Wealth Actually

BROOKE SUMMERHILL has written a new book to address “Divorce and the Wealthy Woman.” https://youtu.be/FFSeBg3XT8M In this conversation, Brooke discusses the complexities of divorce, particularly focusing on the financial aspects that wealthy women face. She emphasizes the importance of understanding one’s balance sheet, hiring the right professionals, and navigating complex assets during divorce. The discussion also covers the emotional components of divorce, the significance of having a supportive team, and the benefits of open conversations about finances, including the role of prenups. Takeaways from “DIVORCE FOR THE WEALTHY WOMAN” Divorce can be a daunting process, especially regarding finances. Understanding your balance sheet is crucial during divorce. Breathing and staying calm can help alleviate anxiety. Hiring the right professionals is essential for navigating divorce. Complex assets require specialized knowledge and support. Cash flow planning is vital for post-divorce stability. Parenting during divorce needs careful planning and support. Open conversations about finances can strengthen relationships. Prenups can facilitate healthy discussions about money. Divorce is a journey that can become easier with the right support. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Divorce and Finances 02:58 Understanding the Balance Sheet 05:45 Navigating Complex Assets in Divorce 09:05 Building Your Professional Team 12:04 The Emotional Component of Divorce 15:09 Modeling Settlements and Cash Flow Planning 17:56 Parenting and Financial Responsibilities 20:41 Preventative Measures and Financial Awareness 23:53 The Role of Prenups in Marriage and Divorce Transcript of “DIVORCE FOR THE WEALTHY WOMAN” Frazer Rice (00:01.186) Welcome back, Brooke. Brooke Summerhill (00:03.378) Hi, thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. Let’s chat about the most fun topics in the world. Divorce and finances, right? Frazer Rice (00:09.952)Well, and codified in your new book, Divorce for the Wealthy Woman. I have already started, and I think it’s a winner for a bunch of reasons. The big one really is addressing a viewpoint that I think has been missed by the financial books generally speaking, Brooke Summerhill (00:15.794)Mm-hmm. Frazer Rice (00:31.086)It really corrects a problem, I think, around information asymmetry in finances generally. And unfortunately, we’ve both been around it from a divorce perspective. Tell me what, first of all, let’s let our listeners remind themselves of your practice. And what do you do there? And then what was the book trying to accomplish? https://www.amazon.com/Divorce-Wealthy-Women-costs-that-ebook/dp/B0G1ZMFVCN/ Brooke Summerhill (00:53.554)Okay, so hi, I’m Brooke Summerhill. I do specifically for the last like 15 years in finance. Specifcially in the last five specifically in divorce and finance for wealthy women. So I’m not very creative my book specifically and my podcast is literally called divorce for the wealthy woman. I love being able to understand the perspective of someone going through divorce,not feeling the fire, and creating a years long fight. I help alleviate the stress of divorce and go through the finances, the emotional aspect, I’m in financial psychology. I’ve been doing that and I plan on continuing doing that. It’s a fun, fun, fun career path for me. Frazer Rice (01:40.526)One of the great things I think about your book is it starts where I start. You really have to be comfortable with what your balance sheet looks like. Take us through a little bit about your experience in helping wealthy women get acquainted with something they weren’t familiar with initially. However, they have to get familiar with it real fast. Brooke Summerhill (02:03.014)So typically, you go to a lawyer . You’re about to get divorced and it was blindsided in your face. my god, what is going on? He wants to get divorced or she wants to get divorced. Doesn’t matter who you are, heterosexual couple or not. It does not matter. You might not know where the finances are, right? And you’re going to a lawyer. You expect them to help you out, but you don’t even know where the assets are. You don’t know it’s on the balance sheet. So the first step is breathing. Let’s not get into this sympathetic nervous system. No fight or flight, freeze, thaw, and let’s not go there if we can’t avoid it. And really just breathe and understand it’s going to be OK. That’s the first thing I want to just point out is you can do the work on yourself without having to do hard interval training. You can just breathe. So you’re going to breathe and understand, OK, the balance sheet. I can figure this out. You got it. And you might need to hire someone like myself who’s a certified divorce financial analyst, you might have your lawyer help you. You might ask your soon to be ex if they’re willing and amicable to understand the balance sheet. You might go to a financial advisor, wealth manager, your family office and ask some questions. So this is a time of learning and it’s okay that you don’t know where everything is. And the balance sheet is terrifying for most people. 98 % of us have money anxiety. It’s okay. Breathe. Get help and support where you can. The foundation is the balance sheet. If this is the only thing you take from today, is just breathe and know that the foundation is your budget, your expenses, what’s coming in, what’s going out. Can you figure that out? Even though you might not know where your assets are. Do you have Bitcoin? Or have different properties? Do you even know if there’s liens, mortgages, loans on them? That all will get figured out. But you’ve got to know what you’re spending. I would say, you tell me if you have a different experience. But most clients do not know their budget. And that’s OK. Doesn’t matter your wealth, income, anything. Most people, at least in America, do not know what they spend every month. So that’s the foundation is to start theirs. Understand, what are you spending? Just keep a little log. It can be old fashioned. And I have plenty of technological apps that can help with this. But keep it old fashioned. Just write down, what are you spending? And keep that for a week. Brooke Summerhill (04:28.752)That can help you in your divorce process and remember to breathe. There you go. Frazer Rice (04:32.91)And it’s part of my process, I think, is to just understand what you’re spending. And then the next step is really understand where it comes from to help support that spending. It’s like analyzing someone who earned 100 million dollars from this movie. It’s like, OK, that’s the headline. Now it’s a lot different in reality. Certainly taxes, how it’s paid to you. We’ll get into this in a second, and sometimes it’s not in cash. Sometimes it’s in different types of assets. Whether it’s stock or maybe you own homes, and it may not be necessarily liquid right up front. It sounds like we’re parking our cars in the same garage on that front. Brooke Summerhill (05:19.154)Absolutely, absolutely agree with you. Frazer Rice (05:22.114)So maybe let’s go through some of the complex assets that you think about that come up in any, not all divorce situations, but definitely in many of them. Many times people have grown their wealth through a private business. so even, you know, the number that is settled upon in the divorce settlement may not be readily available from a cash payout perspective. How do you take people through that? Brooke Summerhill (05:47.473)Oof. So I have an entire chapter on businesses because majority of my clients, I’m going to be very sexist here and say majority of my clients, husbands in a heterosexual relationship do own a business or have just been bought out of a business or are starting a startup or have something behind the scenes that they’re aware of or maybe not even aware of. So businesses are huge thing. That’s why I put a chunk of it in my book because The biggest advice I can give is hire, I’m going to be a repetitive throughout this whole podcast today is hire the right professionals if you can, because you don’t know what you don’t know and that’s okay. You’re going to breathe through that and acknowledge you don’t have to be an expert in divorce. But when you have a business reading, listening to podcasts, doing all of those exercises are wonderful and hiring an expert. So getting someone who’s understanding the finances in a divorce specifically, so business valuator, or just having a consultation. That’s enough to understand, this, I need a forensic accountant, because I don’t know anything that’s going on within this part of the businesses that I’m a part of, but I’m not really a part of, or I need a business valuator. Let’s just have a consultation. It could be really a non serious, non threatening, non emotional way to start it. I’m just going to have a consultation to understand, do I need this business valuator? I would just at least have those conversations to understand more about your husband’s business or your business in general on what are the numbers behind it? Because it is very complex, just as you’re saying. Businesses, absolutely, you want the right experts involved. Frazer Rice (07:30.506)And sort of as a broader business, or not really business, but sort of as a broader sort of contextual situation here, the type of wealth, whether it’s private funds, people who are invested in private equity or hedge funds or stock options or RSUs for people who are in the tech world, things that are held in trust, there’s the concept of carried interest and real estate and concentrated stock. This is to go back to your comment that there are people out there that can help you. Understand those assets, I guess for lack of better word, can and can’t do. As far as either provide cash flow or are easily divisible in a divorce settlement. Does that square with your thinking on that? Brooke Summerhill (08:13.522)Absolutely. And my role is to r

Wealthy families are discovering Tennessee’s legal and tax ecosystem as a key component for their long term wealth strategy. I spoke with ANDREA CHOMAKOS from Pendleton Square Trust on Tennessee around these advantages that the Tennessee Wealth Ecosystem provides in the context of other states’ legal systems and economies. We cover directed trusts and Tennessee situs, and even a tip like the Community Property Trust, which is interesting in both prenuptial tax planning and estate planning contexts. https://youtu.be/CiR8eoAG-iI “The Tennessee Wealth Ecosystem” Transcript Frazer Rice (00:00.814)Welcome aboard, Andrea. Andrea Chomakos (00:03.128)Thanks, Frazer, happy to be here. Frazer Rice (00:04.696)Well, glad to have you on. Always happy to talk to friends of mine at Pendleton, talk about Tennessee and trust administration generally. Our listeners are probably pretty well versed as far as the idea of trusts, but I don’t think it hurts to go and talk a little bit about what the trustee function normally entails as we talk about what is interesting about Tennessee and other jurisdictional issues. Andrea Chomakos (00:29.358)Absolutely. So Frazer, it’s great to be here and share some conversation with you and your audience. While I have been in the professional fiduciary role for several years, for several decades before that, I was a practicing attorney. So I would often have conversations with my clients and drafting their documents and asking them decisions about who to appoint as a trustee. One of the very first conversations we would have is what does it mean to be a trustee? As I have now come over to the other side, broadly stating that the trustee has the responsibility to administer the trust for the sole benefit of the named trust beneficiaries in accordance with the trust terms. That seems like a lot of really big words that don’t make a lot of sense to the average person. I get it. When I was practicing, a lot of my clients, their reaction would be, okay, so you’re just telling me that this person is the person who makes the decisions about distributions and that’s great. I can go, you know, no big deal. And the reality is, yeah, the reality is it is a big deal. Because it’s more than just making distribution decisions or making them in a vacuum. You have to look at the broader picture. Frazer Rice (01:41.228)It’s more than that though. Andrea Chomakos (01:55.598)But it also entails managing the trust assets and investments. It means making those important distribution decisions and understanding the impacts those are going to have not just in the short term but the long term. Filing and paying tax returns for the trust. Communicating with trust beneficiaries, providing reports and accounts. And even all of that sometimes seems like not that big of a laundry list but Let me give like an example that I ran into. Everybody loves a good example. So when I say a trustee is responsible for investing and managing all of the assets of the trust, that also means the protection and preservation of those assets. And it’s incredibly common to see a trust hold some real estate, oftentimes a residence that a trustee or a beneficiary lives in. Frazer Rice (02:24.58)That’d be great. Andrea Chomakos (02:51.094)And you may say, OK, well, no big deal. Like if something happens, we’ll just get it fixed. Well, it’s more than that, right? You need to really understand what that means and the risks you’re taking and the potential liability you’re taking if you don’t manage those issues in a way maybe different than you would if it was just your own house. So I was at a prior institution and that institution was serving as co-trustee with a beneficiary who resided in some trust-owned property. And lo and behold, you know, got a call from that beneficiary saying, hey, there was a leak with one of the pipes in the house. So I just went out and got some duct tape and put that around the pipe to stave off the leak, but now it’s gotten really bad. And you’re just sort of like, well, wait a minute. Like that’s. Frazer Rice (03:34.276)Hmm. Andrea Chomakos (03:47.573)As a trustee, that’s not an appropriate response to fixing a leak, it’s not a roll of duct tape. So it’s things like that that trustees are responsible for. Frazer Rice (04:00.004)One of the things too that’s happened in modern legislation is that those three functions you talked about, the investment, the distribution, and the administration have been in many states you’re able to, we like to call it bifurcate them, so that you can put an expert maybe in the investment role, maybe a family member with a corporate trustee in the distribution role, and then a corporate trustee in the administration role who, you know, they’re used to doing the paperwork and the tax filings and the eye dotting and T-crossing. And in your, I guess in your experiences, we’ve gone through that. How have trust companies evolved to take into account this new flexibility? Andrea Chomakos (04:42.254)Absolutely, think you hit the right word. I always say the same thing, Frazier. It’s a bifurcation of those duties and responsibilities. And so there are more trust companies who are embracing what we call the Directed Trust Model, where the corporate trustee is handling the administrative functions. So the reporting, the trust beneficiary communications, filing the tax returns, all of those very important functions, but ones that oftentimes are overlooked, their importance is overlooked. And other people are given the role of either distribution advisor, and sometimes the corporate trustees in these roles will make distribution decisions. But certainly the investment function is one. And as you see arise in individuals, families, using private equity for investments, other alternative investments, you see them using RIAs, multifamily offices, to manage their investments that, and those entities don’t have that trustee function. There are more corporate trustees who are filling that role. And I think that we’re only going to see that market increase and that demand increase. Frazer Rice (06:11.196)I don’t think I could agree more with that statement. I think the idea of people having all of those functions under one umbrella really ignores just the way wealth is being managed these days, whether it’s sort of peculiar assets or even, you know, regular run of the mill stocks and bonds, people have their advisors and they don’t want to necessarily give that up to take advantage of trust situs and professional trustee services. Andrea Chomakos (06:21.998)Listen. Frazer Rice (06:36.524)As I talk to people around this topic, the culture of a good trustee, and especially sort of a good corporate or a good administrative trustee, there are a lot of things that go into that. In your experience, what is it that makes a good sort of corporate or administrative trustee for particular family? Andrea Chomakos (07:01.422)There’s I mean, that’s a great question. And it should be top of mind for all clients. Right. I think there’s a couple of things. One is the institutional professionalism that a corporate trustee, independent corporate trustee provides, as well as the skill, the background and then the lack of conflict of interest. So when you think about an administrative trustee that’s not managing the investments, we have no dog in that fight as they say about what’s going on with the investments, how they’re being managed, how they’re being allocated. We, Pendleton Square and others are here to serve the beneficiaries, to facilitate communication, to help beneficiary wealth education, to continue the continuum of family values and conversations, as well as be some be a person who can sit there alongside them and educate them about the trust, about the wealth, about the impact the distributions from the trust are having on their own estate, on their own lifestyle, and really honing in on the things that they’re really good at. And I think predominantly it is that being free of conflict. We don’t have any other interest in the trust. Frazer Rice (08:28.252)I think the concept of staying in your lane is important. I think in the old world where the big trust companies did everything and they would allocate resources to that because doing everything required good integration and so on, it made a lot of sense. But nowadays, as we talked about the bifurcation just now, the provision of the administrative trustee functions and the distribution committees, et cetera, that feels more like an accommodation. Andrea Chomakos (08:30.913)I’m sorry. Frazer Rice (08:56.696)than a sort of focus for them. And so these trust companies that have developed, the new ones that are less worried about the investment function, that that focus is now a strength in the sense that people hire experts in that field in order to get what they need from an estate planning perspective or a site of choice, et cetera, but then to really effectuate that culture we just talked about. Andrea Chomakos (09:26.956)Yeah, I mean, think there’s a couple of nuances there that you touch on that always resonate with me. And so one is. Trust business, it’s a business, we all have to admit that it’s a business, but is it relational or is it transactional? And at its core it’s really relational. You’re working alongside a family for hopefully multiple generations and as an institution you can carry forward that historic bank of knowledge in the grantor’s intent, the family values as you’re administering the trust. But in many larger institutions, because of just structural considerations and constraints, sometimes you have a lot of turnover in personnel. You have some loss of historic knowledge and information. And you have a compression of what it takes. not just the skills, but the technology and what it takes to execute on trust to meet the needs of the beneficiaries. And so sometimes those decisions get kind of kicked down the road to a committee that

