Episode 6: Beyond the Documents: How Estate Planning Decisions Shape Family Outcomes
Estate planning is often treated as a box to check: documents signed, files stored away, and the assumption that everything will work as intended. But when plans aren’t communicated, updated, or properly executed, families are left facing confusion, conflict, and costly consequences during moments that are already emotionally overwhelming.
In this episode, David Darby, CFA, managing director of the investment strategy team at Farther, shares real stories from decades of experience helping families unwind estate planning mistakes after it’s too late. He explains how unfunded trusts, outdated documents, and lack of coordination between advisors can turn good intentions into years of legal and emotional strain. Listen in as David breaks down what actually goes wrong behind the scenes, how thoughtful execution creates clarity instead of chaos, and why proactive planning is one of the most meaningful gifts you can leave your family.
What You’ll Learn:
Why having estate documents doesn’t guarantee they’ll work as intended.
How unfunded or outdated trusts can trigger costly legal battles.
The role communication plays between advisors, attorneys, and families.
When life events should prompt an estate plan review.
Why healthcare directives are just as critical as financial documents.
How advisors help reduce administrative burdens during times of grief.
What clarity looks like when estate planning is done well.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“The value-add of a good advisor is that we give people time in their lives by taking care of the minutia that they probably don't want to have anything to do with. They just want to know that it's getting done.” - David Darby
“As you get more experienced in life and in our business, you'll see clients that have health issues, and I think we tend to forget that our clients are people first. And that when you have a health issue, it's almost the only thing you can think about.” - David Darby
“The first time you're probably looking at estate planning is [when] we get married or have kids, and then as they get older, we may be updating it.” - David Darby
Resources:
David Darby: Website | LinkedIn | Email: david@farther.com | Contact: (347)-385-8572
About Our Guest:
David Darby is Chair of the Farther Investment Committee and an advisor to a select group of high-net-worth clients. With more than 25 years of experience working with families, entrepreneurs, and executives, David specializes in managing complex, multi-asset portfolios and helping clients thoughtfully structure and implement long-term planning strategies. He spent 21 years as an advisor at Goldman Sachs before co-founding DG Wealth Partners in 2017, which later merged with Farther in 2022. David lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife, Helen, and their three children.
Connect with Us:
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Read the Transcript:
David Darby: The value add of a good advisor is that we give people time in their lives by taking care of the minutia that probably they don't want to have anything to do with; they just want to know that it's getting done.
Welcome to The Wealth Development Studio. I'm your host, Genevieve George, Senior Financial Advisor and Founder of Pelican Financial Planning & Wealth. Our goal for this episode is to provide clarity about today's financial topic, inspire you to be brave with your questions, and gain confidence in your financial future. So take a deep breath, grab your favorite cup of coffee, and step into the studio. Your dose of financial empowerment begins now.
Genevieve George: One of the greatest gifts you can give your family isn't financial. It's clarity. When estate documents are thoughtfully created, kept up to date, and actually put into action, they remove guesswork during some of the hardest moments a family will ever face. Instead of confusion, conflict, or unanswered questions, there's a clear path forward.
Today, we are talking about what happens when that clarity exists and what happens when it doesn't. Our conversation is about estate planning—not the technical checklist—but the real world mistakes that don't show up until somebody is gone or incapacitated. We're talking about what happens when plans aren't communicated, aren't funded, or simply aren't kept up to date.
And what we as advisors have learned when we have helped families clean up that mess. I'm joined today by David Darby, CFA, advisor to high net worth families and managing director of the investment strategy team at Farther.
Thank you so much for being here, David. This was a topic that you had brought to me, but it's definitely not something I'm unfamiliar with as having gone through it with some clients.
But maybe just tell me a story that made you want to share this with other people.
David Darby: Well, thanks for inviting me on, Gen. When you start out in your career as an advisor, you never think you're gonna see things like this. You tend to think that your clients are advised by top lawyers, top accountants, top financial advisors, and they all get great advice and then they listen to it.
And then you find out over time that they're just like all of us in the sense that we get good advice, but we don't always follow through on it. So when we talked about this topic, I thought of, well, what's the worst mistake that I've ever seen a client make? And then let's talk about that in real terms.
And what it can lead to, especially after the fact when a client has passed away. So wanted to talk about a situation where I had a very wealthy client, he was retired, focused on living the good life. I think when he passed away, he was 80 and a half years old. And his wife at the time said he lived 80 years perfect health, great life.
