. So just a plug for the nobody should be operating without a will.
00:16:21
Speaker
No, but I think someone like myself, like I'm 45, I don't have a ton of assets. And so I don't think about any of that stuff, but to your point, I probably should. And in my friend's case, same idea. He actually was thinking about those things, but he didn't have a formal will because you don't.
00:16:40
Speaker
We, you know, when you're younger, you just assume you have time. And the truth of the matter is you never know for sure. So, you know, you may think like, oh, that can wait. I don't have really anything worth anything. But to your point, you do. And whether you think so or not.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah. And look, I mean, I think, you know, even, and I don't, I don't know enough about your personal situation, obviously, but I would say you're building a business and that business could take off and is taking off, right. And, and you're successful and all of a sudden you get to a point where many of these clients that we're talking about, you know, started by building a business of some kind and all of a sudden that business is worth.
Complexity of First-Generation Wealth
00:17:24
Speaker
five or $10 million. And what happens to that business is radically important. Maybe there's a partner and there needs to be buy-sell agreements and maybe the kids are going to get equal ownership. Lots of different issues come up, right? And people springboard into these wealth levels without realizing their life actually substantially changed. And then in your friend's case or my friend's case,
00:17:47
Speaker
You know, all of a sudden something really unexpected and tragic happens and those pieces aren't necessarily in place. But anyway, okay. One last pitch to if you don't have a will or basic estate plan, please get one. And by the way, I'd say, you know, you mentioned insurance and that certainly
00:18:04
Speaker
goes to the same kind of issue because somebody might be carrying enough insurance that that could with the value of the business and the value of their home and the value of whatever else is there especially again two years from now when that lifetime exemption changes and maybe they're single or divorced or whatever it is and so now all of a sudden that exemption is five million dollars that life insurance if it's in your name is going to push you over that
00:18:27
Speaker
estate tax threshold, right? And if you don't even understand what an islet in insurance trust is, then you're creating an estate tax situation that you don't need to be creating. So to your point, one thing, by the way, we're trying to do that is give that advisor.
00:18:43
Speaker
The picture to say oh wait a second, I see. Here's this insurance it's in your name Shana, and yet it shouldn't be in your name it should be in a simple insurance trust which would take it out of your estate, and the advisor can help advise on that on that issue which is not about.
00:19:01
Speaker
should I be in index funds or alternatives or whatever else it is, it's really about that holistic planning. But at the end of the day, that's hugely valuable because 40% of that is going to the US government. And if you're in California or some of these states that have, well, California, I think doesn't have, but if you're in states that have
00:19:20
Speaker
significant inheritance tax or estate tax on their own, then that's just adding on top of the federal government's 40%. So I think all those issues are really important. And you touched on a few things that I think are really worth commenting on. Some are simple, but yet are giant pain when they happen. The estate tax return, regardless of whether you have an estate tax due,
00:19:45
Speaker
is do nine months after somebody dies. So first of all, let's think about the typical family. Hopefully you're grieving. This is the last time you want to be searching for information and trying to figure this out and all of a sudden probably doing something that you've never done before completed in a state tax return, which is wildly complicated.
00:20:05
Speaker
And you've got nine months to get this done. And there's no, there's an extension, but there's no extension to the payment. So it's really, it's not a fun period of time of your life, right? I'm grieving for mom or dad or my best friend or whoever it is. And now I've got to also be making all these decisions and figuring it out. I like to use my own little nuclear family as an example of another thing that you talked about, you know, which is the mortgage payments. So we happen to have two homes. We've got two different mortgages.
00:20:34
Speaker
I pay the bills in the house. My wife is perfectly capable of it, but I pay the bills. She, I guarantee you has no idea how the mortgage magically gets paid every month. And so, or both of them. And, and also would have no idea if I weren't here and you decided to pay off one of the mortgages, which one would you pay off first? So I've left her a note to be able to say, Hey, I would pay off this one before this one. And this is the reason.