Musician and label owner, Blake Morgan, discusses the Music Business and the importance of “Reputation over Fame.” Ever wondered how musicians really make money? It’s a tough journey filled with losses and small wins, but it’s all about persistence! In this episode, Blake Morgan shares that every small gamble counts, and eventually, one big win can turn it all around.: “The people who are “for real” have no choice.” https://youtu.be/j8vf5dI-cbE Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01.135)Welcome aboard, Blake. Blake Morgan (00:02.946)Good to be here. Frazer Rice (00:04.111)Well, it’s really nice for you to be here. You were nice enough to invite me to your show, your residency downtown. And I was glad to reconnect and remind myself how talented A, that you are and B, that musicians are. And it got me thinking about business and how musicians and the world of music works these days. So it’s a treat to have you on there. Blake Morgan (00:27.714)Thanks so much. I’m glad you could make it to the show and it’s great to talk to you again. Frazer Rice (00:32.155)So let’s start at the beginning. So if you’re a musician, you’ve been bitten by the bug, you’re talented, and you get that wonderful curse, what are the ways that musicians really make money and support themselves? I imagine it goes from a spectrum of busking and performing and having your guitar case open and taking… donations from there on up to the professional musician and then to the actual creator of the music itself. How do you think about that? Blake Morgan (01:01.858)Right. So, you know, I think I’m thinking about your audience and finance people and business people, you know, right off the bat, of course, for starters, the marriage between commerce and art has always been, shall we say, an interesting one, or it’s been it’s been a conflicted one. And it’s mostly been conflicted for the artists. But the reality is, you know, I think Frazer Rice (01:22.747)Sure. Blake Morgan (01:32.897)in a lot of ways and I do have something of an eagle eye view because I’m an artist, I’m a songwriter, I’m a record producer and I’m a record label owner. And so whether you’ve had a career and are having one like I am or like the person that you’re imagining who’s just getting, who’s just starting out, I think your experience basically it’s very similar to quantitative finance. in that you’re acquiring a lot of small bets that rarely pay off, but when one does, they make up for all the other losses. And every part of being a musician is very much that experience. So when you’re first starting out, whatever that means, if you’re making, if you’re building tracks on your laptop, if you’re, you know, I think the days of busking on the street are, probably behind us because I don’t see it very much, honestly, in New York. And we can talk about why we don’t see it very much later. But the reality is however you’re getting into it, you’re immediately in a position where you know you’re going to be taking a loss. And what you’re hoping is that there will be a payoff at some point so great that it will pay for all or most or some of your losses that you’ve Frazer Rice (02:30.203)Right. Blake Morgan (02:58.414)crude. And the truth is that really never ends. And I think that that really also kind of never ends if you’re a superstar. That’s really that’s that’s that’s the gig. I don’t see I don’t see billionaire investors usually sort of hang up their investment coat jacket. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t see them hang up their cape and say, I’m out. You know, they’re still trying to somehow leverage what they have into something else. Frazer Rice (03:20.279)Bye. Blake Morgan (03:27.822)And so that’s the financial part of it, which is that, you know, I think especially now, if you were talking about the beautiful curse, like I think especially now there is this feeling in music that musicians make music, you know, for fun. And I’ve never, I’m not a musician who makes music for fun. I’ve never met a musician who makes music for fun. We make music because we’re compelled to. That’s the beautiful curse. It’s not because, hey, I’ve got I’m thinking about doing this and it’s just the people who are for real have no choice. And so I often say that my relationship to making music, and this was true when I was a kid, when I was just starting, my relationship to making music is exactly like my relationship to breathing, which is that I really like doing it. But if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter because I’d still have to do it to be alive. It’s a part of who I am, right? Frazer Rice (04:21.403)Sure. Blake Morgan (04:23.894)And the thing about breathing is we aren’t in a position to being like, how’s the breathing industry? How am going to leverage my breathing into some sort of better form of breathing that would keep the lights on? We’re all doing that, I guess, with our lives in some form. But that’s that awkward marriage of commerce and art, which is that our strength as artists, as musicians, comes from the fact that we have an absolute bedrock. We are compelled, a bedrock need. to continue to make music no matter what, no matter what’s thrown at us. And then that’s also exploited because the people who exploit us know that we’re still gonna do it no matter what, in whatever form that takes. So that was like 20 pounds of answer to a one ounce question. But that’s the real truth, which is I think if you’re starting out, you really are hoping that you’re gonna you’re gonna start trying things basically to get some kind of a career off the ground, some kind of path forward to be able to make more music, some path forward where you’re gonna be able to make music where you wouldn’t want to have to do something outside of your own profession. People don’t tend to set out to be in a profession with the overwhelming feeling like they’re gonna have another profession that they’re gonna have to have to pay for their bills for their actual profession. Frazer Rice (05:52.611)No question. How do you graduate from hobby to commitment in many ways? Blake Morgan (05:53.39)So. Blake Morgan (05:58.734)Exactly, exactly. And so right out of the gate, you’re hoping that your ideas and your talent and your perspiration and your inspiration are going to be enough to leverage the next moment and the next moment and the next moment. Moments where you know, and you know, a 13 year old who’s trying to write their first song or pick up a violin and practice, they know that they’re going to lose and lose and lose. and lose and they’re hoping that somewhere down the line they win and that pays for these losses and this is financial a financial truth and an emotional truth to like I’ve taken I often say to people like I’m a good humored person generally speaking but like I’m 96 % scar tissue at this point and so I still the joy offsets the scar tissue right I don’t want to be bitter and and and I’m and I’m not but Frazer Rice (06:47.62)you Blake Morgan (06:56.969)The moments of artistic wonder and satisfaction, just like the moments of financial hope, like, my God, this actually is hitting or this actually works. This really gets the monkey off my back to be able to do more of this, right? It’s very, very much the same, whether it’s financial, emotional, or temporal. The time you’ve put in to try to do something pays off when it works. Frazer Rice (07:26.731)So this massive investment, time, emotion, skill, dollars, et cetera, what are the ways that you start to get into the green and turn it into a situation where you’re actually sort of making money on what you love here? Blake Morgan (07:47.832)So if there was an easy answer to that, I would hope that you would have it and you could teach me what it was, but there’s a complicated answer to it. And it’s harder than ever. Art and music are devalued more than ever. The rungs under the ladder of where I’ve been able to get in my career have been kicked out. It’s harder for people to get to where I am. The world has changed because of piracy and streaming and Frazer Rice (07:52.89)Right. Blake Morgan (08:16.043)now AI and you know, we can touch on all of these things. But I do think that there’s an important panacea that will lift every facet of this. And in a world where we’re seemingly fixated on followers and likes and streams and these kinds of numbers, the reality is the place that I get paid As a label owner, as a record producer, as an artist, as a singer, as a guitar player, as a bass player, as a piano player, all the jobs I have, the place that I get paid is that I have a reputation. And we live in a fame-obsessed business, music, and a fame-obsessed culture, but reputation and fame are not the same thing. And… When you’re in, for lack of a better way to describe it, when you’re living in sort of in a Mad Max world, the music world has turned into this kind of wasteland in a lot of ways, unfortunately. When you can prove that you know where the fresh water is and you have some fuel for your car, you know how to evade the raiders on the highway, when you actually have a reputation. Frazer Rice (09:28.603)You Blake Morgan (09:35.278)there’s any numbers of ways that that winds up being valuable. And that could be a reputation of just being an incredibly professional singer who on short notice can go and sing a national anthem. That can be a reputation to say, we’ve been trying to make this record for months. We can’t get out of our own way. We’re screwed. We need someone who actually is from the before times who knows how to make a freaking record as opposed to just generating one. Right? Frazer Rice (09:48.581)Mm-hmm. Blake Morgan (10:04.683)Why would you go to a doctor? You’d go to a doctor because you need something. You can’t do it yourself. Home dentistry, bad idea. Home lobotomy, bad idea. And then you’re going to say, well, which one of these doctors has a reputation that I could trust to put this part of my life in their hands, right? So I think that’s

Family Office Security with EDWARD MARSHALL, CEO of PRESAGE GLOBAL https://youtu.be/uLbbZg52ABg In this conversation, Frazer Rice and Edward Marshall delve into the complexities of security within family offices, emphasizing the importance of understanding risk as a multifaceted concept. They discuss the vulnerabilities unique to family offices, the interconnected nature of various risks, and the necessity of a comprehensive approach to security that encompasses governance, internal threats, and physical safety. The dialogue highlights the need for families to engage with security experts who prioritize diagnosis over fear-based marketing, ultimately aiming to enhance the quality of life for families through effective risk management. Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01.173)Welcome aboard, Eddie. Edward Marshall (00:03.074)Hey Fraser, how are you? Frazer Rice (00:04.375)Great. Thanks. You are now a member of the two episode club. We’ve got a few of them out there. We one of my favorite ones was with you talking about there is no such thing as the family office, which I thought was a terrific bromide that I bring out every once in a while. It can be controversial depending on who you’re talking to. Edward Marshall (00:23.15)So some people like that and some people hate when I say that, but it’s all good. I mean, it speaks to the whole issues around family offices and I think some of the things that we’ll probably talk about today around security is if you’re defining it so many different ways, we’ve to look at it more as a process than some actual thing that we can put our finger up. Frazer Rice (00:46.421)Well, so security and whether it’s family office or regular high net worth or people generally is foremost in the headlines these days. We had the United Health Care executive who got shot. We’ve got different scenarios of global conflict out there. The theft around financial assets is everywhere. The urgency in the family office space, though, it seems like it’s really taken on a new thing. What is your experience with it? Edward Marshall (01:17.612)Well, mean, I think we could take a look at it from the perspective and start out with this, is risk is really what we deem it and how families and companies… offices and investors are looking at risk, they can perceive it in a lot of different ways. But I think one of the things that are important for high net-worth individuals or family offices is that some parts of their just organizational DNA create these engineered vulnerabilities. So what they are makes them more susceptible. And if you think of it just from the Willie Sutton effect, right? Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. It’s kind of myopic. Because you have to look at the other factors. What does the family office typically have as characteristics? You tend to have a very lean operation. There tend to be sources of time, line, agnostic capital. They have a lot of trusted relationships. Their customer is the family. And they’re pretty agile. So a lot of those factors come together and make them attractive for bad actors in a lot of different aspects. They could also be politically outspoken, which attracts a different kind of attention to them. And so it is… It’s really an ability to understand the nature of family offices and what makes them attractive for them because they have enterprise level wealth and oftentimes amateur or retail level security and risk management practices and processes in place. Frazer Rice (03:08.009)So how do you get your arms around it? When I hear risk, think, my gosh, you’ve got physical risk, you’ve got technological risk, you’ve got all sorts of other things. One of the frameworks you have is really these 10 domains of risk. And we may not list all 10, but how do you get your arms around it when you’re helping a client think through what their vulnerabilities are? Edward Marshall (03:30.873)Yeah, think the 10 domains of risk that we have put together as kind of an organizational philosophy for Presage Global really harkens to the fact that traditional security, traditional risk management is very siloed. I’ve got my cybersecurity thing that I’m focused on, then I’m focusing on physical security. Unfortunately, risks and threats don’t really respect your self-constructed silos. And that old school mentality tends to lead to lot of whack-a-mole behavior and reactive behavior to these types of risks that come out. So we came up with this framework. The risks range from privacy, technological, reputational, legal, operational, financial, and so forth. And the reason we came up with that is that we were seeing the interconnected nature of risks in this space, whether it’s for family offices, companies, or investors. there’s a lot of interconnectivity between these risks and they can cascade. So something that starts out as a privacy risk, exposed information, a bad tweet, an Instagram post that puts out some information around you can lead, cascade into reputational issues or financial… fraud types of issues or even legal fights depending on kind of the situation that’s there. And if you’re not looking at risk across these different domains, how they interact and really taking a deep dive to assess it, you don’t look at the entire picture. And I think that combined with not just focusing on the shiny object of a technology driven Edward Marshall (05:31.617)approach to solving risk in these issues is important as well. Oftentimes you’ll see folks that work in the security space or people that have purchased something to support them on security or risk management. They’ll say, you know what, we’re doing great because we have X, X software, X tool or whatever it may be. But they haven’t even evaluated if they even need X tool that’s out there or even if X tool is properly configured so you could be spending thousands of dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars if you’re a company on these tools, but if they’re not properly configured then all that money is for nothing and it’s and And it becomes like security jewelry. We’ve got all this stuff that’s in place. We have cameras that are of X brand and they’re doing all these things. We have firewall that is of Y brand and it’s doing all these things. But if you haven’t properly configured it or the people that are supporting you internally and externally… some of the externally creating supply chain risk there, then it’s all for naught. it comes down, and it’s similar in the work that you do. If you’re not looking at somebody’s entire trust and estate picture just beyond the documents that they’re trying to draft, how do you figure things out? It has to be not just a black and white, here’s a legal document for your trust and estate. It’s part… archaeology, part anthropology, part psychology, multiple other science disciplines and other disciplines that come into it to develop a document, to develop a plan, to have an execution that actually keeps the family safe. Frazer Rice (07:30.315)So when, part of this seems like a real governance issue at the family level or at the family office level. When you see it done well, who owns this task, the security task at the family level? Because I could imagine the Generation One, the matriarch or patriarch, they wanna deal with it, but I’m not sure they’re the best ones to be driving it. What is a good practice there? Edward Marshall (07:58.189)Well, listen, think risk management and security, oftentimes, whether you’re talking about a Fortune 100 company or a family office, is looked upon as a cost center. And I think that’s an unfortunate aspect to it, instead of an enablement factor for you to go and do the things that you want, right? Good security, good risk management for a family should enable the quality and improve the quality of life for that family. If you’re constantly thinking of it, we have to spend X amount of dollars on our cybersecurity or planning for our travel or purchasing this trying to reduce my privacy footprint by buying some security tool that does that and says that I’ll get all of your information off the web news flash. Not possible. You know, there’s thousands of data brokers that are in this country. There’s legislation that is going on in different states and at the national level to try to limit the aspects of the data broker stuff. But you know what? At the end of the day… Edward Marshall (09:14.178)that information is out there to nation states and to bad actors and try telling a hostile foreign country or a hostile hacker whether they’re in Brooklyn or Belarus to remove your private information from their data sources. It’s not going to happen. you have to, putting it in the perspective of governance is shifting the mindset away from Frazer Rice (09:31.318)Right. Edward Marshall (09:41.467)Just being a cost center and to how does this help? All of the family office operations that are there and the family improve their quality of life by keeping them more secure. And that’s a critical step to it. Then having a robust plan and really looking at the plan and testing it. This may say simple, but if you’re not, if you don’t have a plan and you’re just trying to patch things together and you’re not testing that plan, then you’re spending a lot of time and not of getting a lot of good results. If you’re not thinking of security governance and risk management governance through a maturity model, understanding what good looks like, where we are today, where we want to go into the future, here’s my gaps, here’s the things that a good family office that’s focused on this issue or a good company that’s focused on this issue looks like, then I think you’re missing out on a lot of things for these families to really keep them You gotta be able to fix those gaps and somebody has to own that mandate within the family and not be looking at it as, well we didn’t have any incidents this year as a metric. That’s too simple of a