Had a half year where his health declined and then he passed away. If we could write the script, we'd all want to pass away that way. But after he passed away, his executor, who was a close friend, called up and said, "Did you ever know about this revocable trust that he'd set up?” And I was like, “What revocable trust are you talking about?”
And it led to a point where we realized a couple of years before he passed away, he’d changed from having just an estate with a will. This was a second marriage situation, although a long time second marriage, had kids from his first marriage. He had a longstanding wife from his second marriage and they had stepchildren.
So there was complexity to this. Under his revocable trust, he achieved how the money would flow under his will and through under the trust, and so that you had a situation where you could look at the trust, which was never funded, had slightly different terms, and basically said, “I wanna support my wife and then have money go to my kids from the first marriage.”
And the will said, “I want to carve out X millions of dollars to my kids and then have the rest support my wife.” So it was flipped the order that the money would flow to his kids from his first marriage. And as you can tell when you're talking about a nine-figure estate, this led to a serious legal battle, and where both the kids from the first marriage and his second wife each had a document proving how the client had wanted to act, but neither of them being able to say, well, he really wanted to fund the revocable trust, or he purposely didn't fund the revocable trust. And so this led to a battle that I think lasted for at least a couple of years. And sure the only winner in the process eventually was the lawyers who charged probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on both sides to get to a reasonable fair resolution that both sides could agree on, but rather—would’ve been better if the client had just said, “David, I did a revokable trust,” and then turn it over to us and said, "Go make it happen.” And so that's it in a nutshell.
I could talk about how we would've solved it and things like that, what we learned, but it was a tough situation to watch.
Genevieve George: Yeah. And I've had this come up with clients in the past too, where I will say something like, “Do you have estate documents? We wanna look at those and understand how everything is supposed to flow.
And then in that course of that, we're like, “Okay, there's a rev trust here. Do you wanna fund it?” 'Cause you just went through all this exercise to create it and legal fees to create it, to only have it do absolutely nothing if you don't actually use it, right?
David Darby: Yeah.
Genevieve George: And which is what you ran into, right?
And then it created this legal battle, so maybe talk about when you're working with clients, what are you telling them to do if they've gone through this process?
David Darby: Well, it's interesting. So now as you said, asking about their estate planning documents and whether their assets are titled in their own name or in a trust telling them to keep us informed when they actually may have conversations with their estate attorneys so that they can, the next step too is let, oftentimes, when you're working with a wealthy client, you, they can get overwhelmed by the estate planning and the estate planning can run their life.
Unless they're working with a good advisor who can handle these things for them. And so one of the things that I pride myself on is being able to make our client lives easy. And a lot of it is taking all of the annual to-dos of having the complicated estate plan and making sure that they happen.
And so the clients can go travel, go spend time with their grandkids, golf, whatever the thing that they want to do, enjoy the fruits of their labor. And so being on top of things and off top of their estate buying and knowing about it is really helpful. But I think the other thing is also, as you get this experience and have seen kind of the mistakes people make, is that when clients ask, I have recent experience, a client asked, “David, I don't want, I don't wanna be a burden on my kids when I die or have my finances be a burden on them.”
And I said, “Well, look, they're gonna be in a terrible situation. It's gonna be the worst time of their life losing their mother.” And frankly, I said, “Frankly, your finances will take years to settle. And everything was owned in her own name. And she was recently widowed and her husband had finally listened to advice to put things into rev trust—create a rev trust and fund it.
So like everything had flowed through to her very easily. But then she had a lot of assets. It was both joined and through the trust. She put 'em in her own name and now she heard me say it and I said, “It's gonna be a nightmare.” And it was multiple, a nightmare because of where she lived and just 'cause she hadn't really done much planning.
And she called her lawyer. And lawyer literally that day sent an email to this. She said, “Lawyer David, find time to get on the calendar. And we're talking in January.” She's probably gonna set up a rev trust. We'll fund that rev trust, put her assets over there and make her daughter's life easy.
I think she wants to put things, checking things off her checklist to get things, to make things easy so that she can go on with what's important to her. Which is, she has a consulting business that she likes, that she does a part-time, but she also wants to spend time with their family and grandkids.
And then that's really, the value add of a good advisor is that we give people time in their lives by taking care of the minutia. That, probably they don't wanna have anything to deal with. They just wanna know that it's getting done.
Genevieve George: Yeah. You mentioned two things there that stood out to me is, estate planning, it shouldn't happen in this vacuum where the client is only talking to the attorney.