00:20:58
Speaker
She doesn't have to follow that, but at least she'll have that context of what I was thinking because I was the one who took out the mortgages. I was the one who put them in place and did all these things. You talked about the accounts. We had a guy who inadvertently became a trustee and he didn't become executor. He was the power of attorney holder and a trustee. He didn't become executor because this guy ultimately didn't pass away.
Client Crisis Story
00:21:27
Speaker
client, friend, whatever, went in for some voluntary surgery, ended up in a coma, tragic story, was in a coma for months. This guy steps in as power of attorney holder and trustee. He goes to the guy's house. He finds three checkbooks on the kitchen counter.
00:21:43
Speaker
And ultimately it was in the middle of COVID and it took him months to get an appointment with one of the banks in Florida to go in and see the banker and say, hey, I now have this power of attorney. Here I am. He finally gets the appointment months later. He goes in and the banker says, well, thank you for coming in and presenting all the documentation. That account's been closed for three years. So a complete waste of time, right? One of my kids totaled his car.
00:22:10
Speaker
And he was fine. So nobody says, oh my god, you're making light of this. But we had it insured with Chubb. Chubb called and said, hey, we're totaling the car. Send us the title. We'll send you the check. Of course, I had no recollection of where the original title was.
00:22:27
Speaker
And so sure enough, in Leaf Planner, I had a note of, hey, the original title is in the files in the basement, like whatever it is. So it's all these little things that as you were describing, they touch on so many aspects of our lives and they're hugely time consuming and they're hugely inconvenient and they're hugely like
00:22:47
Speaker
comforting if you know that they're all there. And a lot of what Leaf Planner is doing is bringing just a sense of comfort. It's a sleep better at night because I know that my family knows everything I know. And by the way, that I know everything that they know because no one person has the whole picture to any family. We just don't, right? Life has just gotten too complicated. Well, I think you pointed out something there. You couldn't remember where you put the title.
00:23:13
Speaker
no idea you know and and you were talking about you and your wife you know which one of the houses you would pay off first you may have discussed that at some point but i'm pretty sure she didn't take notes you know and in a period of grief or a period of stress like you were talking about being in a coma
00:23:28
Speaker
Those things don't come to mind quick. They're not things that you would like made mental notes of because you thought at the time that they were super important. It was just kind of something in passing. And to your point, having some place to kind of go where all that information is kept. And I think one of the things I love so much about Leaf Planner and the way that I really can envision advisors using this to get to know their client is that there's prompts in there for things that like I wouldn't think of.
00:23:57
Speaker
Right. And you wouldn't think of and it's these little things and those prompts I think are hugely important. It takes time to your point and nobody's going to sit down and do it in one day but even as an advisor there are questions that are prompted that you probably wouldn't have ever thought to ask your client but in doing so you're a getting important information
00:24:20
Speaker
but also be learning something about your client that perhaps can be helpful somewhere down the road and something related to their investments or related to something else that they're planning wise. And can you talk about how you kind of thought about the prompts and maybe highlight a couple of prompts that you might not intuitively consider thinking about things that are kind of out there, but once you kind of see them, you're like, wow, that is hugely important.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah, there's a huge educational component to what the way Leaf Planner was built. And as you've seen, there's a whole kind of guided mode, if you will, that can be client facing or advisor facing or both or neither or whatever anybody wants. But the idea of that is exactly what you're saying. You know, most of us, I mean, I think a lot of issues because I basically have spent 25 years running a single family office. But if you haven't spent 25 years running a single family office, then there's no reason
00:25:14
Speaker
that you would know all the things to think about. And I still don't know, as you said, I still don't know all the things to think about. And certainly an advisor who is focused on bringing the highest possible return to their client, hopefully in a tax efficient manner and all these other things, but is not likely to be thinking about all these other things that you're describing. And those things do
00:25:38
Speaker
have impact on each other. So yes, you're going to see prompts from everything to, I would say, better engage your clients. So you're going to get a prompt saying, hey, Shana, I see that your daughter is turning 18. Do you know that you need a HIPAA release? Do you know that you've got to go convert her minor bank accounts? Maybe you set up a Roth IRA for her because she had a summer job, which I actually did last summer for my 17-year-old. I've got to convert that now into an adult Roth.
