- Share This Post
- submit
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
In this week’s Ten Money Questions, we speak with Alexis Martin Neely, a mom, writer, speaker and the Personal Family Lawyer you love. She gives the kind of guidance that is critical to the growth of your family wealth and she’s speaking at the virtual Wealthy Girl Summit in January. Get a sneak peek below about what she has to say about money, death and taxes. Enjoy!
1. How are you revolutionizing the world of financial and estate planning for families?
I’m revolutionizing the world of financial and estate planning for families in a few ways. First of all, I’m bringing back the idea of the personal lawyer as the family’s trusted advisor and making a personal relationship with a lawyer both affordable and accessible for families who need the regular guidance of a lawyer, but have not felt that was possible. I see too many people turning to stock pickers and insurance agents for legal and financial advice and getting taken advantage of because they don’t have enough in investable assets to get good, objective advice. The personal lawyer is the answer.
Second, I’m helping people see that an estate plan is so much more than just a set of form documents, like a Will or a Trust, and it’s not something you wait until you are old, sick or getting ready to retire to think about; very often by then it’s too late.
Last, an estate plan isn’t something you “do” once and forget about. It’s a lifelong process that is about passing on not just your financial wealth, but your whole family wealth, including your values, insights, stories and experience. If you “do” it once and never look at it again, your plan is likely to fail.
2. How did a failed estate plan personally impact your life?
Failed estate plans personally impacted my life three times … all when men in my life died without having planned adequately, though in each case they thought they had.
First, when my grandfather died. He had children from his first marriage and my grandmother was his second wife. My grandfather thought he had everything taken care of, but after his death there was a huge fight between my grandmother and my grandfather’s children from that prior marriage. It was ugly and didn’t need to happen.
Second, my father in law died when I was in law school. All of the sudden, we were dealing with the probate court, which I couldn’t understand because I knew my father in law had worked with a lawyer to prepare an estate plan specifically so we wouldn’t have to deal with the probate court. I remember looking through his fancy estate planning binder and seeing a letter that said “Congratulations on your estate plan, now go transfer your assets into your trust.” Well, my father in law never did that and neither did his lawyer. At the time, I thought his lawyer must have committed malpractice. I was shocked when a few years later I went to work at one of the best law firms in Los Angeles and found out that it was the exact same way we did things; it wasn’t malpractice at all … it was common practice!
Last, when my own father became ill with cancer at only 57, he did not have his own estate plan finished. We had been talking about it for a couple of years, but there were still many open issues. Once he became sick, it was impossible to talk about estate planning because it would have meant acknowledging he might die and he had to maintain the mindset that he was going to beat the cancer. My dad died with an unfinished plan that left my step mom with a big mess. Luckily, my sister and I love our step mom as if she was our own mom and I was able to help her through the process, but most families don’t have that.
3. What is your most significant memory about money?
I grew up in South Miami in a community with people who had a lot of wealth, but my family didn’t have a lot, so there was always a huge insecurity around money in my house and a definite sense that we were struggling. Mind you, relative to the rest of the world we had a lot, but relative to our community, we didn’t. I remember once my