RICHARD HAASS returns to the podcast to talk about the US FOREIGN POLICY implications of Trump’s Tariffs and other initiatives. We take another tour of the world’s hotspots after the recent UN conference here in New York. Finally, we weave in an analogy of the recent crowd misbehavior at the Ryder Cup as a symptom of America’s current mood. https://youtu.be/z4FlnrXl8tE US FOREIGN POLICY: INTRO Frazer Rice (00:01.277) Welcome aboard, Richard. We are past our technology glitch, I think. The next big thing here is to try to figure out what the US looks like. We’re on the heels of the UN week and also the Ryder Cup. I’m not sure which one was more chaotic, but as you look at the US’s standing after the UN, what do you take from the events that took place last week? Richard Haass (00:02.744) on US FOREIGN POLICY Great to be back. THE US MOOD (AND THE RYDER CUP) Richard Haass (00:28.172) It was not a great week for what Joe and I, may he rest in peace, called soft power. What happened at Beth Page, the terrible manners, the coarseness, vulgarity, choose your word, the lack of sportsmanship, we could go on, but you get the point, was really poorly received in Europe, as it should have been. And I thought the PGA here just showed a blind spot would be generous. So it was not good. I felt somewhat between embarrassed and ashamed and also just overshadowed some unbelievable golf on both sides. Frazer Rice (01:11.069)Kind of where I came out on it. And it just felt bad watching some really good players doing their thing and then all of a sudden, again, overshadowed by pretty boorish behavior. Richard Haass (01:22.51) Particularly golf, because golf’s a game of rules and norms. I think it was Rory Mclroy who used the word etiquette, and what we saw was anything but. I really wondered at times whether some of those people ever played golf. And then the UN. Look, it didn’t happen in isolation. The President’s US Foreign Policy speech was…at times just, it was seen, it was taken badly by Europeans. It was for understandable reasons, seen by them as something of an attack on them. The comments like about Sharia law in London were over the top. The criticism of immigration policy, some of which, for the record, deserve some criticism, I would say. The total denial of climate change was badly received. So it was not good, even though, and I think the president detracted for some of his legitimate criticisms of the UN. My own sense, though, is the UN’s got bigger problems than Donald Trump’s speech. The UN has basically made itself increasingly irrelevant. It’s no longer a place for serious diplomacy. At most, it’s a venue for side meetings. And since then, you’ve had the announcement of a “peace” plan for Gaza and so forth. So the world’s moved on. quite honestly, what matters is not what happened during a few days of traffic in New York, but rather what happens more broadly. So we’ll see what, if anything, comes of this Middle East announcement. We’ll see what happens next, if anything, diplomatically with Ukraine. President Trump’s about to meet his Chinese counterpart in less than a month in South Korea. So there’s a lot going on. And not to mention domestically, there’s a lot going on we can discuss. So the fact that the Ryder Cup or the UN were not great in and of themselves, they’re more data points. And I think what matters is more the larger story for better and for worse. US Foreign Policy: Russia and the Ukraine Frazer Rice (03:32.339)As we just a couple of quick points to hit back on Ukraine Russia. What’s the state of play in there right now? Richard Haass (03:41.71) Well, we’re reaching the end of what you might call the third fighting season of this phase of the war, the one that started just over, mean, just under three years ago, in February of 22, if I have my dates right. My sense is things will dial down militarily somewhat during the winter, and then they’ll dial up again early next year for a fourth fighting season. I don’t believe diplomacy will gain traction until the United States does probably two things, puts much more economic pressure on Russia and gives Ukraine much more military wherewithal, both to withstand Russia and to take the war to Russia. Ultimately, diplomacy will only happen in a context where Vladimir Putin comes to the conclusion, however reluctantly, that time is not on his side. Right now, he believes time is on his side. He has no reason to compromise or settle. Only if we convince him. The time is not his friend, I believe. Will he agree to something like a ceasefire? I don’t think we should be pushing for peace for any number of reasons. We can go into it if you want, but I don’t think we need to. So at the moment, diplomacy is dependent on the calculations of the two sides, and I think the Ukrainian leadership is willing to accept a ceasefire in place, but the Russian leadership isn’t. We’ve gotta change that calculation, and that’s more than anything, I think, a function of whether we give Ukraine greater military help, which persuades Putin that more war will not give him more results. Frazer Rice (05:15.571)Any inside baseball and any potential weaknesses in Russia that we don’t hear about over here, as opposed to sort of the general posturing we get from Putin? Richard Haass (05:25.389) There’s been a lot of talk about it recently. The president mused on true social, about Russia’s economy and so forth. Look, Russia’s paid an enormous price for the war in terms of manpower, in terms of its economy. But China continues to buy oil, India continues to buy oil, Turkey continues to buy oil. So think the Russian economy limps along. Militarily, they’ve got a pretty good wartime economy. Putin still controls the narrative within Russia. I don’t sense, I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t sense that Russia’s on any brink where it can’t sustain a version of what it is doing. So no, no, could we reach a point, phrase it like that, is no longer true, and Russia, literally and figuratively, begins to run out of gas? Yeah. But I don’t think we’re there yet, but time, the medium to long term is not in Russia’s favor, only because their productive capabilities are getting diminished and so forth. again, I still think what we want to do is help Ukraine more. don’t know if we will. I don’t know if we’re going to impose sanctions. can’t explain why this reluctance to pressure Russia directly and indirectly. It gets into places I don’t have any evidence on. But I would simply say…President Trump is right to want to bring peace. I think he’s sabotaging or undermining his own US Foreign Policy efforts by not creating a context in which diplomacy is more likely to succeed. But I don’t see any signs at the moment that either side is ready to essentially shout uncle. US FOREIGN POLICY: ISRAEL AND GAZA Frazer Rice (07:10.163)Trump just came out with his 10 or 20 point plan for Israel and Gaza to Richard Haass (07:15.373)It was to inflationary times. It was 20. Frazer Rice (07:18.951)It’s power of compounding. Hopefully, maybe that’ll help. What do you make of that? We’ve just had all sorts of different iterations of from the invasion to the counter invasion to all the fighting. on one hand, I’m happy to see that there’s an attempt to try to stake out some peace plans here, but I’m not confident that it will come to pass. Do you have any thoughts on that? Richard Haass (07:44.258) I pretty much agree with what you said. Look, it’s the shortest 20-point plan in history. And by that, I mean there’s 20 points to it, but none of them is fleshed out. So the immediate question is whether Hamas agrees to it, the Israeli government did. But even if Hamas does any number of implementation questions. Certain preconditions have to be met and so forth. When I used to teach at Harvard, we used to say that 90 % of life is implementation. Well, this plan is the 10%. It’s a design. It includes all the things a peace plan would need to include, at least it mentions them. But they’re not developed. And so all sorts of things to tall for a technocratic that could run Gaza, a stabilization force, full humanitarian aid, all sorts of things about political and diplomatic processes. The plan is more, I guess I’d say it’s more aspirational than operational. So the good news is the Israeli government agreed to it. We’ll see what Hamas does. My own guess is at some point, There’ll be all sorts of hiccups in implementation. And probably early next year, in the spring or so, I expect Bibi Netanyahu will call for new elections. He’s got to do it within the next 12, 13 months. He’ll choose an opportune moment. The fact that he’s gotten this plan put forward, which is quite sensitive, shall we say, to Israeli interests, and he’s agreed to it, puts him in a very good position. So either Hamas…capitulates or Israel’s given a green light to continue the war from the United States. So I think, my own view is this plan in its current form will not reach fruition to say the least. And at some point sooner rather than later, we’ll probably have Israeli elections, possibly as soon as six, seven, eight months from now. CHINA AND INDA Frazer Rice (09:48.392)Got it. So it would be geopolitically crazy not to talk about the two most populous nations in China and India. I know they got together with Russia in the room as well to maybe to broadcast their sort of emergent standing in the world. Is there anything we should be watching on that front besides sort of the obvious in terms of how they deal with themselves and how they deal with US Foreign Policy, especially in a tariff environment? US FOREIGN POLICY: INDIA Richard Haass (10:16.279) Couple things come to mind, in terms of India. I think it’s fair to accuse the administration of diplomatic malpractice. The U.S.-Indian relationship has been carefully nurtured over the last few decades by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. It made sense economically. India is the world’s l

