Speaker 1: Today's question comes from James in North Carolina, and he says, at what point do you need to involve an estate planner when planning your will, or can you just go online and complete a will? Well, we recommend Mama Bear Legal Forms for your will. It's about $100 to get a full set of documents to do a properly done basic estate plan. Now, at what point do you need to do more than something like that, is his question. Probably just due to the complication of your estate. If you get up over about $2 million, I probably would go ahead and spend the money to have an attorney, a professional estate planner do your will. The truth is, you do not have any federal estate tax problem until your estate is over $20 million currently. And so, if you don't have a huge, huge estate, you know, it's actually $22,800,000 right now. No federal estate tax on estates smaller than $22,800,000. And a very simple A-B marital trust, if you are married, can double that. And so, instead of, you know, basically $22,500,000, you'd be at $44,000,000, $45,000,000 before you'd have any taxes with an A-B trust. So the way this works is simply this. Spouses can receive an unlimited amount from their spouse with no federal estate tax. It's when the second spouse dies that you get tagged, if you're up over that $22,000,000. Okay, it used to be $2,000,000 years ago, okay, but right now the current law is $22,800,000. Now, so if you leave the first $22,800,000 into a trust when you die and your spouse has full use of that trust, they can leave another $22,800,000 plus that trust without any taxes. That's a simple marital trust, an A-B trust. And so that's a way to double the amount for a married couple that you can shelter from estate tax. You do want to shelter from estate tax because the estate tax is 55% right now. And so if you have a $100,000,000 estate, you've already paid taxes on all of that, by the way. You pay taxes on every bit of that when you got it, okay? So if you're sitting on a $100,000,000 estate and you shelter roughly $50,000,000 of it, you're going to pay 55% on $50,000,000 that you've already paid taxes on. And let me just help you with that. I don't think if I had that much money, I wouldn't care. Well, you're supposed to care or you wouldn't have that much money. Well, all those people inherited their money. Oh my God, when are you people going to stop believing this mythology? The 400 wealthiest people in America today are the Forbes 400. 70% of them are first-generation. 93% of millionaires are first-generation rich. And all the Forbes 400 are billionaires, that's 1,000 million. And 7 out of 10 of them started with nothing and therefore have paid taxes on every bit of that money. It's all earned money one way or another. And by the way, it's their money, it's not yours. They did it, you didn't do it. They didn't do anything wrong, Oprah didn't steal from anybody, she's one of them. And she's going to be taxed on basically $950,000,000 at 55%. And that's money she's already earned and already paid taxes on. This is how this soak the rich crap gets translated into stupid socialism. And so death tax is really what it is, it's not an estate tax, it's really a death tax. We're going to get you again now that you're not here, that's what it says. You've already paid us once on the income tax, you've earned the money, you've grown the money, you've built something, now we're going to get you again. That's what all that is. So do I sound bitter? Yeah, I've probably spent $100,000 on estate plans trying to keep the government's hands off of everything in excess of $50,000,000. So it's just ridiculous. Now, all that to say, let's go back and answer his question again. If you've got about $2,000,000, you start to not have a federal estate tax problem, but you probably have a complicated enough estate that it's worth spending a few hundred dollars on an estate planning attorney on an estate, having a professional detailed estate plan done. If you've got $100,000 or $500,000 or whatever, I wouldn't fool with that. I just get a mama bear in legal forms will, they need to be state specific. You always do a will that's state specific and you need to update it anytime there's a major life event. Like you move to another state, now your will's not good because it was specific to the other state. You get married or you get divorced. Your kids grow up and they're no longer minors, then that would change your will. Like we had a will set up for our children. If something happened to us, everything went into a trust to care for them in the event of our death when they were little. Well, once they're grown, I don't need that. I can just leave them the money. So the will would change. So anytime there's major life changes or moves, you would need a huge jump in income. Probably won't affect your estate tax, but it makes you need to stop and think about do I have the right insurance in place, do I have the right will in place. Jump online at DaveRamsey.com. There's that coverage check-up tool that's free and it'll help you figure everything out. It's very, very easy. You can text the word check-up to 33789. Bottom line is all this stuff is aggravating, but it is part of, so is just managing life. Keeping your car tags updated is aggravating. Making sure you have insurance on your house is aggravating, but it's called grown-up stuff. So you go and you get your will done if you've got a complicated estate. If you have a fairly straightforward thing, though, you don't have to spend a bunch of money on it, but you do need to get a will. 78% of Americans die without a will. That's just dumber than a rock. You need to get your will done. If you haven't updated or looked at it in five years, you need to get it out and look at it. You probably ought to do a reading of the will to your family while you're alive. If you're going to piss everybody off, you might as well do it while you have the joy of doing it while you're there. Don't do it from the grave and make them all fight with each other and they're really mad at you. So, Junior, you're doing heroin. You get nothing. I'm not funding your dysfunction. Sally, you're the star of a reality show and you have no character. You get nothing. You can go ahead and do this while you're alive. We've done it with our family. Our family understands exactly what we're doing and exactly why we're doing it, and it's very, very important. It helps the family actually go through the grieving process because they don't go from thinking they hit the lottery to sheer disappointment in one fell swoop right after your death. And so, just go ahead and get it all laid out there. It's good for everybody to know what's going on. Why create drama? Go ahead and get rid of the drama with good planning and good diligence.