Because coming out of it, oftentimes things need to be retitled that are outside of the attorney's space. So trying to open up those lines of communication and making, like your client just described your meeting with them and the attorney. “Let's all get on the same page. Let's make sure this is all clean and doing what it's supposed to do,” is so important.
And then the retitling, the actual action of retitling, which, from an account standpoint isn't really that difficult if we have the right information, but it's just a matter of, and I think you're right, like the process, especially when it's more complex, but that process of over going through the estate planning process and working with the attorneys can be really overwhelming and it can be complex and really not every attorney—a lot of them do—but not every attorney can break it down so that the client on the other side of the table like really understands what they're getting into.
So they just check that box. “Okay, that's done.” And then they don't want to think about it, right?
David Darby: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They can set up these beautifully complex estate plans with family partnerships and grants and all these terms that we talk about, and like when you realize what actually goes into the management of all of these entities, and it's exponentially more complex rather than linearly more complex.
And I know you would appreciate this as an advisor, but I think that, yeah, an estate attorney is telling our clients, “Hey, you'll save, on your estate taxes, which is great,” but then it's oh, you're gonna have to every year do a lot of work. It's like you better have a really good advisor or be a very detail oriented client who likes to do a lot of busy work.
Genevieve George: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.
David Darby: Most people aren't that way.
Genevieve George: And I think what's missed just from my experience in over the years is obviously nobody wants to talk about this, right? We're all gonna die, but nobody wants to talk about it.
And some people really just don't want to think about it or put a plan in place, but it's so important that they do because I'm sure you've had an experience where there was no plan. Your first example was there was a plan, but it wasn't executed. But if we've had clients where there was no plan and it is a mess, maybe talk to that, like how it's so wearing on the family and the team and everybody.
David Darby: Yeah. I think a situation I was trying to, another second situation I was thinking of was just sometimes, you have a plan, but it's so old. It's essentially like having no plan that it worked for a different agent stage. It may be the laws have changed in between when you executed them.
Genevieve George: Or you moved.
David Darby: Yeah. Moved to a different stage. Like lots of different things can come up and I saw this within the last few years with just the health documents that come up. But, we think about, hey, for us, we deal a lot with the financial assets, but just as important are like the healthcare decisions and things like that might need to be made should one of our clients become incapacitated.
And that's gonna be, who's the family member that's gonna be taking care of your client. And I've seen situations where clients have just assumed that the documents that they had, and they may have, in case, there's a handwritten document from when they went into surgery stating their wishes and things like that, thinking that's a sufficient document to have power over your spouse if something happened to them.
Well, like the hospital may not accept that, and we saw a situation where they didn't, and so you had a really serious situation where a spouse couldn’t get involved in taking care of their spouse because their planning documents were so outdated and the handwritten document that they'd written that expressed some of their wishes, the hospital said, no, we can't take it.
And that's when you're just like, whoa, this is a real problem. And you'll feel the stress from your clients when they're dealing with it. It's as you get more experienced in life and in our business, you'll see clients that have health issues, and I think we tend to forget that our clients are our people first.
And that when you have a health issue, it's almost the only thing you can think about. And like everything else just, you have tunnel vision on till that's finished and so it can really be compound that with just not having the ability to help out your loved one. It can just be a night.
Genevieve George: Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. I've had that recently come up where somebody was telling me they are the healthcare surrogate for another family member, but not a direct family. Not a parent. Not their spouse. And I said, “Do you have that paperwork?” And they said, “I do not.” And I was like, “It's gonna be really hard for you to prove that when this person has to go to the hospital and you are there and saying, ‘I'm the healthcare surrogate. I'm supposed to be making those decisions.’” So it's important to have that communication too. Because your example that you're describing, they needed to have it updated, but then they needed, if that person didn't even have that handwritten paper, they'd probably, I don't know where they would've been, but.
David Darby: Yeah, I think you're right. And it's like the hospitals need to err on the side of caution because of the laws that they're subject to. They overshare or they make a decision based on the wrong person's authority. Like they're the ones that are liable. And you are trying to help a loved one or your clients are trying to help a loved one, and the hospital is just geared to say no.
Genevieve George: Yeah, it's hard and that applies on the financial side too, right? The power of attorney, like if the right people don't have copies of those documents, then it can't be, if that client becomes incapacitated, it can't be addressed in the proper channels that you wanted it to be addressed because that paperwork isn't available.