In this conversation on “TAX ALPHA”, Frazer Rice and BRENT SULLIVAN (of TAX ALPHA INSIDER) delve into the complexities of tax awareness in investing, focusing on capital gains, income tax, and various strategies for tax efficiency. They discuss the importance of tax loss harvesting, the challenges of managing concentrated portfolios, and the implications of estate planning. The conversation emphasizes the need for advisors and trustees to understand these strategies to optimize tax outcomes for their clients. https://youtu.be/pCIXFq4YoS0 Outline of Tax Alpha Quick Overview of Tax Rates Ordinary vs Capital Gain (Usually Income vs Asset based taxation) Short Term vs Long Term (Long Term Treatment) (we’ll talk about Estate Later) Federal vs State (Can be important!) Netting Losses/Deductions vs Gains and Income Owning assets Taxable vs Non-Taxable vehicles https://open.spotify.com/episode/3uL924aOlPd2hgmC9s7KCI?si=hBS09OKDTd-uHhT8PAj7aA Tax Alpha in stock investing (Universe) Long Only Concentrated Positions Timing – Getting LT Capital Gain treatment Basis – increasing basis Exchange / 351 Funds to defer and diversify Dramatic foreshadowing with step-up later in estate context Blind Trusts for political appointees Diversified Positions Passive (Lower Cost, acceptable returns, “lower risk/tracking error”) Active (Now frowned upon – except in the after tax world w/ TLH) Deferral Carve-Outs like QOZ’s Tax Lost Harvesting Owning an index vs owning a sample of the index Buying Coke and selling pepsi Wash Rules Loss Carry Forwards Capital Losses / Not Ordiany Losses Amplified Tax Loss Harvesting Own the sample of Index AND Borrow off those holdings to create long and short positions to generate capital losses while having beta of 1 Trends: Pre-Liquidity Event planning Storing Losses for the bulky sale Timing the event(s) to have the losses line up with the gains Pre-Diversification planning Pre Death Planning Integrating the Estate Planning with the Income/ Cap Gains Planning Step-Up Avoiding Estate Tax, But Prolonging the Cap Gains Tax exposure (and concentration risk?) Grantor Tax status and he swap power How does turbo charged loss creation look in an estate environment? Trustee/ Executor and Fiduciary / Beneficiary risk issues Vehicle evolution Funds SMA’s 351 and other ETF vehicles (+/-‘s) PPLI,PPVA How did you develop this expertise? How do we find you? Transcript of Tax Alpha Frazer Rice (00:01.122)Welcome aboard, Brent. Brent Sullivan (00:03.035)Well, happy to be here, Fraser. Frazer Rice (00:04.558)It’s fun to chat in person. I’ve been following it to call a blog I don’t think gives it the proper respect because I think you’re uncovering a lot of great information for advisors like me and wealthy people and other people generally speaking in terms of Really getting going on the tax alpha end of it Let’s start a little bit with some basics because I think you know for someone new to the concept of Being particularly tax aware in terms of investing taxes can be, they’re more than just income tax, that’s for sure. How do you think about it? How do you get your framework around what people are trying to avoid when they’re dealing with their investable portfolios? Brent Sullivan (00:45.723)Yeah, I mean, there are really just a couple of different ways to break it down, but I probably start with the concept of a capital gain as a distinct thing from income tax. so capital gains come in really like four different flavors. There’s short-term capital gains, short-term capital losses, and then long-term capital gains, long-term capital losses. And then these things are different if you have collectibles or other types of instruments too. But the point is here that you’ve got those four quadrants that you’re always sort of operating in. And I think that’s where the management and the prowess around portfolio design, execution, that’s where all of that really comes into play. And the final point I’d make about capital gains versus income is that capital gains is really a planning opportunity. Income is gonna come at you and there’s really not much you can do about it. Strong caveat to that. But capital gains are really about timing. You can accelerate losses, you can defer gains. Frazer Rice (01:37.929)Right. Brent Sullivan (01:45.079)And that’s really the beginning of the conversation when I’m talking with advisors about this usually. I operate in B2B space, I’m not retail facing. And usually that’s where the planning conversation starts. Frazer Rice (01:57.655)So as you sort of step back and help people think about the tax planning aspect of it, for advisors generally speaking, they’re very interested not only in the investment perspective, but the structuring of wealth such that they’re taking advantage of what they can and mitigating that which is destructive, but otherwise not really something they can avoid. If we settle in a little bit on the investment piece a little bit, what is the universe that we’re looking in in terms of how people allocate their portfolios? Brent Sullivan (02:33.22)Well, mean, so probably I’d say the hot topic in tax management nowadays is really getting the portfolio to be more equity like. And so the reason or part of the motivation for more equity like exposure is to utilize to the extent possible the planning opportunity of capital gains, realization and acceleration and things like that. So that’s that’s probably the core concept. The biggest chunk of the investable portfolio. The idea is to make it more equity like. And then the planning opportunities sort of expand beyond the core portfolio. That’s in, you know, how can we align total diversified exposure across the right types of investment accounts? In your space, it starts to get really interesting. You know, I say your space, like in a state planning world, it starts to get, you know, the idea of asset location, putting the stocks, you know, in the high growth portfolios or tax exempt portfolios, depending on the profile. Frazer Rice (03:17.228)Sure. Brent Sullivan (03:26.458)Putting the bonds in tax advantaged accounts or tax exempt accounts, again, depending on the profile. All of that is like, these are like really crisp, interesting planning questions that do not have crisp answers. And I think that’s where the planning opportunity really emerges. Frazer Rice (03:42.668)We talk a little bit about asset location. The investment vehicles we’ll talk about shortly and some of the things that can happen to turn the dials on that front. But in terms of location in whether ERISA accounts or life insurance or trusts or things like that, as people are trying to get their arms around the matrix, as you called it, and certainly with the capital gains and short and long, there’s almost a matrix of different things you can think about in terms of the tools in your toolkit. How do you get your arms around that if you’re new to the space or otherwise trying to really provide subtle advice as opposed to maybe speculative advice? Brent Sullivan (04:23.214)Yeah, I mean, I think that the first step is really trying to understand how each investment decision impacts not just the current investment returns, but also future investment returns, after-tax returns, pre-liquidation, post-liquidation, but then also estate considerations, like are you choosing the right vehicle if you’re trying to isolate or exclude assets from the estate? Do you want to keep a strategy on for multi-generations? Is it private? Public? Is it liquid? Iliquid? Inflation protected? All this kind of stuff. You have to realize that every single investment decision involves or impacts this really complex ecosystem. It’s super interesting, but I think like first order decision is like how much of a thing should I own? That is just like the tip of the iceberg. And I would say that’s where 99 % of like the financial media focuses. You how should I invest a million dollars now? It’s like, no, boy. Like there’s so much more ground to cover that could make portfolios resilient today, but also with multi-generation in mind. Frazer Rice (05:29.835)As I like to say, trying to get past the two dimensions that most people are normally thinking about in terms of the X and Y of income and capital gains and then sort of layering on asset allocation to be responsible on that front, but then add the Z axis of the estate planning, really kind of years 10, 15, 20, and then going beyond your use of the assets to different constituencies that are going to benefit from it later. Brent Sullivan (05:55.365)I mean, I get so excited when I think about the opportunities in this space because they’re so messy and bespoke. And I say messy in a good way. These are real problems that planners have an opportunity to step in and address for high net worth folks. really, down market, I don’t say down market in a pejorative sense, but mean, in down market too, there are really opportunities for planners to step in and add meaningful value and like again, I am an observer of this industry. I’m an independent tax analyst, which means that I don’t have a stake in the game. I don’t, I’m not trying to sell anyone’s product. So I just get to see the opportunities that planners have when they’re engaging with, with clients at all wealth levels. And again, like to your point, yeah, multi-generation is super exciting. It’s so messy and interesting. Frazer Rice (06:43.755)As we look at it here, the one unifying theme is most people don’t want to pay taxes if they don’t have to. success really does come down to what do you get to keep at the end of the day from the fruits of your labor or your investment. Without that unifying principle, then we’re sort of grasping at straws I guess. Let’s start with the simplest sort of tools that we have in the toolbox. And this is gonna combine a little bit of investment vehicle and tax awareness in the long only space? What are the thin

In this conversation, Frazer Rice and PAUL HOOD delve into the evolving role of trustees, particularly in the context of Delaware’s new Well-Being Trust Statute. They discuss the broader responsibilities of trustees beyond mere asset management, emphasizing the importance of understanding beneficiaries’ needs and the implications of well-being provisions. The dialogue highlights the challenges trustees face in balancing the interests of multiple beneficiaries, the potential liabilities associated with well-being services, and the necessity of having clear processes in place. The conversation concludes with reflections on the complexities of trust management and the importance of careful drafting in trust documents. https://youtu.be/9LFt6HsjpWM https://open.spotify.com/episode/4uqhoeXtfaIIWLbKhd62ej?si=nDTf-09bRSWjT0O_YKX49g Takeaways Trustees have a broader role than just managing assets. The well-being statute in Delaware is an opt-in provision. Balancing the needs of multiple beneficiaries is challenging. A clear process is essential for trustees to navigate their duties. Well-being provisions can complicate traditional trust structures. Trustees must be cautious about the liabilities they assume. Decanting trusts can lead to unintended consequences. The intent of the settlor is paramount in trust management. Trustees should document their decision-making processes. Effective communication with beneficiaries is crucial. Sound bites “I would never opt into 3345.”“Decanting is not that easy.” Well Being Trust Chapters 00:00 Understanding the Role of Trustees04:45 The Concept of Well-Being in Trusts10:33 Balancing Beneficiary Needs17:53 Navigating Well-Being Responsibilities24:30 Challenges and Considerations in Trust Management Well Being Trust Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01.078)Welcome aboard, Pop. Paul Hood (00:02.648)Great to be with you today. Frazer Rice (00:04.598)The Delaware legislature has tried to give us some new tools to give us a holistic approach to planning for trustees and for beneficiaries. Help us sort of think through first from a function perspective what trustees do. I always thought of it as, you know, they held assets for the benefit of beneficiaries and then with that they have to administer them, they have to invest them, and then they have to distribute them. Have we got that about right? Paul Hood (00:35.34)Well, I’ve always had a broader view of trustees. Jay Hughes, a good friend and fellow pilgrim in this field, he talks about the trustee as a persons with confidence and like a trainer, an elder, and for a lot of beneficiaries, and I believe trustees, especially in discretionary trusts, The trustee needs to be that. There needs to be some attention to the person of the beneficiary, not just the finances. Send us a budget. The distributions committee who’s in secret will meet, and we’ll decide how much we’ll give you. Well, I think a trustee’s duty is broader than that. Or let’s say this, you can meet the minimum requirements of being a trustee by doing what you said, but I think the very, very best trustees are persons with confidence. Frazer Rice (01:41.17)I agree with that. The problem is identifying the people who mix the temperament and the talent and then paying for them. So to that end, with those different functions, the world of bifurcation came about. Directed trustees where people got to be good at certain things. Maybe you had a good investment person, you had someone who was with the family who understood the dynamics from a distribution standpoint. and then the administrative side making sure the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed as far as the administration’s concern. How do you view that in the evolution of the trustee function? Paul Hood (02:17.612)Well, it’s interesting because I haven’t been in practice. since well the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is August 29th of this year. My life changed that day. I didn’t know it but it did. And I left Louisiana. So I haven’t practiced law in 20 years but I remember the directed trust percolating up and it was driven by the investments. People wanted the bank trust or the institutional trustees but they hated their investment performance. So the compromise was, okay, we’ll reduce our duties because the bugaboo was always whether it was a proper delegation of investment authority. The trustee could still be held liable for what if the court thought it was an improper delegation, okay, or oversight of the delegation. They started out investing right, but then they got real heavy in crypto and foreign flips. you can go there. So we’ll take fewer basis points, but we don’t have the liability for that. That liability is not delegated. We have segregated it. But enter the Wellbeing Trust, and this is only true in Delaware in the Wellbeing Trust statute because it’s an opt-in. Once you opt-in, you are required, the trustee and all the advisors are required to perform that those well-being, provide those well-being services. Now the question is who is responsible for providing them. Frazer Rice (04:16.891)Let’s step back for a second. The well-being provision, which is designed to give the trustee the tool to promote, improve, advance the well-being of the beneficiaries, which I think we can agree is a good thing in concept. What do we think of well-being as being? How is it defined? And what part of the function is it taking from the trustee’s perspective? Paul Hood (04:45.228)Well, I’m going to default back to, I think it was Potter Stewart who said he knows pornography when he sees it. I think that’s the same with well-being. I think things are either obviously well-being related and are not. And there’s a continuum of them. But the whole concept, I think it’s just pretty much to promote the betterment, the improvement and the just the the maintenance personal maintenance of a trustee i mean of a a beneficiary Frazer Rice (05:26.269)So how do you think about it from a trustee’s perspective when there are multiple beneficiaries and maybe the wellbeing for one is not the wellbeing for another? Very often a trustee has to balance a lot of different equities and I don’t mean that from a stock perspective, sort of taking care of one possibly at the expense of the other with the trust’s assets. How does the new statute in Delaware address that? Paul Hood (05:54.222)Well, and you raise an excellent point. what you said, you were talking about equities, okay? What it really is, is the trustees duties. And the big one is the duty of impartiality. And arguably, the 3345 statute, and I’ll call it that, that’s the wellbeing statute. That’s the opt-in. They have another one and it is to provide, it’s an immediate power. It was added to 3325 as number 32 in the Delaware trust code. And it allows almost the same things. It empowers trustees, now not the advisors. It doesn’t say anything about the advisors in that statute. Whereas 3345 includes, and remember in Delaware an advisor is like the trust protector and the administrative trustee, that kind of thing. They call them advisors. I don’t favor that language because I believe that they should all be fiduciaries. So I call them trustees because I think in the end they’re going to be held, especially if they’re professionals, they’re going to be held to that standard as it is. But that statute was immediate when the law went into effect. So they’re authorized to provide those services now. For me, would provide, I would never opt into that statute. Because why do you want to take on a mandatory duty that’s unclear? Frazer Rice (07:30.12)That’s it. Frazer Rice (07:34.908)Yeah, it sounds like a Roach Motel where you get in but you can’t leave. That’s right. That’s right. So if you were to encounter one of these trusts in the wild and you’ve got multiple beneficiaries, but let’s say three, one of them needs a lot of help. Another one could use the help and then the other one is completely self-sufficient. How do you… Paul Hood (07:40.35)Eagles Hotel, California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Frazer Rice (08:02.693)sort of build a process around that so that you are being impartial but you are invariably taking away from potentially the corpus of the trust in order to effectuate different goals as they develop for these beneficiaries. Paul Hood (08:16.782)Well, it obviously starts with the settlors intent. And it’s the settlors intent first as set forth in the instrument. However, because this is not a court case where you’re construing, because I I used be an expert witness, know, construing, you know, problematic clauses in operating agreements, trusts, wills, whatever. You, you, you, you construe that including more information you investigate. The trustee, let’s look more, because you look at the language and well it would authorize it here, but let me find out a little bit more. If the settlor is still alive, I would at a minimum also talk to the settlor, okay? Also, if he or she is not still alive or sentient, I would investigate. I would talk to other people. I would make that into a process so that when you’re questioned down the road, here’s my process. Anytime you have a process, you’re better off. When all that planning was done in 2012, you know, and we filed more gift tax returns. I was the only guy in the country saying, don’t. put your marginal wealth clients into anything big, irrevocable. I said, because I think this is gonna work itself out. And for six hours, I was wrong on January the 1st, 2013, but there were lawsuits. And Jackson versus Colon was one of the cases and poor Colon, the lawyer got sued. because he didn’t have a process for evaluating whether his client had put too much or had retained sufficient assets after they did this planning. So it’s all about a process in the end. So instrument, settlor, and I would investigate and I would wrap it up into a process that was documented. Frazer Rice (10:36.848)So if I