00:26:06
Speaker
all these different kinds of things are going to get prompted on sort of a demographic level. You're going to see prompts in every section of the tool, essentially the platform. So maybe it's going to say, hey, Shana, do you have long-term care insurance? Well, if you're an advisor who has never really been in the insurance world, you may not think about, do they have appropriate umbrella coverage? Do they have appropriate homeowners coverage? Do they have appropriate long-term care coverage? And Leaf Planner, I will say importantly,
00:26:34
Speaker
I don't honestly care if your answer is yes or no. I only care that you deliberately answered the question. If you've said, wow, that's interesting, I've never thought about long-term care insurance, why would I want that? Especially if maybe you're a family that could afford to self-insure long-term care. There's a reason why you might still want that. How do I know when
00:26:55
Speaker
I should move from listing my artwork on my job policy or my state foreign policy or whoever it is, and how do I know when I should start thinking about, hey, maybe my collection is getting big enough that I actually should have collection insurance, which is a whole different animal, right?
00:27:13
Speaker
Those are the kinds of things. And again, the answer is less important than have you thought about it? Have you asked the question? The same I would say is true on the estate planning side. You're going to see in there, hey, this is what a minimally viable estate plan looks like. It's a will, it's a revocable trust, it's a power of attorney, it's a healthcare power, all those different pieces. Here's what one looks like. Go get one.
00:27:36
Speaker
You're going to see anyway, to your point, yes, you're going to see prompts all over the board and the way we pulled that together.
00:27:44
Speaker
is by having this advisory team of, again, from a multidisciplinary, so there's spiritual leaders, there's medical doctors, there's lawyers, there's insurance people, there's family dynamics experts, you name it, they sit on our advisory board and they go through that guided mode and help us make sure that we're asking every single possible question. A good example of that was interestingly to me at the early stages, I knew enough to say, hey, Shaina, do you have long-term care insurance?
00:28:12
Speaker
But our insurance person knew enough to, of course, knew more than I did. So they knew enough to say, well, that's a good first question. But the second question should be, well, Shana, if you needed long-term care, would you like to be cared for in your own home? Or are you OK going to another place? Because the cost differential and how you structure your financial affairs around that is radically different. I wouldn't have known to ask that question. So now we ask that question. So a lot of this is this kind of iterative
00:28:41
Speaker
multidisciplinary approach to help both the advisor and the family think about, as you said, all the things not only do you not want to be thinking about it in the months after somebody passes away, but you also you don't even know to be thinking about it. And that's one of the things that we're trying to do is give people that roadmap.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think until you've actually had to deal with it, and I would argue that most people don't have to deal with it until they have a parent pass away, unless they were an executor on somebody, a relative's will. My mom was an executor on her uncle's will because he had no children. He had an adopted daughter, but she passed away from breast cancer long before he ever passed away, and his wife passed away, and so she became the default executor.
00:29:22
Speaker
And he made decisions that she had to follow that were not things that made people happy. And it would have been helpful to have context. When
Preventing Family Disputes through Communication
00:29:33
Speaker
my uncle passed away, my aunt had a very, very robust plan. She had the trust drawn up, but who she chose as an executor was somebody nobody had ever met. So we were kind of confused as to what that person's relationship was and why.
00:29:50
Speaker
And we learned that over as time passed, but it was one of those things that in, you know, in the depths of grief right after. But again, to your point is that, you know, preparing for those things and thinking about those things ahead of time, you think you're doing the right thing, you know, you're thinking about your kids, I'm going to do this, this and this. But then you never think to communicate some of that information to people who would need to know it in the event of your passing. And until you actually go through something like that, you don't realize how
00:30:20
Speaker
Like there's little things you never think about that all of a sudden you immediately have to deal with, like the mortgage payment or in some cases in the case of my friend, like the rent because, you know, he lived alone. And, and, oh my God, like.
