Nobody wants to talk about their own death, let alone plan for it. But the holidays can be a good time to have conversations with your loved ones about your final wishes. After all, would you rather have these chats now when everyone is healthy, or under the duress of an illness?
Lynn Habrowski of Great Lakes Wealth Planning rejoins the show today to talk about the Family Love Letter. This is not a legal document like a will or a trust. However, it's a way to instruct your loved ones about your final wishes for what's not covered in those documents.
The Family Love Letter can explain things like online accounts, funeral wishes, plans for pets, storage lockers, and so much more. It's giving your family members the gifts of time and information, during what will be a very difficult and stressful time for them.
To reach Lynn, or get your complimentary copy of the Family Love Letter, give her a call at (586) 773-6800, or find her online at https://www.glwealthplanning.com/
To reach Paula, visit https://www.paulachristine.com/
Or send Paula an email: paula@paulachristine.com.
Lynn Habrowski is a certified financial planner with LPL Securities. Advisory services are offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor. Member FINRA SIPC
Family Love Letter
Paula: Welcome to Beyond The Paycheck. I'm Paula Christine. Stop living paycheck to paycheck and start living the life you dream about by taking control of your money. I can provide you with the knowledge and the tools if you make the commitment to put them into practice. So most people avoid talking and preparing for their death.
It's one of the hardest conversations to have with your loved ones, but it's a necessary one. I've asked Lynn Habrowski, financial planner with Great Lakes Wealth Planning to join us again to talk about how she helps her clients prepare a family love letter. So welcome Lynn.
Lynn: Hey Paula. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Paula: So Lynn, what is a family love letter?
Lynn: Think of the family love letter as essentially a system or a process that works in conjunction with your traditional state planning documents such as your wills, your trust, or your power of attorney. And it's an intergenerational wealth transfer system that will help your loved ones through one of the most confusing and difficult times in their lives, your death, or the death of a loved one.
It's basically a storytelling roadmap designed to help loved ones understand the wishes of the deceased, but also to help reduce mistakes that always come with this type of turmoil. In a nutshell, it's essentially a gift of information and it's a gift of time.
Paula: What's included in a Love letter?
Lynn: Basically a system. So the Family Love letter essentially sits beside your estate planning documents, and it fills in all of the gaps. For example, you have your basic information, okay? So what are your assets? Where are they located? You have bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, IRAs, 401ks. Who are the beneficiaries of those assets?
Do you have any property? Do you have a house, a cottage, rental property, land? Do you have life insurance or a long-term care policy? Do you have any cash around the house or outside of the country that nobody knows about that will be lost forever if you don't tell someone? And if you have minor children, who do you want to be the guardian of those children?
So that's the basic stuff, but there is also all the additional information that's subtle and often forgotten. For example, do you have military benefits? Do you have non-traditional accounts such as deferred compensation? Or maybe a life settlement plan from a lawsuit. Does someone owe you? And now your estate money.
Do you have a storage locker? So think of the show Storage Wars. How do you think those shows are possible? People forget them or the beneficiaries don't know about them and they get lost, and then they get sold. Are you a business owner? So that's kinda level two. And then level three are the things that people simply flat out forget or don't even.
Do you have pets? Who would you like to take care of those pets? Who's your pet's current veterinarian? Are you gonna allocate some of your money to the person that's gonna care for your pets, for their care going forward? What would you like the guardian of your children to know about them? Their dreams, their fears, their talents?
What would you like for your funeral? Do you wanna be buried? Do you wanna be cremated? If you're a veteran, do you want military honors? Do you want a small event for your funeral or do you want a big blowout giant party to celebrate your life? I'm thinking you, Paula, are gonna be the big celebrating life party person.
Paula: I am having a big party. Yes, everybody's invited. It's not gonna be in a funeral home. I'm going to be cremated and you can just put a picture of me up, with a, maybe a glass of wine next to me and just have a blast and remember all the great things and great memories.
That's what I'm gonna do.
Lynn: There you go. So that's the stuff that you have to put pen to paper to, to convey that information to people because honestly they don't know. And so you're stuck after the fact trying to figure out what that person wants. So it's those types of things. Here's one for the world that we live in today, where are the passwords for your accounts online?