We go inside the the enormity, complication, and notoriety of the BEZOS PRE-NUP AGREEMENT with divorce attorney, MARILYN CHINITZ of BLANK ROME. https://youtu.be/nMMp6He056Y https://open.spotify.com/episode/39KMPMRhwGfYbdZVMJHEan?si=36c5c8a927bf4a6f Outline of the ISSUES INSIDE the BEZOS PRE-NUP General Concepts What happens without a pre-nup? Process for disclosing assets Previous marriages and those pre/post-nups? Community vs Equitable Distribution (Does the Pre-Nup contract this away?) Separate property Outside trusts?  Estate Planning? Pre-nup vs ultra high net worth pre-nup Financial Considerations (and Complication) Non-Financial- NDA, media activity, scope of negotiations, data and tech issues Let’s go through the General Fact Pattern High Profile Asymmetric Net Worths Kids? Which state is used for choice of law? Portability?  How do you make sure this has teeth?  (Coercion penalties) Spousal support / alimony? Escalator or sunset clauses? Disqualifying or  “infidelity” or “weight gain” clauses? What happens if children? Other constituencies – charities, businesses, political causes etc  Integration with estate documents, life insurance, other vehicles Is there a check-in every five years? What else can we learn from what is inside the Bezos Pre-Nup? Transcript Frazer Rice (00:02.07) – Inside the Bezos Pre-Nup Welcome aboard, Marilyn. Marilyn Chinitz (00:04.088) Thank you, really nice to be here and nice to talk to you about what’s inside the Bezos Pre-Nup. Frazer Rice (00:07.541) We sort of regaled ourselves with a mutual friend and we’re already, I feel like we’re already related. That’s right. So we’re going to talk a little bit about probably one of the highest profile marriages in the world that just happened with the Bezos Sanchez union and get inside the Bezos pre-Nup. But for just for a little bit here, let’s talk about what happens in a sort of family law divorce setting. Marilyn Chinitz (00:13.39) Your best and glorious buddies are ready. Frazer Rice (00:35.232) With general concepts because we’re going to be diving into some specifics with the case study here. What happens when something goes wrong and we have a divorce that happens without a prenup? Marilyn Chinitz (00:46.734) So it depends what state you’re in. If you’re in a state like New York, then we have equitable distribution laws. If you’re in a state like community property in California, then those laws are very different. So if you have no prenup, and a lot of people don’t because they start their marriage with very little assets, and everything that you acquired during your marriage is now subject to a division. Frazer Rice (00:49.569) Of course. Marilyn Chinitz (01:15.918) And what happens is you start to trace the assets and you look at, what do I have? You look at homes that you purchase, real estate that you purchase, stocks, securities that you purchased. It doesn’t matter in whose name the asset is held. It’s a marital asset if it was acquired during the marriage and it was not gifted or inherited. If you come into the marriage with assets and you have no prenuptial agreement and you keep those separate property assets clean, and I’ll explain what that means. When they go up in value because you actively caused their appreciation, they may be subject to a marital claim, the appreciation aspect. If you… have an asset that went up in value because of passive reasons and you kept that asset separate, it will remain separate property. So let’s talk about an example. If I owned a building before I got married and that building was worth five million dollars and then I get married and years later I get divorced, that building is now worth twenty million dollars. It appreciated by 15 million. Did it appreciate because of market fluctuation, because the market went up, real estate did better? Or did it appreciate in value because I managed it, I collected the rent, I made sure the repairs were done, I made renovations to the building, and therefore it went up in value. If it went up in value during the marriage because I actively did something, I renovated, I took care of the building, I managed the building. That appreciation from five million to 20 million is gonna be considered marital. Then the question is, what percentage does the other spouse get? Do they get 10 % of the appreciation or 50 % of the appreciation? If that asset went up because of market fluctuation, I sat back, I did nothing, the market went sky high. Marilyn Chinitz (03:38.905) Then that property will remain separate property and the appreciation is separate. So you have to look at those different factors. But other than that, if you come into the marriage with no assets and you create a marital estate and you have no pre-nup, that marital estate is going to be divided. Now the question is, how is it going to be divided? If you’re in an equitable distribution state, Frazer Rice (04:04.907) Right. Marilyn Chinitz (04:08.718) What does that mean? It means what a particular judge feels in a particular courtroom on a particular day. What does equitable mean? It’s completely subjective. So did the other spouse take care of two, three children while you were managing that property? Did the other spouse work but supported you? Or did the other spouse do their own thing and had no real contribution? It’s very fact specific. And if you can show that the spouse really contributed in a meaningful way while you were running your business or running your properties, I took care of the children, I took care of the home, I took care of you, then the court is likely to give you a more substantial percentage interest of that appreciation. And in New York, for example, equitable, and then we’ll talk about community, California, for example, generally, Bank accounts, retirement accounts, stock security accounts are going to be divided pretty much 50-50. Where the court will not give 50-50 is if it’s a business. And then the court can go anywhere from 10%, 15%, 20%, up to maybe 40 % in unusual cases. What do those cases look like? They work together in the business. They took care of things together. It’s very unusual for a court to give 40 % interest to the non-working spouse unless they were really actively involved in the business. Now, conversely, take California, which is a community property. When you get married and you acquire property in California, that’s 50-50 off the bat. Now, why does that become really important? We’re seeing a lot of cases where people have really created a lot of wealth in their marriage and they are correctly and smartly putting some of that wealth into trust. They’re gifting it to a trust for their children. New York, for example, is a title state. A title state means if I own the asset during my marriage, I can sell it, I can gift it, I can do whatever I want with it. Marilyn Chinitz (06:33.718) As long as there’s no divorce. If you are in a community property state, you can’t do that because that person, that spouse already owns 50%. It’s almost jointly owned. So you can’t give away a marital asset unless you consult with me, your spouse, unless you ask me, is it okay? So in New York, if I wanted to take an asset, an interest that I own during the marriage, it’s a marital asset, but because there’s no divorce, there’s nothing that prohibits me, I gift it to a trust, I have the right to do that. In California, I may not have the right to do that unless I got my spouse’s consent. So, number one, what’s critically important is you need to know what the laws are in the different states. Now, Sometimes people get married. They get married in New York. They enter into a prenuptial agreement in New York. But now they move to California that has very different laws. And if they thought they were going to move to California, then you want to make sure as a New York lawyer to advise the client, we need to engage California counsel. We need to find out what their laws are so that your prenup is portable, it could be enforced in a different jurisdiction. Frazer Rice (08:03.559)So choice of law, obviously very important. Then I would say sort of the process and hygiene around using assets and deciding what happens jointly versus what stays separate is something that’s important to manage going forward. How do you think about that with clients? Marilyn Chinitz (08:20.346)So, I mean, interestingly enough, when I do a, let’s talk about prenups for a minute. Because when I do a prenup for a client, we have a check-in every year. We go to lunch. We talk about what changes, what’s going on. Does the agreement need to be modified? So many times people will sign a prenuptial agreement, they put it away, they don’t even know where they put it. And 20 years later, sadly, somebody triggered. the terms of that agreement. Now they pull it out and they go, my God, everything’s changed. When we signed that agreement, he was only worth X amount. He’s now 20 times wealthier, but I didn’t increase anything. That’s not fair. If the agreement is…an agreement that you entered into with the advice of counsel. If the agreement had full financial disclosure, if the agreement was negotiated, if you had your own counsel, etc., all the bells and whistles, it may be an unfair agreement, but it’s going to be enforceable unless it is unconscionable. So what does unconscionable mean? Unconscionable means shocking to the conscience. So I represented, and I could say it because it was in the media, Liba Icahn, married to Carl Icahn. And he had a prenuptial agreement prepared, and she signed it. Years later, he decided he wanted a divorce. And she argued to the court, I was not her first lawyer. I was not her second lawyer, I was her third lawyer. And I’ll tell you why that was important. She argued to the court that the agreement is unconscionable. He’s now worth several billions of dollars, and all I got was X amount of dollars. That’s unconscionable shocking to the conscie

NICK MAGGIULLI, successful author of “Just Keep Buying” has a new book out called “THE WEALTH LADDER.” It’s a well done framework on how one’s relationship with money has to change as they move up the different strata of money and spending. We get into the book, how major life changes can shape our views, and the writing process. https://youtu.be/pFmWTHlPTUY https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Ladder-Proven-Strategies-Financial-ebook/dp/B0DKMPFTR3/ OUTLINE What does this book seek to accomplish? How was the experience different from the last book? Surprises in your findings? Has getting engaged and married change your lens on any of these topics? THE SIX LEVELS OF THE WEALTH LADDER Level 1: Less Than $10,000 Level 2: $10,000 – $100,000 Level 3: $100,000- $1M Level 4: $1M-$10M Level 5: $10M-$100M Level 6: $100M and beyond TRANSCRIPT Frazer Rice (00:02.178)Welcome aboard, Nick. Nick Maggiulli (00:04.138)Thanks for having me back, Frazer. Appreciate it. Frazer Rice (00:04.911)Easy to have you back and congratulations on two fronts. You just got married and you’ve also in a sense given birth to a new publication here. Tell us about the last few months and what it’s been like. Nick Maggiulli (00:14.41) It’s just been very busy, lots of things. We were doing wedding planning. We got engaged late last year and so wedding planning did that, had a few small celebrations. And now it’s book launch time. We’re delaying our honeymoon until the end of August because the book’s coming out now and the book’s out, so going from there. So it’s been fun. Frazer Rice (00:38.094)Big things happen in three, so it’s all coming together in a couple of months there. So I’ve been watching this book getting written over the course of last, I guess, two years now. What was the gist of the book for the audience here? What got you into the wealth ladder concept, having written Just Keep Buying? Nick Maggiulli (00:41.374)Yeah. So the gist of the book is that your financial strategy needs to change over time. I think it’s very easy to get caught in a certain set of habits and you can follow those to their logical conclusion. But if you’re trying to kind of go to the next level, so to speak, as I say in the wealth ladder, you might need to change your strategy. And there’s a ton of examples of this and it really depends where you want to go, how much wealth you want to accumulate, etc. Knowing all those things will help you better determine which strategy you should follow. That’s the high level of the wealth ladder. Frazer Rice (01:30.574)So as you were sort of getting into the research on it and you take a lot from your personal experiences, you’ve moved up the wealth ladder and have had to have a little self-discovery on that. What would have been the interesting findings in your own experience and in the research that you’ve had and maybe things that were surprising? Nick Maggiulli (01:51.338) the Origins of the Wealth LadderI think this is something that I’m hoping a lot of people who have built wealth have come to the same conclusions, which is like as you build more wealth and have more money, like money doesn’t mean the same thing to you anymore. It doesn’t have the same value. Like I remember still being a, you know, semi-broke college student, you know, and then being a, you know, semi-broke just graduated college student, just started earning money and stuff. And I remember not wanting to pay for a beer at a festival because it was $9. And now that beer is probably 15 or 20 bucks. But at the time I was like, this is crazy. I can’t pay for this. But looking back now, it was because I just didn’t have a lot of money and I was trying to be very careful about my spending today. Looking back, if I had known everything I know now, I’d be like, I can, I can buy the beer. I’ll be okay. Right. I don’t have to sneak these little mini liquor bottles and all the crazy stuff I used to do. Right. That’s like an example of like over time, just money changes. Because of that, you’re like, yeah, I shouldn’t have been as, you know, I shouldn’t have cut back as much when I was younger. also just how you view it. I view it more as a tool now and less from like as a scarce resource. Like it’s a tool I can use to do things. I can help my family with it or travel with it. I can donate. There’s all sorts of different things you can do with your money. And I think seeing it as a tool is really the important part. And lastly, it’s just how like the amount of money I need to change my lifestyle just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Right. We’re like, you know, ten thousand dollars back when I was 22 would have been like, wow, that’s like a ton of safety. I wouldn’t worry as much about money. Today, $10,000 just doesn’t mean as much as it used to. And so it’s great. would still be, used, hand me a $10,000 check. That’s great. I’d be happy, but not even close to as happy or wouldn’t have as, as big of an impact on my life as it would have when I was 23. Right. I think everyone understands that, you know, what’s $10,000 to someone with a million. It’s not as big of a deal compared to someone with close to nothing. And so, yeah. Frazer Rice (03:36.14)Yeah, one of the things that, you know, as was reading the book, super interesting is the idea that as you move up the wealth ladder and more and more people become involved and are part of your responsibility umbrella in many ways. And it gets back to something I wrote in mind where I talk about how the liabilities increase geometrically even though the assets may increase linearly. Is there a process around when you start thinking less about yourself and wealth than you start thinking about a family unit and then… intergenerationally and beyond. It’s something that I think gets lost in many times in the sort of the financial planning shuffle, but it’s something that I think your book covers well. Nick Maggiulli (04:23.454)Yeah, I think the big error that people make in that front is thinking too much about the monetary and the financial piece of that and not the non-financial piece of it. So it’s like, Hey, my gosh, I accumulated, say $20 million and I’m going to have this for three generations and I’m planning this and I’ve trust and all this stuff. And you can set up all these structures and do everything perfectly right. But if you don’t have the right relationship with your kids, if you guys don’t have a shared set of values to build off of going forward, It’s going to derail as soon as you’re gone because you know, maybe they’re just following your wishes while you’re here and as soon as you’ve passed, how do you know that those things are going to live on? You don’t at all, right? At the end of the day, I think what’s more important is having a stronger relationship with your children so that you can talk about these things and listen to them, get their feedback and then plan your money more together instead of just doing it completely on your own and trying to create this control beyond the grave, right? And I think that’s what can create other issues within the family. It’s the thing that people overlook because I think everyone’s just like, if I just get the wealth and it’ll last. And I don’t think the second part is true unless you have the value set up. You’ve thought about all these other things that people tend to overlook. Frazer Rice (05:35.883) the Wealth Ladder and CouplesJoelle and Doug Bonaparte have come out with a book about wealth and marriage and money and you’re going through it right now having just been married. What’s been sort of the first takeaway in getting married and sort of the principles of the wealth ladder? And I guess another different way of asking that is how do you merge your way of thinking about these wealth concepts with what your wife is thinking about? It’s not pinning you down specifically, you’ve been buried above. But at the same time, I’m sure you saw that where when you’re merging different views on wealth and as you sort of put a timeframe and a ladder frame to it, what have you found interesting in your research on Nick Maggiulli (06:22.25)Yeah, so I haven’t done too much research on couples in particular. I can tell you that my wife and I are very aligned on a of our finances. She’s actually more frugal than I am. I try and I even use, you she’s read the book at this point, right? Cause I, you know, I was writing in and I gave it to her. Frazer Rice (06:34.526)You forced her! Nick Maggiulli (06:51.69) Yeah. And for no, she wants, she wanted to read it on her own. So she wrote like a EPUB version of it and read it and stuff. She really enjoyed it. But I think for her, like she still has trouble spending money. And so I like came up with this spending framework using the 0.01 % rule, which is like, Hey, take your net worth multiplied by point zero one percent or divide by 10,000. It’s the same thing. That’s the amount of money that your wealth is like generating daily in like a very conservative sense. Right. If you point zero one percent do that, you know, let’s say 365 days in a row. That’s about three point seven percent a year. It’s a very conservative return. And so if we assume that like you could spend that in theory every day and it’s like a trivial amount of money to you So she’ll be like, oh, I don’t know if I want to spend 50 bucks on this thing. I’m like, baby, our net worth is over 500 K. So we don’t need to worry about that. Right. Because at 500 K, the point zero one percent rule would say you’re spending about 50 bucks a day on these like marginal purchases. So I’m trying to get her to not think through that. like, yes, obviously, your spending depends on your income. That’s obvious. But I think the marginal spending decision, hey, can I afford this thing? I like to think of it using this spending rule because it does scale very well with wealth. Right. And so I have these six levels of the Wealth Ladder and I can walk through those