And I talk a lot when I'm talking about this as like the gift of clarity. And I know it's hard because some families really don't want to have this conversation. Maybe they did the documents, but they don't wanna talk about what they have or what their wishes are or whatever the case may be.
They just figured we'll deal with that later. But sometimes later comes suddenly. And there's such a benefit to having pre-planned and not chaos planning or crisis planning in the moment. And I am sure that you've seen it too. I think people think, “I'm not old enough. I'm healthy. I don't need these documents. I'll just take care of that later.”
But I've had clients that lost their parents when they were in their twenties, and it's hard. And now you think of a 20 something, trying to figure out life without their parents and now a mess, a financial mess, that they have to figure out.
And they were just trying to figure out how they can pay rent and now they're having to figure out how to manage all these things that they never thought they were gonna have to think about. So it can happen suddenly. I don't know if you have any experience with that when there was like no planning involved at all and just a mess left behind.
David Darby: Fortunately, I don't think as many situations have been where there's no planning involved, but I think that the point you brought up that a lot of families don't communicate it with their children, or and I'll be the first one to—my kids are younger and so I don't think they're of the age that I would have that conversation. But our daughter turns 20 years old tomorrow. And the reality is, like we're not that far off from having a conversation with her and being able to say, “Here’s what's gonna happen. Here's who should call. You're taking care of this at an awful time. Here's what you would need to know.”
Like even just like saying that we've planned and prepared her, that might help the situation along. We’ve seen on our own and my wife's parents both passed away and her father and stepmother literally I think went into a place in Albuquerque called Walk-in Wills, which his other business, he was like Better Call Saul, an ambulance chaser.
And so you can imagine a terrible time for my wife with no communication or very little communication about what the wills were other than we have wills. That when we saw the wills, we realized that we had gotten what we'd paid for and the years spent cleaning that up. It's been a nightmare.
Genevieve George: And it's hard too, because that puts us in a weird spot too, right? Like with your parents as they're aging, trying to get that information out of them. I've seen both sides. I have clients and I have family members that are just an open book. Here's everything. We wanna communicate all of this to our family.
And then we have others that are more closed off. And it's hard to pry that information and being in our profession. You think about that. We should be asking these questions like, “Hey, if something does happen to you, who am I supposed to call? Where am I finding the documents?” But it's uncomfortable. And especially if you have someone that you already know is not a big sharer of personal data.
David Darby: Yeah, sometimes it seems like our clients find it easier to talk to us than their own family about these things.
Like we're in the role of financial doctors or something like that. Those people can open up and we keep things private. We can give them advice. They may not listen to it, but you have a trusted role with your clients, right? And like the same conversation you and I might have, we'd be like, “I would never had that conversation with my children.”
Genevieve George: Right, right. And that's totally their choice. So let's just say okay, we have a family and they have their estate documents, things are titled correctly. We feel like everything is in pretty good order. What are those like triggering periods where you would tell somebody, “You should definitely be updating your estate documents”?
David Darby: Yeah. There's probably time. It's a passage of time. It's you gotta think, the first time you're probably looking at estate planning is we get married or have kids and then as they get older, we may be updating it. We just redid our estate documents for the second time.
Our daughter's turning 20 tomorrow, so I think we did to him last year. So it’s…
Genevieve George: They no longer need guardianship.
David Darby: Right. Exactly. Like we're thinking a little bit about that, our youngest is 13 years old. Like that's different than being 2, for example.
So there's that and then I'm sure once all of our kids are out of the house and then starting families of their own, like our estate planning will think there, but that probably puts us in our 60s or so. And then, as we retire, we'll probably enter a third, I guess maybe that's a fourth phase of where we might wanna think about our estate planning.
But then also I think you can trigger if that your health suddenly changes and you have—look our health can change at any time, like it might have a really unfortunate accident. And hopefully you've prepared for that.
But maybe you get like an unfortunate cancer diagnosis and you have some time to just change it. I think that would definitely be a trigger to really look at this and say, “All right, you've gotta make sure things are up to date and flowing how you want it,” which would be hard to do. 'cause you're probably just thinking about your spouse's health. So should do it, but will you do it?
Genevieve George: Yeah, so when I talk to people, I try to say we should be at least addressing it every five years. So let's just look and say, “Okay, this is what it says, this is how it currently flows. Does that still make sense for your family?”
And maybe that's that. I'm not trying to cut the attorney out, but maybe that's an initial conversation with their advisor. 'cause they're probably talking to them more often than they were talking to their attorney. And just seeing, okay, does that still make sense? And then having open communication between all of those parties.