That's a good one. Yep. Do you have cryptocurrency, and if so, where are those wallets? Here's another one that I keep finding with clients. In this world of electronic everything, do you have any accounts that are paperless and will be forgotten or overlooked? Because usually when you pass away, people start shuffling through your drawers to find out what your accounts are.
That one gets overlooked all the time. And then it's not the financial, but the relational things. Who gets your grandmother's rocking chair? The one that everybody was rocked in as a baby. Do you have SkyMiles? Who would you like to have those?
Paula: Give them to me.
Lynn: There you go. I believe that. That makes perfect sense.
Paula: Gotta plan that trip to Spain and Portugal next year so I could use them.
Lynn: Exactly. So that might be something. You wanna get the word out to your family members.
Paula: I'm telling you, Lynn.
Lynn: Oh, you're talking to me? Okay. I'll pencil in. I'm writing it down right now.
Paula: You can gift that to me too at any time. You don't have to wait until you passed away.
Lynn: I don't have to store them up.
Paula: Hey, you know I had an interesting conversation with a lady toda. She has two cats, two dogs. . And that was one of her biggest concerns is what's gonna happen to her pets if she was to pass away? Who's going to take care of them?
She has no children. We had a long discussion about that and she also mentioned that she wants to put money away for those pets if something were to happen and how best to go about doing that. So it was an interesting conversation because we don't feel her husband has the same.
Although he loves the animals, they're old and sickly, so we're not so sure he's getting to continue the level of care that she would, if something were to happen to her.
Lynn: Older animals, I have two dogs. Me and my husband have had two dogs forever, and they're a lot of work when they're young and they're puppies, but they're a lot of work when they're old and they're sick, and so there's both sides of that equation.
Paula: Yeah. She's really concerned about that. So this family love letter is a lot more than just preparing a will or a trust. It's really inclusive of a lot of different things.
Lynn: Yeah, it really is. Let me give you a real life example here. There was a married couple with a $500,000 second to die life insurance policy, and the premiums on this policy were being paid automatically from a small bank account.
The wife had recently passed away and the husband had Alzheimer's, so the kids stepped in and they decided to simplify things. Combine the bank accounts for their dad, and in doing so, they closed this small bank account that the premiums were being drawn from. Unfortunately, after they died, they located the life insurance policy on their father's paperwork and called the insurance company.
And I bet you can probably guess what the insurance company had to say about the payout on that death benefit.
Paula: No go.
Lynn: No go. These things happen all the time. All the time. And this is a perfect example of what the Family Love Letter is designed to prevent and to get that information to your loved ones.
Paula: And I'm just sitting here thinking as we're having this conversation, since I'm recently divorced, all my stuff is paperless. And my beneficiaries are current, right? That's done. But I don't think my kids, if something were to happen to. I gotta think that through. I guess I need to write a family love letter.
Lynn: But you don't have to write it. That's the beauty. We have the booklet and obviously I'll just get you one. , it's incredibly important to get this stuff on paper and it's something that, I have clients ask me, oh, I already got a will. I already have a trust. This is not a will. And it's not a trust, it's not a legal document.
Your trust is a legal document that lays all of your wishes to paper and provides instructions that are followed upon your death to disperse your estate, whether it's large or small. The Family Love Letter is a booklet and it contains a step by step process to help transfer all of that information that's important in your life to your loved ones. And as a financial planner, we take the time to walk our clients through this boat, let help them get their affairs in order.
Paula: Okay, so let's say I do this and then I have to have the conversation with my kids. It's not easy to sit down with your children and say, oh, you know what? Mommy's going to die someday, and this is what I want done. It's not easy to do that.
Lynn: I hear that all the time. Maybe as I get older, you get older, more people that pass away and you see what's happened. I've seen so many incredibly sad stories that just flat out shouldn't have happened.
So I say, pull up your bootstraps and get the family love letter done. And then once you get it done, you wanna sit your kids down or whoever your loved ones are, and tell them it's in place and walk them through. If you really. Derive the benefit of the family love letter. And here's the key, maintain harmony.
You wanna sit down with your family and let 'em know what you've done. If you do this ahead of time, you can substantially reduce their stress and it'll also most importantly, reduce conflicts. And these are conflicts that I see between family members all the time after their loved ones have passed.