The Business of Estate Planning is in the midst of a revolution- or is it? BRANDON RAINS discusses advising clients responsibly, profitability, and the “firm of the future.” https://youtu.be/a7VdZvrH9LI BRANDON RAINS from the Denver-based Rains Law Firm and I discuss estate planning in an era of artificial intelligence, scalability, the democratization of advice being delivered by non-lawyers and the fun and games that exist when people die and plans go into action. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6FeR3ACd8vXVkKyMZODnlu?si=Q0XrGGMRR92usDUiKcsT9g Outline for the BUSINESS OF ESTATE PLANNING What is involved with the process of educating/advising a person or family ? Good judgement, discretion, and experience is something worth paying for What does drafting and implementing involve? The benefits of “Professional Liability” and experience The intersection with technology / AI / drafting tools The dangers of DIY How to be a good client and get to adult conversations sooner Puttng thought into staffing important roles (and backups) Ongoing maintenance / administration Transcript Frazer Rice (00:02.954)I’m Frazer Rice. Today we have Brandon Rains. He is a practitioner in Colorado and owns his law firm in Denver. We’re going to talk a little bit about the business of estate planning and what it’s like to have an ongoing profitable enterprise when trying to help people arrange their affairs and do the right thing as far as advising. Brandon, welcome aboard. Brandon Rains (00:22.222) Thanks, Frazer. Pleasure to be here. Frazer Rice (00:23.926) So we’ve had a nice back and forth on the topic and maybe tell us a little bit about your practice generally and what you do, who your ideal client is, and then we can go into why we think it’s important to get paid for this type of advice. Brandon Rains (00:42.254) I my own firm about nine years ago, the Raines Law Firm, very originally and imaginatively named. I was leaving my previous firm, was interviewing with a bunch of other attorneys trying to find a good landing spot, and it just kind of hit home to me through those conversations and kind of debriefing with my mentor that they’re lots of times the state planning attorneys interact with their clients in the same way, generally speaking across the board. In some of those aspects, just not necessarily how I’m wired as a person, not that it’s necessarily better or worse or anything like that. I just felt that there might be more space and to kind of throw my elbows around within my own firm to kind of figure out what that could look like for me and serve clients in the best way possible. so started from scratch and still here and alive and kicking. Frazer Rice (01:38.028) So one of the things that I think is interesting is, I talk to people all the time and they indicate that they don’t understand the process of drafting and implementing and what does a lawyer actually do in putting together in a state plan? Take us through little bit about the process of advising and educating a client to help them understand what they’re identifying as far as an issue is concerned and then solving it. Brandon Rains (02:04.942) Well, I mean, think some of it is some of that answer is kind of what you would expect, right, which is asking good questions and listening. Beyond that, I think a lot of attorneys are going to be really different. I know that some attorneys that I’ve talked to, they have very strong feelings about our role to make recommendations, sometimes even tell the client what’s best for them or not. I think there are some situations where that makes sense. Again, it’s even though that’s not how I go about it, I think that they have, there’s some good sense there too. Some, think there’s a lot of decisions that can be personal that the client is best positioned to make those decisions of. so for me personally, kind of shy away from making recommendations for the most part, helping them have the information and advice and counsel that they’re looking for, for them to decide what’s best for them and their family. That’s kind of the tack that I take. For other attorneys, I know that they have stronger feelings. It’s like, we are not going to do this. This is not a good option. This is, you know, the best ones might say that and then explain why. But generally speaking, walking the clients through the decision-making process, I think offering that advice, being able to explain things in layman’s terms is so incredibly vital and important. Throwing… Legal jargon in our world doesn’t really offer too much help to people. They’re just going to end up just dazed and confused and going along with whatever you say because they don’t understand any better. I think deep down at the end of the day, that’s not really anything that what anybody wants. then, you know, understanding the questions that we’re asking, the decisions that we’re guiding our clients through is vital. as I understand, we’re gonna be talking even more about later on the benefits of working with an attorney as opposed to other options out there. But I think it’s kind of touching on that. And then on the back office side, you know, there’s over the last 10, 15 years, the growth of centralized drafting software programs has proliferated. Brandon Rains (04:31.982) Whereas before each firm would have their own templates and Word documents, copy, replace, copy, paste, and replace, and stuff like that. I know that there still some firms that still prefer to do it that way. But third party companies providing the forms that company, that attorneys or their staff use.has kind of proliferated. I personally am in that camp just being able to learn from hundreds or thousands of other attorneys and their experiences and the process of keeping those documents up to date with legal changes. It’s a lot easier with something like that. But sometimes that sense of ownership of those documents is lessened when someone else has prepared them and updating them and maintaining them. Sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted. But the process of drafting, the basic principles of drafting of legal advice are the same, really is we need to match the language that we prepare for our clients to their goals and their vision, their hopes, their dreams, their concerns. We really kind of capture all of that in the legal documents and do it in a way that’s understandable and ultimately is going to be effective after our clients have passed away. Then of course, walking clients through them and explaining it in the hopes that maybe a week or two after they’ve signed their documents, they might remember a thing or two of what they’ve been fighting. Frazer Rice (06:14.719) on the business of estate planning Always a challenge. One of the things I tell people is that you’re hiring an attorney to help you out on these situations because you’re going through it something that’s very complicated and opaque with huge ramifications for your life and after your life. With this being usually the first and only time that they’re dealing with that, it’s helpful to have a very well-equipped sherpa to help you along that journey. But then you’re also paying for the good judgment, the discretion and the experience that working with hundreds of other situations brings to bear to the instant case. describe that experience for me. You came from another firm, you decided to go this route and maybe a case study or something like that where a client really was able to find benefit from your having dealt with something similarly that occurred in your past experience. Brandon Rains (07:17.196) Yeah, I mean it’s you know there’s so many examples, but so it’s interesting how often clients come in. Like even just this morning, had a client, a couple come in, we had an initial meeting and kind of partway through that conversation, I was like, hey, do you have any questions for me in any way? It was kind of towards the beginning of the meeting a little bit. They were like, we don’t even know, we don’t know. We don’t even have the knowledge base to be able to ask you any questions in the first place. It’s like, okay, that’s fair. And so sometimes that’s just subject matter knowledge that is really helpful. I think a lot of times when couples and families benefit from our, to use your terms, your good judgment, discretion, and experience, we see that a lot when clients are making decisions. So it’s what makes sense, know, it’s, it’s, especially when children are struggling, right? I had some clients that I was meeting with earlier this week. We were helping them make decisions one of their one of their children is Just an amazing go-getter and the other one is struggling and so we had a real conversation about whether or not they should give money to their son or actually skip their son and go with give it to their grandson or granddaughter or whoever it was right, but just skipping that generation and walking them through that decision making process. Because some people, for example, think they don’t realize all the options regarding distributions to their loved ones. think it’s just everything. The only option they have is outright distributions, which is giving it to them all at once. Well, I don’t trust my child to give them everything all at once for drug addictions, manipulation, their spendthrift, whatever. So I just need to disinherit them. Sometimes clients have legitimately, literally come in with that mentality. When we talk to them and help them understand that there are more options than that to spread those distributions out over time and protect from those potential bad situations. That burden is just completely lifted off of their shoulders. It’s like, okay, I can give them money, but I can give it to them in a way that is best setting them up for success with some protections, with some guideposts, guidelines with some restraints because we think that’s really what their life and situatio

“IS THE CIO DRAGGING DOWN THE FAMILY OFFICE’S PERFORMANCE? (And What Can You Do About It?)” with R. ADAM SMITH. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Cl26HkpjZBnovg3zumuBx?si=0c7e252e629d4603 https://youtu.be/p3VtFCVpp8o The Family Office CIO job involves a delicate high wire act. The position can be the fraught intersection of: Asset Allocation (& collision of “endowment” vs “family adjacent” strategy) Cash Management Deal Sourcer/Vetter Club Deal Gatekeeper Risk & FOMO mitigater Overall One-Man Band R. ADAM SMITH advises families around deal and investment structure via RAS CAPITAL PARTNERS. We discuss the evolving CIO in family offices, Our discussion addresses the importance of expectation-setting on both sides. We get into what the families can do to understand their own needs (and why they might be the problem!). The goal is to help both sides unlock potential and get out of the way of performance. Adam Smith’s Background (2–3 min) Adam gives a brief personal background and current work with family offices Set up the problem: Many family offices operate with misaligned or underperforming CIO structures Mention growing tension between opportunistic deal flow vs. structured allocation frameworks CIO Dragging: Defining the“Non-Functioning CIO” (3–4 min) Describe what a non-functioning or misaligned CIO looks like in a family office Common traits: reactive, relationship-driven over process-driven, lacking risk discipline The consequences: inconsistent returns, governance confusion, lack of accountability Deal-Driven vs. Allocation-Based Models (4–5 min) Explain the difference between a deal-centric CIO vs. one focused on institutional-style allocation Why the dealmaker mindset often prevails in emerging family offices Tradeoffs: speed and access vs. diversification, scalability, and defensibility Challenges when there’s no clear investment policy statement (IPS) Why Do Families Tolerate This? (2–3 min) Emotional and trust-based dynamics—families often default to familiarity over structure Over-indexing on “access” as value Underestimating the long-term risks of ad hoc strategies What CIO Institutionalization Looks Like (3–4 min) What a functional, institutional CIO framework looks like (clear mandate, reporting, delegation, rebalancing discipline) Role of governance in supporting this structure When and how to make the transition—triggers and best practices Cultural and Generational Resistance (2–3 min) Why some families resist institutionalization How generational shifts are challenging legacy CIO models Importance of aligning values and objectives—not just tactics Closing Thoughts THE CIO DRAGGING ON THE FAMILY OFFICE PERFORMANCE (2 min) Tie back to broader themes of sustainability, legacy, and governance in family offices Call to action: revisit your CIO model—does it reflect your goals or just your past? Emphasize the importance of aligning investment leadership with broader family vision Other CIO Dragging Considerations- Do the staffing and comp models adequately align the employer and employee?   What does a successful structure look like and how much does it cost?   What dos a minimum structure look like and how much does it cost?   Are CIO’s under resourced and put in a failing position?   How does career risk factor into CIO decision-making?   Does the threat to the family’s relevance in decision-making risk factor into this?   How much time is wasted doing “pretend” work to maintain access to other family offices deals?   Do you measure investment adjacency to the family specialty and how should that affect the evaluation of the CIO’s performance?   What happens when a deal-centric CIO is thrust into an asset class that is out of their expertise?   What is the benchmark performance for a FO CIO these days?   On the ESG, DEI, impact and philanthropy front, are these buckets in an overall allocation (sometimes where younger generations can be brought along?) or are you seeing FO’s incorporating the values metric in the overall allocation?  Is there a trend to think of family offices as useful for one generation and then to have them split up? BRIAN ADAMS ON FAMILY OFFICE RECRUITING https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/

https://youtu.be/UizVi4fJzPs?si=MeLp0txegEzBkVLl CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: The Secret to Revitalizing Communities- this is how we improve our neighborhoods. It’s a great way to teach the next generation about citizenship and how to be a part of something bigger than themselves. But what is involved in getting involved? Politics has an ugly reputation. How does one participate, get meaningful results, and keep ones sanity? Friend of the show, BLAIR DUQUESNAY, takes us through her experience navigating levee governance and politics in her hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She explains why civic activity is important to her and the example she wants to set for others. It’s a great example of citizenship that we can all learn from. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3BjQeTf3nz5mgt6UD2pgpy?si=ntfqCSR1S2aCQvmVxSNQoA Summary In this conversation, Frazer Rice and Blair discuss the importance of community engagement and civic responsibility, particularly in the context of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. Blair shares her journey into civic activism, the challenges faced in flood protection governance, and the grassroots efforts to raise awareness and advocate for reforms. They emphasize the significance of being informed and active citizens, the lessons learned from local democracy, and the need for ongoing engagement in community issues. Takeaways Civic engagement is crucial for community well-being. Personal experiences shape one’s commitment to volunteerism. Grassroots advocacy can influence local governance. Awareness of local issues is essential for effective activism. Democracy requires active participation from citizens. Building relationships with elected officials is important. Researching issues enhances advocacy effectiveness. Community coalitions can broaden outreach efforts. Caring about local issues is a fundamental aspect of citizenship. Voting is a critical component of civic responsibility. The Secret to Sound Bites “We’re all just humans in this process.”“It’s important to research the issues.”“You have to vote to have a voice.” Civic Engagement Chapters 00:00 Community Engagement and Civic Responsibility05:59 Political Challenges in Flood Management12:11 Lessons in Local Democracy? Titles Reinvigorating Our Communities Navigating Governance After Hurricane Katrina Other CIVIC ENGAGEMENT EPISODES https://frazerrice.com/civics/ WHAT IS CIVICS? https://frazerrice.com/all-the-presidents-money/ https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/ Keywords community engagement, civic responsibility, Hurricane Katrina, governance reforms, flood protection, grassroots advocacy, local democracy, civic engagement, informed citizen, activism, belle curve, blair duquesnay, ritholtz wealth, next capital, next vantage, frazer rice

