Jeff Fouts: “Hi, I’m estate planning attorney Jeff Fouts. I sometimes ask people when they come to my office, ‘What was it that got you to thinking about estate planning?’ They oftentimes tell me, ‘Well, Jeff, I’m not getting any younger. I’m pretty old.’
That’s true. When I’m speaking to a group of people, and you look around the room and you see that people are not 20 years old, they’re not 30 years old, and you’re probably not 30 or 40, or maybe not even 50 years old any more, the reality is that you probably have more miles behind you than you do in front of you. That’s a really important thing to realize.
You have probably worked a long time, maybe decades, to achieve what you have. You’ve worked hard. Maybe you’ve lived on less than you’ve made. Maybe you’ve made sacrifices, but you’ve been able to accumulate something, and that’s pretty important. You want that stuff that you’ve accumulated to make sure that it goes where you want it to go.
When I talk to people, my goal is to attempt to give them lots of legal and technical estate planning information, so they can understand, maybe take a self-assessment as to where they have things in order and where they don’t, because you need to realize that if you do not have things in order, then you will not have a good estate plan in place to protect you and your wife, during disability, and then during maybe perhaps remarriage in the future, and your children and grandchildren.
What I have discovered over the years, and perhaps you have seen this too, is that it is a lot more expensive to clean up a problem than it is to fix one ahead of time. That’s my goal. I want you to have an estate plan in place that actually functions. I look forward to speaking with you. Thank you.”