Paula: Yeah, a lot of times they don't even speak to each other anymore.
Lynn: Nope. Not a lot of times it's probably 50% of the time that there's some type of conflict between usually the children and honestly, it's not about money. It's usually about a thing, it's about grandma's rocking chair or some fruit bowl or any number of things.
It's not so much about the money that people are pretty good about dividing up the money and laying all that out. It's the other often non-tangible things that aren't obvious. And if it comes out of your mouth, if it's in your writing. Then it's obvious what your intent was, and it really does a lot to reduce the stress after you're gone.
Paula: No, I agree. I know. I've seen several families torn apart and even though it was stated, they still fought.
Lynn: Yeah, you can't get around that.
Paula: Sometimes the ugly comes out.
Lynn: Always. There's always some little smattering. I can't tell you how many times I hear people say, oh, that will never happen to my family, and it does to some degree, unfortunately.
So all you can do. It's steps, get the will and the trust. That's nice. But the family love letter takes 80% over and above the trust out of the equation and so you're just making it a little bit easier for your family.
Paula: This time of year is a good time to have that conversation too, since you're all together for the holidays and if you get your kids to come over a little bit early, and I sometimes think it's important to include your children's spouse.
Because lots of times a lot of the problems come from the spouse. You know how the spouse can sometimes encourage the child to go after more than they need or.
It's, yeah. That happens all the time, especially if the spouse is more dominant and the child tends to follow along behind what the spouse wants.
Lynn: You're right, the holidays are a perfect time. It's so important to have these conversations. When you're happy and you're healthy and you're together, you don't wanna have these conversations in the final days of your life when you're not. Or heaven forbid, you're not able to have the conversation at all. That would be a real catastrophe.
Paula: Think about all the people that were affected by Covid, went into the hospital and never came out. They couldn't have that conversation.
Lynn: Nope. And so it's kinda like a homework assignment. You can make it fun. Believe it or not, you could do a video.
I've had a couple clients talk about, hey, especially in the older generation, grandpa, grandma, the youngsters will videotape the older ones and ask them the most hilarious questions, and it's just this precious gift that they get to pass on and keep for the next generation. So it's very special.
Paula: That does sound cool. Yep. It'd be nice to hear my grandparents' voice again.
Lynn: Wouldn't it though?
Paula: Yeah, that would be a huge gift. Yeah, that sounds like fun. I think I'll do that.
Lynn: You should do that. Everybody should do that.
Paula: No, cuz then I'll have to listen to it and I . Yeah. Don't like the sound of my own voice. At least that's what my producer tells me.
Jon: Your producer says, do it, Paula.
Lynn: Do it. Absolutely.
Paula: So Lynn, you offered me one of these books. Will you make that offer to our listeners, too?
Lynn: Absolutely. This is one of the most important things we're doing. We started to put it in place this year in 2022. We are carrying forward in 2023. We're having little webinars for our clients, but certainly if your listeners are interested or would like to talk or just want it. By all means, reach out to me. I'm happy to provide it. I'm happy to help you fill it out. And if you don't need help filling it out, then I'm happy to just get it in your hands so that it's something that everyone can use.
Paula: So how do they get a hold of you?
Lynn: Call my office. I have two offices, one in Southfield, one in Clinton Township. There's always someone picking up the phone in Clinton Township, so please call 586-773-6800. Melanie will probably pick up the phone and she's the one that sends out the booklets, so you could just talk to her directly.
If you have questions, she'll take a message and I'll be happy to call you back. Or if I'm in the office, I'll pick up.
Paula: Thank you as always. It's such a pleasure talking with you.
Lynn: You too.
Paula: So Lynn has been on the podcast previously talking about the market and investing. So check out episodes 16 and 17. So thanks again Lynn for joining us today and sharing your information about the Family love letter.
If you need to get a hold of me, you can reach me at paula@paulachristine.com or you can check out my website at paulachristine.com. So next week we have a listener who called in. Jamie, her husband is thinking about retiring, and she had some questions cuz there's about a nine year difference between the two of them. So she had some questions about social security and where she should be saving. So check out that episode with Jamie next week.