The massive costs of caregiving can be a big surprise to most people. It is an expensive undertaking in the best of circumstances and can be a full time job. BETH PINSKER, a columnist at Marketwatch and the author of the new book, “My Mother’s Money- A Finanical Guide to Caregiving” takes us through her experience. There are many great tips to help get support for this difficult experience. https://youtu.be/WNYLOR_Pvw8?si=8dS2LPG3vfe1FWIX https://www.amazon.com/My-Mothers-Money-Financial-Caregiving-ebook/dp/B0DW3RLJSF/ https://open.spotify.com/episode/120pb9198YPecMzPir7RyC?si=mqlnY7XmRA-gtRzfJemq_w Outline 00:00 Introduction to Caregiving and Aging 02:15 The Importance of Planning Ahead 08:28 Navigating Legal and Financial Caregiving 10:33 Understanding the Emotional and Physical Toll 14:29 Making Informed Decisions for Loved Ones 19:40 Financial Planning for End-of-Life Care 25:28 Essential Documents and Digital Access Transcript Introduction to Caregiving and Aging Frazer Rice (00:04)This is a real treat for me in the sense that I have had personal experience around this. Your book, which we’ll get into in just a second, is going to be coming out in November. I think it’s going to be an important resource for pretty much anyone who has ⁓ any exposure to aging or anything like that or any sort of caregiving. Give us a little bit of a sense of the timing of the book first and we’ll get that out of the way, far away. Beth Pinsker (00:35)Great, you know what, we’re all in this together and nobody’s gonna escape any of this. You will either need to care for somebody or you’re gonna need to be cared for yourself at some point in time. Like it’s inescapable. you ⁓ know, we’re all, we all need this information. The reason I put it together was because I couldn’t find it out there when I went looking for it. When my mom got sick, there wasn’t a resource that told me how to deal with the things that I had to deal with. Being a CFP and being a retirement columnist and a journalist, I got the caregiving information. Then I wanted to put it out there for other people to benefit from it so they could plan a little bit better or get through whatever they were stuck in the middle of. I pulled together a bunch of columns I had written and brought in them out. I interviewed a lot of people, like almost 100 people, especially for this book. Over the years as a journalist, I’ve interviewed probably, you a thousand people about, you know, planning and estate planning and all of that stuff that goes into it. This book is coming out November 4th from a Penguin Random House imprint. You can pre-order it on bethpinsker.com or through the publishers portal. Hopefully you’ll see it everywhere and every bookstore you go to. Frazer Rice (01:51)One of the concepts of the book that I think is vital is that it’s important to have these steps. This caregiving analysis, this process established while everyone is at least a little bit on the top of their game. That you’re not making decisions under maximum stress, either emotional, financial or otherwise. Maybe take us through a little bit about how you came to that realization and how you articulated that. The Importance of Planning Ahead for Caregiving Beth Pinsker (02:06) Yeah, so I got a call from my mom ⁓ one day. You know, she’s perfectly fine, 76 year old, and she’s like, I’m gonna have surgery. It’s gonna be a big one. I’m gonna get my back operated on so that I can continue to walk. She really wanted to be able to walk and she was losing her abilities. The thing we need, we needed two things. We needed a power of attorney for ⁓ financial needs and a healthcare proxy because she was going to be incapacitated for a certain amount of time. We didn’t know how much and we needed those documents. If we would not have had those documents, my life would have been an utter disaster. It was already really hard with those documents, but without them, I would have had to go to court. I would have like not been able to do anything. I would have had to pay her mortgage out of my funds, I would have had to pay the caregivers out of my own funds. I would have been locked out of her life and locked out of making decisions for her and I would have had to, you know, get a lawyer and, you know, that cost about $18,000, right? So instead we had forms that said I could act on her behalf and she got them as part of her estate plan. The equation I put in the book is you can get those documents for free or you can pay $18,000 to go to court. Like that’s the position that people are in before something bad happens. Like, do you want to just spend 10 minutes and get a power of attorney and healthcare proxy? Or do you want to go to court and spend months and agony and lots of money? So, you know, if you put it that way and you explain to people why and show them how hard it is to not have those documents, I’m hoping it will spark a discussion that somebody in the family will say, hey, Does mom have those documents and does dad have those documents? Does Aunt Sue have those documents? We really need to get those and do it. Everybody over the age of 18, so don’t send a kid off to college without them. My son turned 18 and he needed some minor surgery before he went off to college. Printing out documents and marched him down to the notary and got those signed for him. He’s like there was no way I was gonna have him do even a minor surgery where he wasn’t even gonna be really fully under and Was gonna come home the same day I wasn’t gonna let him do that without having some sort of paperwork in place because he’s 18. He’s a legal adult You know Frazer Rice (04:46)I mean, everything related to the Terry Schaivo case to situations where decisions for accidents that happen abroad and so on to not have those documents in place is a disaster waiting to happen as you described. One thing that I’ve gotten from my experience is that it’s important to not only keep them reviewed to make sure that people are in place, et cetera, but also to have them just generally updated. I’ve found that hospitals and medical practices sometimes say, you know what, this is more than five years old. We’re not going to respect it. Beth Pinsker (05:22)Yeah. Frazer Rice (05:23)Was that any part of your experience or have you heard about that from anyone? Beth Pinsker (05:26)Absolutely, because ⁓ people move, right? And so my mom and dad had their estate plan done in Pennsylvania. ⁓ Then they retired and moved to New Jersey, primarily. So Pennsylvania and New Jersey have different rules. If they would have gotten sick in New Jersey and had a Pennsylvania power of attorney, Frazer Rice (05:30)Right. Mm-hmm. No question. Beth Pinsker (05:47)We would have had trouble. Then they packed up and moved to Florida. So if they would have gotten sick in a time period where I needed to take over for them and they still had their old documents, we would have been stuck. ⁓ As it was, my father died in 2018. The first thing I did was have my mother redo her entire estate plan in Florida as a single adult, right? No longer, I give everything to my husband and my husband gives everything to me, ⁓ which they call sweetheart wills, which everybody in your audience already knows, but ⁓ if you’re watching and you don’t know, that’s what they call those. ⁓ Frazer Rice (06:18)That’s right. Beth Pinsker (06:25)But so they had sweetheart wills and if something happened to one of them they said I give the power to the other in a power of attorney and my brother and I were named as you know successors. ⁓ But after my father died, those things are no longer any good, right? So my mom needed to update her plan and I was already a CFP and a retirement columnist by then. So she listened to me and she went and got all these documents done in Florida. And so when she got sick, it was within five years. ⁓ Nonetheless, I went to the bank with them and tried to get access to her bank account and they just look at me and they shook their heads. They said, Nope, you need a court order. And I said, Nope, I don’t. I don’t need a court order. have valid paperwork. They said, Nope, you need a court order. We went back and forth like that in like, you know, for like 10 minutes. I knew what I was doing and I stood my ground, but I wonder how many people don’t ⁓ and go off and you panic. But I made, I stood my ground. made them, you know, let me talk to a customer service rep. made an appointment. I came back and they put the paperwork through, but I really had to like, ⁓ you know, hold a sit-in and refuse to leave. Frazer Rice (07:42)Gosh, the one of the things that that brings up, go in all sorts of directions on this. But the first one is that is the changing of planning once an event happens. And so when your father died and your mom was on her own and the characterization of the estate planning is different at that point, you know, it’s sort of take it’s taking one set of circumstances into account. Well, those circumstances happened and now you have to prepare for the next tranche of life. both from a caregiving perspective and then from an estate planning perspective. It’s also, I think, a unique opportunity to sort of look in as you sort of diagnose too and understand who is actually making the decisions for people at this point because the dynamic is now completely different. Navigating Legal and Financial Caregiving Beth Pinsker (08:28) Yeah, no, my mom, you know, didn’t know a lot of this ⁓ stuff. And I think a lot of people don’t like in the process of writing this book. I got an edit note that was like, I didn’t know this, you know, and it was that when you have a couple and they’re both getting Social Security when one dies, you know, you go down to one Social Security income and you can can shift to the higher of those Social Security incomes. But people don’t realize that. And if they’re counting on paying bills with the two Frazer Rice (08:49)That’

There are plenty of LESSONS FROM GENE HACKMAN’S ESTATE PLANNING. https://youtu.be/HZI4oiP0ZtM It’s a cautionary tale about managing changing circumstances. Proper implementation and monitoring has to be in place. Periodic reviews of the documents, asset titling, and staffing of the fiduciary roles are a must. Finally, understanding the family dynamics and desire for confidentiality are vital in putting the estate plan in place. The disposition of $80 million was at stake here. LAWRENCE D MANDELKER, Partner at the NEW YORK OFFICE OF VENABLE, and I discussed the fact pattern, what could have been avoided, and points to take away in one’s own affairs. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ndlYCQRiAokJ4FyATL9Te Transcription Frazer Rice (00:02)Welcome aboard, Larry. VENABLE ARTICLE ON GENE HACKMAN’S ESTATE Lawrence D. Mandelker (00:04)Thanks for having me, Frazer. Frazer Rice (00:05)This is, I wouldn’t say it’s fun talking about someone’s estate, but this one’s particularly interesting. We all remember Gene Hackman from Hoosiers and Superman and Mississippi Burning and all sorts of great movies. Unfortunately, his end was sad and as it turns out, Gene Hackman’s Estate was complicated and public. From a planning perspective, we can learn a lot. ⁓ Take us through a little bit about where where Gene’s estate kind of went from and ended up as far as a fact pattern. Fact Pattern in Gene Hackman’s Estate Planning Lawrence D. Mandelker (00:37)Sure. So, you know, the news sort of surprised all of us when we heard that he had died. And then over the next couple of days and weeks and even months, more more detail came out. And as you said, it was pretty disturbing. But it seems as though Gene Hackman was a very successful ⁓ actor and he engaged in estate planning. Gene worked with attorneys, which is always a good thing to do it to work with people who are experts in the field And he had a you know a normal estate plan. He lived with his wife It seems like he had a little bit of a fractured family. It was not his first marriage. We learned after he signed his estate planning documents sort of things over the next 20 years sort of changed for him he He had some health issues. He was suffering from advanced dementia at the time he died and as we know his wife died from a virus apparently a week before. Then as the details came out we learned that he had the advanced dementia. There was a fractured family the the wife and his kids did not get along so well. It’s unclear what the situation was with how much contact he did have with his children. But he had a will, he had signed it 20 years before he died. The facts changed. It looks like he hadn’t reviewed it in a while. His attorney died so we have a sad situation here. Frazer Rice (02:12)Many lessons to get from that. Let’s start with the first one. He definitely had ⁓ sort of dementia situations, cognitive dysfunction that eroded over the course of time. Maybe take us through a little bit about the scope of that issue. mean, it affects lots of people and a growing number every year and some things that should be in place because of that. Lawrence D. Mandelker (02:38)Yeah, you know, we all think we’ve got a lot of time and for someone who gets a diagnosis of dementia It’s sort of a warning sign as soon as that happens that, you know, we never know when our time is going to come, but the dementia is sort of the warning. You know, maybe you’re entering the second half of the game or the fourth quarter of the game. So maybe you should start getting your affairs in order while you still can. So it’s a good ⁓ impetus to do that. You know, when we’re looking at estate planning, there’s, you you can do different types of estate planning, but really think about it as, you know, you can do it for yourself. You can do it- your loved ones and then you know for depending on the nature of your assets you can do it for tax purposes but you know getting the the warning that you have dementia doesn’t mean that you can’t sign a will doesn’t mean you can’t do any estate planning it just means that you know you’re probably heading towards a situation where you are going to face you know a number of years during your life where you can’t make the same decisions on a daily basis for your own benefit that you can today. And going back to that idea of the first level of estate planning is for yourself. So you want to make sure that you’ve put in place a plan of who’s going to make decisions for you when you can’t make those decisions, rather than having those people fighting amongst themselves to decide who’s going to do it. You’re empowered to do it yourself. Standard Documents Frazer Rice (04:08)Well, and it goes to goes so far as to reiterate the notion that you should review these things periodically. The idea of making decisions around health care, making decisions around financial ⁓ situations. We’re dealing with a sizable estate and to have that in a confused state, you know, someone’s health starts to decline. That’s a dangerous place to be. Lawrence D. Mandelker (04:31)Yeah, absolutely. mean, you’re at the very basic documents. You want a healthcare proxy and a power of attorney. The healthcare proxy is going to name a healthcare agent to act for you to make your decisions when you can’t make them. And the power of attorney is going to name someone who can do anything that you can do by signing your name. So they can sell your house, they can buy a house, they can take out a mortgage, they can buy stock, they can sign your tax return, they can pay your electricity bill. The people that you trust to do those important jobs may change over time. So when your kids are young and if you’ve got a teenage child, maybe you don’t trust them. But as they are in their 20s and 30s, and at that point when your kids are young, maybe you’re naming your siblings as these agents, or good friends, or trusted advisors, whether it’s your accountant or your attorney, people that you’ve known for a while whose judgment you trust. But then when your children get older, that changes a little bit. Maybe now you start trusting your kids to do that. Your advisor is no longer working or you’ve moved on a different advisor. Maybe your siblings have their own health problems so they’re not able to do it. So it always changes and it’s always something that you don’t need to look at the documents every day. And I sort of tell my clients, know, keep the documents someplace where they will be found but not where you see them every day. ⁓ Frazer Rice (05:57)Well, the backup to that is don’t leave it in a safety deposit box at a bank where necessarily the bank may have trouble getting to it if you don’t have those documents in place or they are in the vault. Lawrence D. Mandelker (06:12)Yeah, you know, that’s the thing that’s one of the first things you learn out of law school as a trust and estates attorney that you you need a court order to open in New York, at least you need a court order to open up a safe deposit box after someone died. So if the will is in there, you you’ve increased your complexity, you’ve increased your costs, you’ve increased your time just to get the will. Implementation Frazer Rice (06:32)So let’s get back to the important notion of implementation and then the close cousin to that monitoring the estate plan as it goes forward. A lot of what’s going on in the Gene Hackman estate is going to be related to titling of assets and making sure that they are in the different entities that were set up, making sure the designations are in place, and then understanding that that is where that it follows the intent of Gene going forward. What do we learn on that from what we had here. Lawrence D. Mandelker (07:04)Sure, know, a lot of our clients come in, they sign the documents, and they think, wait a minute, I’m done, right? And, you know, sort of there’s a next step. You want to make sure that you’ve implemented your plan. So that means you know if you have a revocable trust because you want to avoid probate Well, the assets have to be in the revocable trust You actually have to retitle your assets if you want to update your beneficiary Designations on your retirement accounts or on life insurance policies. It’s not enough to just say you want to do it. You have to actually fill out the forms. You have to send them in. Practice pointer: you should follow up with the insurance company and get written confirmation that you’ve done it correctly. If you name three children and they only put down two, then they’re only going to pay it to two kids. You want to always check and recheck to confirm that everything that you’ve done. Frazer Rice (07:58)This was a case where sort of the way of going about it, where they “set it and forget it.” It really hurt things going forward. Lawrence D. Mandelker (08:06)Yeah, he signed his will and he didn’t review it, it seems like, for quite some time. So he named as a fiduciary, he names his attorney. And meanwhile, his attorney ⁓ predeceased him. We don’t know if that was because maybe he lacked capacity to change those documents at the time the attorney predeceased or he just didn’t look at it. But in any event, if the attorney’s getting older or something’s happening, you you should know, you should constantly monitor. If these are the people that you’re counting on to take care of you, then you want to make sure that they’re in a good position to do that. Frazer Rice (08:42)I tell people that it’s a good idea to have the people who staff the different roles in your estate plan be, as a rule of thumb, 10 years younger than you are. Maybe more, just so that you don’t have these types of issues. Lawrence D. Mandelker (08:57)Yeah, no, that’s a good rule of thumb. You usually don’t want someone older in the event that you really have nobody else. Or you have a small family or you don’t trust someone. Maybe the family dynamics is really shifting drastically. Then so