But then the other piece I call 'em like triggering events. So like you said, an illness, a death, a divorce. If you're getting remarried, those types of things complicate your estate. Or maybe when you did your estate documents, you were building a business, but now you're having a liquidity event.
So that business grew and now we're selling it. That changes your financial picture significantly, right?
David Darby: We have a client undergoing two of those at the same time, a liquidity event and a marriage. I told him you should talk to your estate planning attorney. And I warned him, I said, “This might be her Super Bowl.”
Genevieve George: Yeah. Yeah. So it's important because those things complicate your estate plan and I've had friends go through divorce and, well, you've just been through all kinds of legal fees and all that stuff, they don't wanna go sit with another attorney.
But your financial life looks a lot different now. You gotta go update your estate documents for what your life looks like without that person. And it's important to make sure that you’re doing those things. My biggest takeaway is I want everybody to have them. You don't have to have the most complex estate documents, but like in all these stages in your life that you talked about, you need to have something.
So if something happens, there's a plan, right?
David Darby: Yeah.
Genevieve George: And help your family to avoid like that crisis I always think through. When I'm working with clients, when they've just lost somebody, like you said, it's the worst time of their life. Like they're trying to work through the emotions of this, but then you add on all the administrative complications of not having things all your ducks in a row, and it just makes it so much worse, right?
You're trying to work through the emotions of losing this important person in your life and then you're also trying to work through. Maybe you've experienced this too, but things are coming at them from all over the place. Yeah, you need to do this, you need to do that. “My uncle said you need to do this.”
Like there's so much data coming in and it's very hard to prioritize and so if there is like a clear plan, it can be much easier to—it’s not easy—but much easier to navigate through in those moments.
David Darby: Well, I know we've talked about like worst case scenarios, but the other side, are there moments you've been proud of where you've given someone good advice, and then helped build the plan and then see it come to fruition?
Again, made it easier during someone's worst moment of their life, like when they've lost a spouse or something like that. Or when kids have lost their parents, but that you've prepared and helped blunt the bad news or just the administrative burden?
Genevieve George: Yeah. Yeah. I think that I've had opportunities over my career to come alongside a client as they're doing their estate documents and not doing any of the attorney's job, but just having open lines of communication with the attorney in advance. Like I had a client a number of years ago, a similar situation than what you described earlier, where there was a cancer diagnosis and they knew what was coming.
And so we were able to walk through that process with the attorney, get all of the documents in order, and then have it be like a fairly smooth transition on the financial side. Like it's not gonna be smooth on the emotional side, but have it be a really smooth transition on the financial side.
And then I think it's a matter of like getting all your ducks in a row, but then working with that professional team that makes you comfortable too. In this particular situation, the attorney was very, very patient and helpful in making things—there’s all these legal jargon—but making things understandable to that person and that family as they're building these things.
And so I think you're right, I've seen the disasters, I've seen things go wrong, but I have seen it go right. So there was a lot of clarity in that situation and it is helpful to see that and to be able to communicate that to other clients and other families as you're talking with them to just say this can be done in a way that is less burdensome to your family.
David Darby: I think that's a good point. Like I can think of times where we've had clients and it's, as you said, it's usually when there's enough runway, they get a help diagnosis. There is time to check the box on their planning and make sure it's up to date and then execute the planning.
And even it can just be little things like making sure that you have all the phone numbers for the pension, the accountant, all maybe the little things that they exist in the client's mind but are not down on paper. Just being, having a little, like a one or two-page word document that you can reference for the spouse.
And just start going through different things and working with the attorneys and things like that to make it happen, an accountant, it could just make that spouse’s who, as you said, is dealing with the emotions of a really awful event, but when you're losing your spouse and then once you've lost your spouse, both of those can be real terrible moments, but being able to help that family, it does actually, it's rewarding that we're able to do that and that we're able to be there and deliver on the promise, I think, of what ultimately someone who's hiring you for is to make their financial life better, by making their financial life better, make their actual life better in their moment of need.
Genevieve George: And maybe you've experienced this too. I've had a number of clients where they came to me in that time of transition. So I was not involved with them prior to a spouse becoming widowed or becoming divorced. And being able to come in and be able to help in that moment, where they didn't, maybe the reason they came to you or to I is because they didn't really feel like they were being supported in with their existing team, or maybe their spouse that passed was the one taking care of all of that and they didn't have a team.