00:30:40
Speaker
like what are we gonna do and who do we do it for and how much was it? And so like that information is not an abundantly clear, simple things like did you actually fill out your beneficiary information on some of your accounts? Like even your checking account and things of that nature.
00:30:56
Speaker
Well, a lot of people just don't do that because they don't think about it. They think about it on their IRA because they're prompted to, or their life insurance policies because they're prompted to. But there are some accounts where there's an option to fill out beneficiary information, but you never get prompted to. And so you don't do it. And then something happens and it's not clear.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's all those little things. It is. And, you know, on that beneficiary one, you know, another one, another trap that people I think pretty often are falling into is you're saying right in the typical IRA or.
00:31:28
Speaker
some of these other things, you're getting prompted for that. But think about how many people have moved to set up small donor advice funds. And if you haven't, if you haven't identified a successor donor advisor, all of a sudden that fund is going to be managed not by your kids, but by the community foundation or whoever it is, who is the, you know, the, um, the Doni organization or whatever. So, you know, yes, again, prompting for those things is really important. And I think importantly to your comment that, um, most people probably don't go through this until
00:31:58
Speaker
they lose a parent or somebody else. The other side of that I think is that most, I don't know how to say this without sounding stupid, most wealth creation is probably first generation wealth creation. So I have the advantage of being a second generation kind of wealth family. So I've been through this, but if you're a child of most families, you're probably the first
00:32:22
Speaker
generation that's actually got any wealth and so your kids and you haven't been through it and your kids haven't been through it and nobody knows again what those questions are to ask and and so i think it becomes really really important and then to your communication comment i think it's also really important because if you have gone through you know look there's always going to be the 90 year old patriarch who says you know
00:32:45
Speaker
Nobody knows anything until the day I'm dead. When I'm in the ground, they can learn things. Okay, fine. I can't solve for that. But if you're the family member that you described who said, I've gone through all this planning, Leaf Planner gives you a way to sit down with the family and actually explain it while you're here, while you can explain why you did it, and you can get that input and that family discussion
00:33:08
Speaker
around well wait a second you know what we don't know who josh is why did you choose him as a trustee maybe one of us should be the trustee whatever the question is right so it gives you a tool through which to engage in those family conversations because that's what as as all of your listeners know right that's the stuff
00:33:27
Speaker
that causes problems when mom and dad are gone, right? But it doesn't mean Plano also have the ability to put stuff in there that like you might not necessarily talk about to your point the 90 year olds just says nobody's going to know till I know like Lee Plano does have the capability of stuff that like you don't want everybody to know right now being there and you can have you know that kind of
00:33:49
Speaker
upon my passing, this information can become available. But that at least until then, I don't have to divulge it if I don't want to. And if I want it to be nobody needs to know anything until I pass, it can very well be no one needs to know anything until I pass. Yes, yes. It obviously, as you would imagine, I mean, sorry, I typically don't talk about it because I think of it as like table stakes to be in the industry is like cybersecurity and access. But the access question
00:34:17
Speaker
is obviously everything can be permissioned however you want it to be. We think of it down to kind of, because again, it's really information gathering, not just document gathering. So don't think of it like a typical box or Dropbox. I can invite Shana into this document or this folder. Essentially, it's the same idea, but at an information level. So for example, in mine, I've got a letter to my kids that they won't see until I'm gone.
00:34:42
Speaker
I could invite a new dog sitter in just to see the information about my dogs. She doesn't need to see my balance sheet. She needs to see the information about my dogs. So you can invite in the state lawyer and you could invite an insurance expert and you can invite whoever in in whatever capacity you want them to be invited into.
00:35:02
Speaker
and I will say just as a little pitch for the reason we built some of the things that we did was that everything that annoys me quite frankly as a buyer of these services wearing my family office hat we didn't want to do so Leaf Planner doesn't care how much you're worth Leaf Planner doesn't care how many users you have Leaf Planner doesn't care how much data you're going to use Leaf Planner doesn't care how many family members or entities you have none of that matters to us
00:35:25
Speaker
it's really about can you use this platform to communicate your wishes, your structure, your assets, your liabilities, you know, whatever it is with your family and your advisors as we've been talking about and all those other things just aren't important to us. Yeah and I think you know more importantly sometimes
00:35:49
Speaker
The reasoning behind things are very valid, but sometimes you just don't want to have the discussions because you don't want to have the argument.
