At
a local meeting on health care financing, a lawyer neighbor of mine, “Sam,”
offered a free half-hour consultation on estate planning at the large law firm
on whose staff he serves. Being hopelessly naïve, and forgetting the rule
“there is no such thing as a free lunch,” I signed up, also thinking I’d be
doing him a favor as he’d get a little credit from his colleagues for having
gotten an enrollee.
A Form Arrives from the
Firm
A
few days before the consultation, a six-page questionnaire came from the firm,
seeking lots of information, some of which I did not bother to ferret out and
some of which was useful to me. Mildly alarmed at the formality and complexity
of the request, I filled out the form partially and brought it to the
appointment, wondering whether all this was needed for a simple review of our estate
planning.
Meeting in the Big Room
Sam
and I met in the firm’s large, handsome meeting room; we occupied a small
fraction of the giant central table. His secretary made copies of my back-up
material and left us to explore my plans.
Most
of the free half-hour was consumed in Sam’s reading my material and asking me
questions. Toward the end, he mentioned that any time over the half-hour would
be billed to me at $300 per hour, six times what I made when I retired as a
scientist 15 years ago. I indicated we’d have to wrap this up in an additional
half-hour or less, as the free consultation was going to cost me more than I
had expected. And so we did, with my free consultation costing us $150.
A $150 Lemon Becomes
$10,000 in Lemonade
Our
wills and our Power of Attorney forms were in good shape, and the trust fund
for Tina, my beloved, disabled wife was appropriate. We did not make plans to
minimize our marital net worth to qualify for Medicaid subsidies, as a
philosophical position (we are not really the deserving poor) and a prudential
one (you end up giving other people control over your finances).
What
we did do, and what I advise our readers to do, is to assure that our assets became
held in joint ownership or with the spousal partner named as the beneficiary,
thus passing upon death to the other spouse without charge. Our home is jointly
owned, as are most of our investments. However, several investments, totaling
over $200,000, were in my name only, without a designated beneficiary. As
advised by the lawyer, adding Tina’s name as beneficiary only took a few calls
and filling out a few short forms. Furthermore, the search of our financial
records also turned up a stock certificate we’d forgotten about.
Where
we live, a lawyer gets 5% of the estate as executor, which means $10,000 on
$200,000 in investments that are not jointly owned or having a named
beneficiary. Avoiding this, for my $150 “free” consultation, turned this lemon
into lemonade.
My Free Advice
There
is no such thing as a free lunch, though occasionally you can find a diamond in
the tuna salad sandwich…or take home a lemon and make lemonade.
Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., is a former Harvard science professor. He still publishes, and he helps others write and publish their books via his http://WriteYourBookWithMe.com. His life's central theme has been his half-century romance with his wife, Tina Su Cooper, now quadriplegic for over a decade due to multiple sclerosis, receiving 24/7 nursing care at home, as discussed at their website here.
Published in a somewhat different form at
http://sixtyandme.com/how-i-turned-a-150-legal-advice-lemon-into-10000-of-lemonade/
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