So it's really, I think it is tragic, but it's a rewarding time to be working with clients 'cause you feel like you can actually really make an impact in helping them to—a big thing that I care about is understand what you have, how it's working, what are the opportunities to make improvements there but really taking the time to help them understand that, especially if they weren't like the spouse that was handling the finances prior to.
David Darby: Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. There's definitely been relationships where—sometimes had the relationship with the one spouse and it was purely a self-directed investor and everything about their family existed, like up in the client's head, both their investments and all of the—You have the phone numbers for everyone existed up here, and then something tragic happens, a heart attack on a golf course or something. It's something awful at this wholly unexpected time where you—the family looks to you 'cause they know that you have a important relationship of the principal that passes away.
But they want you to have a totally different type of relationship with the spouse and the kids and things like that. And it as you said, like you have to be able to step into a different type of role and really prove that you can add value in that way as well. And sometimes we have different roles with different spouses and different—so keeps you on your toes in this type of business.
Genevieve George: Yeah. So David, tell me, how did you get into this field and working with clients?
David Darby: I am almost in my 30th year of working with high net worth families. I do not feel like I am college plus 30 years, but it goes by quickly. I started it in this business.
I like the stock market. I was fortunate to get an internship in college and then that slingshot it into a job at Goldman right out of college in New York. I thought I was gonna work there for two, maybe three years. I worked in the high net worth group, had some great bosses at first and decided that I would try to make a career out of it.
Got accepted into their associate program back in the late ‘90s and started working with high net worth families, ultra high net worth families back in the nineties. I worked at Goldman until 2017. And then went into the independent RIA space. Goldman's high net worth group all has a brokerage firm.
And as an RIA, it's different framework, but you're a fiduciary only. RIA is the the move that I made. Our current firm, we merged our firm that we started in 2017 into our current firm, Farther, back in beginning of 2022. So about four years ago. And now at Farther, I still advise clients along with my partner Melissa, but we also I work on our investment team where I focus mostly on writing white papers and things for clients.
So right now, for example, we're writing our outlet for 2026. So I've been able to develop interesting new skill sets since I left Goldman, where I write a lot more look a lot more portfolios and things like that. So it’s been a very interesting career progression.
Genevieve George: That's awesome. And how can people find you and get in touch with you if they want to talk with you further?
David Darby: The easiest way to find me is just by emailing me. It's. david@farther.com, F-A-R-T-H-E-R.com. Or you can just obviously look on my LinkedIn and/or give me a call. My cell phone: (347) 385-8572.
Genevieve George: And you put out, like the writing that you're talking about, you put that out on LinkedIn. I've seen some of your pieces. So are you putting content out there pretty regularly to keep people up to date on what's going on?
David Darby: It's semi-regularly. I'll write an article for LinkedIn if the topic inspires me and/or our marketing group will sometimes say, “We really want a topic on this. Or an article on this topic. Can you write something for us?”
And if it's something I know about, I'll say, yeah, we'll write it. I'll spend a few hours writing a piece. We have a good marketing team now that can edit my documents well. Sort of understands how I think and edits it well.
I've gotten a lot more efficient at writing than I was three years ago for sure.
Genevieve George: Yeah.
David Darby: So that's a nice part. And I'm not a natural writer, but at least I am more efficient these days.
Genevieve George: That's awesome. And what about key takeaways that you want people, on the topic of estate planning, what would you say to somebody meeting with you for the first time about their estate documents?
David Darby: I would say nobody likes thinking about it. You should do it. You're totally normal. If you meet with a lawyer, sit on it for six to 12 months. I did the same thing and then keep us involved with what you do on the estate planning. And our job will be to make that estate planning as easy as possible on an ongoing basis for you.
And I think that's really the value that a good advisor can, if we understand your estate and estate planning and what you want it to do, keep us in the loop. We'll make it as easy as humanly possible for you, and I think that's the real advantage of working with a great advisor. I like to say I'm the only great advisor at that, but that’s not true. I'm sure you are as well, Gen.
Genevieve George: There's at least two on this call.
David Darby: There’s at least two on this call me. Maybe the only two on the planet. But that's really what a good advisor should be doing for you is really helping you out on making your financial life easy and your financial life has included your estate and how that works.
Genevieve George: Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you so much, David.
That's it for today's episode of The Wealth Development Studio. Remember, financial clarity is powerful. Do you need help with your financial plan? Go to pelicanfinancialplanning.com to schedule a call with me. Until next time.