00:35:57
Speaker
And you want to be very clear in what your wishes were and not be influenced by somebody, you know, having a hissy fit. Because anybody who's gone through the death of a family member who had any wealth whatsoever can tell you that you learn more about who really cared about somebody and what their actual incentive was for their relationship with that person after they die than prior. And, you know, sometimes it's better for those reasons alone that certain things be
00:36:26
Speaker
explained after the fact so that you don't have to deal with it. And while the family isn't excited to deal with it, at least they have context. The worst part of these things is having zero context and then people coming up with their own reasoning as to why something may have happened. And it might have been completely innocent.
00:36:46
Speaker
And very valid reasons but without the context, you come up, everybody does this you come up with usually the worst case scenario and why something that's right nature. So I think it's important to point that out because you know when we talk about advisors using the solution, and the tool, I think.
00:37:05
Speaker
One of the best parts about Leaf Planner is that the advisor just introducing the option and the solution to a client can be advantageous to the client. You know, the client may very well have
00:37:21
Speaker
A need for it as well, maybe above and beyond what the advisor and you know I want to touch on this because I think it's important. You know, as we kind of get to the end of our time is to touch upon how the advisor might actually be able to use this tool, not only to improve their relationship and their knowledge of the client.
00:37:40
Speaker
but also to get a better understanding of their full financial picture. To your point, an advisor might only manage say two or 3 million of the liquid assets of the client, but they might not know about the vacation home or the child's account or the life insurance policy that they have with a different advisor or that they have an estate planning attorney because maybe this advisor doesn't do estate planning and they never think to ask.
00:38:07
Speaker
But all of those things can be important, not only in the sense of getting to know the full picture of the client, but also selfishly from the standpoint of boundary and understanding if the client actually has more net worth than you were aware of, therefore making them able to invest in certain things you never would have thought to bring to their attention because you didn't know that they were a qualified purchaser or an accredited investor because you didn't have the full picture.
00:38:31
Speaker
maybe they aren't liquid assets, but they matter. And so let's talk a little bit about how the advisor can use this as a tool to grow their business. Yeah, I think, so first of all, everything you just said, right? So yes, certainly there's an aspect of giving you, I'd say more client contacts, if you will, because again, it's gonna say, you know, do you have,
00:38:56
Speaker
Do you realize that your client has a kid who's turning 18, who's turning 26, who's turning whatever, and all these demographic changes? And that, as we talk about the, what is it, $65 trillion wealth transfer or whatever is supposedly going on in the next 25 years, then
00:39:12
Speaker
you know, as statistics historically show, right, that the next, the rising generation does not stay with their parents' advisors. So if we can use Leaf Planner as a way to create a bridge between the advisor and not only their direct client, essentially, but the other members of the family, how much more likely is it that they can have that stickiness and stay with that client?
Building Relationships Through Full Financial Understanding
00:39:33
Speaker
I think, you know, I don't have any data on it, but I think implicitly it seems logical to say, yes, you're going to have a better relationship with the kids or the spouse or whoever it is.
00:39:42
Speaker
So there's that aspect to it. There's really the holistic picture that you're suggesting where you're gonna see this whole picture and you're gonna understand more about maybe you didn't understand the full scope of the business, the operating business. And that's something that you're managing this million or $2 million liquid securities account or even private investments, but you don't have full visibility into actually how
00:40:08
Speaker
how grandiose is that business or what's gonna happen to it. Or maybe there's something happening even from the prior generation that's gonna come down because mom and dad are in their 90s and they're gonna pass away and they're gonna leave your client something coming down from that generation even if it's just their home or some insurance or some collectibles. And how can you better advise your client to make sure that they're thinking about what's happening. I find clients all the time who don't
00:40:36
Speaker
They've gone through all the work, even really, really sophisticated, really, really wealthy clients who go through this complicated estate planning process. And nobody's ever raised the question of what's coming from above. And so there's a whole prior generation issue of going on. What do they want to do with their charitable wishes? Lots of different things that are going to ingratiate, I think, that advisor
00:41:00
Speaker
into it. Now, I will say then the average advisor listening to this is probably going to say, yeah, but I don't have the time to do this work. And so the leaf planner as a company and as a platform is really designed to let everybody collaborate on that. That can be the advisor bringing it simply to the family and saying, hey, you would benefit from this. That could be the advisor saying, I'm going to do this piece. You do that piece. That can be
00:41:23
Speaker
bringing leaf planter to the table to help put it together, which we also offer as part of our service. So the goal is to say, how do you make sure that this gets done? But then to your whole point, the advisor has a stickier relationship with their client. They're bringing real value to the client because probably people are not talking to them about these different issues. And then they're really getting that holistic picture and saying, hey, I can help you with this, that or the other and building a much, much stronger client relationship.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah. I think, you know, you referenced your art collection. That's a perfect example. Like I would think, you know, the average advisor might not be aware that their client has a baseball card collection or an art collection. And while, you know, that could be helpful in estate planning, it could also be helpful with, Hey, some stuff are coming across my desk investment wise that is going to appeal to you because you love art or you love baseball or you love, you know,
00:42:18
Speaker
Things like that. And even in terms of like endearing yourself to the client, you know, you get tickets to a baseball game or there's a big art gallery having an opening and you wanted and you've had that art gallery provide an invite for a select number of clients, you'll know that that's the client you should call as opposed to just, you know, anybody and everybody.
00:42:39
Speaker
Right. And not having any clear connection and showing that you know that client. Those are all things that something like this can really provide value for. You know, I think we're coming
Conclusion and Leaf Planner Resources
00:42:50
Speaker
up on our time. I like to keep these shows to about 30 minutes. I think we went a little over, but this is such an interesting topic and I think that most people don't think about it.
00:42:59
Speaker
But also, as Bonnie and as I've mentioned, part of our goal here is to provide tools and solutions to advisors to grow their relationship with their clients. And I don't think there is another solution or tool on the market that has the ability to potentially grow and develop that kind of really strong understanding of your client beyond just the liquid assets you might be managing than this one.
00:43:27
Speaker
And so I'm glad we had the chance to have you on to talk about it because I don't think it's something people intuitively think about. Can you give us a little information about where our listeners can find more information on Leaf Planner? And if they want to set up a demo, where can they do that?
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah, so our website is leafplanner.com. Super easy. You can reach me at Josh at leafplanner.com. I'm happy to demo for anybody who's interested or have you meet any of our team. And so yeah, we'd be delighted to talk to anybody about how to work this into their practice.
00:44:01
Speaker
Awesome. And you know, I think it's really important to clarify like this type of tool can be helpful to anybody, not just people who have 50 to $100 million and fall into that ultra high net worth bucket. There's real value here. And I think that the value and the cost makes sense, especially for families that want to make sure that everything is set up. And for advisors who want to get to know their clients better, there's opportunities to do that as well.
00:44:25
Speaker
So thank you for joining us today, Josh. It was a absolute pleasure. And thank you for everyone for joining us. As you know, like, subscribe to our podcast, what's the alternative or any of our other content that you have out there, including the alternative Mason hosted by our chief of staff, Brittany Mason, and you're doing it all wrong, which is our web series that you can find on YouTube. So thank you very much, everybody. We appreciate your time. Until next time, I am Shayna Orzak Sissel. Have a great day.
00:44:59
Speaker
Perfect. What'd you think? Super fun. Yeah. The opinions expressed on the What's the Alternative podcast are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or any specific security. This is only intended to provide education about the financial industry
00:45:25
Speaker
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00:45:50
Speaker
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00:46:06
Speaker
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00:46:36
Speaker
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