US/UK TAX PLANNING with ALEX JONES, Partner at London Tax Firm, RAWLINSON-HUNTER https://youtu.be/UjgQRpfqJ-E Thousands of Americans live and work in the UK and record numbers of them are applying for British citizenship. Planning for taxes for these folks has always been challenging, but in 2024, with the change in the non-DOM rules, it’s gotten even more difficult. To help us understand what’s happening here and to try to identify some of these issues is ALEX JONES. He’s a partner at Rawlinson Hunter, the British tax firm. Enjoy. Outline 00:00 Understanding UK Tax Law Changes for US Citizens07:00 Navigating Residency and Tax Implications11:49 Planning for Inheritance Tax and Trusts19:51 Pre-Immigration Tax Planning Strategies30:03 Managing Double Taxation and Tax Credits https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Hmqaalhjk3NklfMCWNd4X?si=8e45eac2d2f247cc Transcript of US/UK Tax Planning Frazer Rice (00:04) Well, we have certainly had a lot of news with British tax law changing. And for those of us here in America who may or may not be part of getting to Europe in a major way and in the UK in a more permanent way, maybe give us a little overview of ⁓ A, what happened, but more specifically, how the UK thinks of US citizens, which can take different forms. Alex Jones (00:31) Let’s start with the back end of that question, how we regard Americans. So from a tax point of view, clearly what we’re really saying is how do we regard Americans who are exposed to UK taxes? And typically that means Americans who are here. Like most countries in the world, the UK will tax people on UK sources of income. If somebody has a trade or business operating in the United Kingdom, we’re going to try and tax it whether they are here or not. But if the US individuals physically in the United Kingdom, then the UK is going to try and tax them in a number of different ways, which I’ll talk about in a second. The pause is really just to emphasize the fact that they’re American. So a US citizen or US green card holder is going to be US worldwide taxable, whether they live in America or not. So America is going to look at everything everywhere in an American way in dollars in a calendar year. And at exactly the same moment in time, albeit in the UK we have a different tax year end. Our year end is a rather crazy 5th of April year end. Exactly the same amount of time the UK is going to look at exactly that same person and say, hey, what are we going to tax? And so you’re starting with the premise that both countries are fighting over who gets the tax first. And the first thing you have to do is look at the two sets of domestic legislation to see how to start, where the problems are, and then you start looking beyond that. In principle, the UK is going to tax people who are resident in the UK on worldwide income. So anything everywhere under UK rules, UK fiscal year, in sterling, et cetera, et cetera. And somebody who’s not resident in the UK on UK-CITUS connected income only. However, the UK has long had a regime which has been known as the domicile regime or the remittance basis regime, which has been pretty well known internationally where we said, Look, if you don’t originate from here, if you’re a foreigner coming in for a period of time, could be indefinite, could be reasonably long, but not permanently, then we won’t necessarily tax all things which are non-UK. We would tax things that you brought into the UK, remitted, but we wouldn’t necessarily tax non-UK things that you didn’t otherwise bring or use or benefit from in the United Kingdom. So the thing that changed in the budget that was announced at the end of October 2024 that largely came into force on the 6th of April 2025 is that we said, hey, this domicile regime, this remittance basis regime is kind of too beneficial to wealthy individuals. You have neighbors who are paying differential amounts of tax just because one person’s kind of foreign and the other person’s a blue blooded Brit who’s lived here forever. That’s not right or fair morally. So what we’ll do is we’ll say, okay, we’re to do away with this term domicile. We’re not going to use it for income tax or the estate tax purposes particularly. And we’re going to create some new terms. And one of them we’ll create it, which is a four year regime. call the fig regime for an income gain regime where we basically say, again, we’re going to tax UK stuff, but we won’t tax foreign things for that four year window. But once you’ve been in the UK for more than four years, we’re then going to tax your worldwide income. And then we have an extra piece we’ve added on, which says, if however you’ve been here for a long time, which is basically resident for 10 out of the last 20 years, we’re also going to say, now you get worldwide inheritance tax. If you die while here, well, if you die with UK stuff, we’re going to tax you on your worldwide assets. as opposed to potentially just your UK only assets, which is how we typically would have treated you if you were a non-domiciled individual under the old regime. So lots of change as to how the UK taxes people and therefore how we view the American is all about the interaction of the two. It’s all about, yeah, but I’ve got both. I’m an American, I’m paying US income tax, I’m paying US estate and gift taxes. How do I deal with the fact? How do I prevent? Two sets of taxation globally, such that my income tax rate isn’t a top rate of 37. What I don’t want it to be is 37 plus the top rate in the UK of 45, plus maybe some tax I’m still paying in California or New York because I’ve got a residential property that I’m renting out in one of those two locations. how we treat Americans is we treat them under domestic rules. We treat them in a way that says what are we or are we not going to tax in our way how we think about things. And by that I mean if we think it’s taxable, it’s taxable. If you guys think it’s municipal bond interest which is exempt, that doesn’t mean anything to UK eyes. We look at it go, well, it’s just interest income. From our perspective, Britain has our own domestic rules which try and stop double taxation. That means give credit for other people’s taxes. Frazer Rice (05:37) Sure. Alex Jones (05:50) And also, most importantly, between the UK and US, we have two tax treaties. We have one tax treaty that deals with UK and US income tax, and we have a completely separate tax treaty which deals with UK inheritance tax and US estate and gift taxes. So we call estate and gift tax inheritance tax in the UK, and it applies in life or death. So we’ve got two treaties which are both trying to minimize unacceptable double taxation. That’s kind of a… kooky term of art, Minimise unacceptable double taxation. A little bit of double taxation may be acceptable in the eyes of government. Well, these two treaties, they’re designed to try and minimise. So when we deal with both UK and US taxes, and I’m a both UK and US tax guy, I’ve been doing US tax since the late 1980s, what we’re trying to do is try and get the two systems as closely aligned as we can. To the amount of credit we can get between the two countries so that overall the person’s paying the lowest amount of tax that they should pay as opposed to maybe double tax. Frazer Rice (07:00) US/UK Tax Planning So if you’re so let’s steer this back to the Americans quickly. The typical situation that you’re running into is, guess, an American who has moved over to the UK either for work or for something else. Maybe take us through a little bit of how you analyze that in terms of sort of understanding how long they’ve been there and then how that sort of surfaces through the regime you just described. Alex Jones (07:25) Yeah, so. there’s always a duality here so we have to talk about sort of both sides to understand the whole but from a UK perspective when we’re thinking about how long have people been here is what we’re really saying is hey are they UK tax resident have they done enough to make themselves UK tax resident because if they are they’ve got an expansion on the things we can tax maybe we can start taxing worldwide income and in the UK we have a test we call substantial residence test, statutory residence test, excuse me. And that’s a slightly complicated set of rules, which is designed to say, hey, if you spent too much time in the UK, are you tax resident? If somebody spends, as an example, more than 183 days or 183 days or more a year in the UK, we’re going to treat you as a tax resident under pretty much all circumstances. But if you spend less than 16 days a year in the United Kingdom, we are always going to treat you as non-resident. And that’s quite a big gap. In between those two, there’s a combination of day of time and factors which can trigger residency. So we’re looking at how much time. We’re also looking now under this four year FIG regime as to have you been here for more than four years? Have you been here for more than last four years? Because if you have been, we are going to tax worldwide everything. If you haven’t been, if you’re still in year two or three or four, then we aren’t going to tax the non-UK income or gain sources or at least most of them. And indeed, we won’t even tax you if you bring and use those funds in the UK. We’d quite like you to bring that money into the UK because that’s good for the UK economy after all. From a US point of view, ⁓ ignoring US citizens or green card holders, you have a test which is called the Substantial Presence Test. That’s basically what the test you would apply to a non-American who is spending time in America to determine whether they were US tax resident and therefore worldwide taxable in America. So both countries are looking at a time component as to where you’re spending time. We also have to look at time in the context of employment income. Employment income is deemed to source, belong to the country where you do the work. Not the country who pa

JOHANNA DAVID, Adjunct Faculty Member at Hofstra Law School is with us to talk about three estate planning mistakes and how to avoid them. Johanna is a Trusts and Estates lawyer, and a partner at Forchelli, Deegan, and Terrana. She’s also the adjunct professor of law at Hofstra University. We’re going to talk a little bit about mistakes that we see in estate planning and the simple things you can do to keep them away from your situation. Enjoy. https://youtu.be/gD_d9J609Vg Three Estate Planning Mistakes Chapters 00:00 The Importance of Estate Planning09:47 Common Mistakes in Estate Planning19:54 Understanding Trusts and Their Benefits24:00 Navigating Elder Care and Estate Planning Outline of “Three Estate Planning Mistakes” Frazer Rice (00:01)Welcome aboard, Joanna. Johanna C. David (00:03) -Three Difficult Planning Stories and What Can We Learn? Hi, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Frazer Rice (00:06)Well, happy to have you on because we are now, most people sort of put their estate planning off toward the end of the year, but I have a feeling given where the legislation is going, et cetera, that the crush is going to happen earlier than we think. In the meantime, you and I were talking beforehand about some mistakes that people make from an estate planning perspective and that they’re very avoidable. I thought we’d take this opportunity to go into that a little bit. In your practice, maybe let’s start with a couple of, or sort of the big ones that you see, ⁓ give us some ideas of some mistakes that people make that really should be avoidable. https://open.spotify.com/episode/57MMskGgp1P3fOVklGt090?si=ISap3Z_YSdqK_zg4-Dlevw Johanna C. David (00:48) – Structure and Other Planning Tactics Sure, absolutely. So the number one mistake that I think that people make is not having the proper estate planning documents. I see this happen time and time again. I don’t know if it’s because of the stigma. People are afraid to approach estate planning, right? Sometimes it makes your mortality very real. But the biggest estate planning mistake is not having the right documents. Everyone, everyone, I cannot stress, everyone needs to have at least a will, a power of attorney, and a healthcare proxy. And there are people that say, well, you know, I don’t really have much, I don’t need to do that, or ⁓ everything’s gonna go directly to my husband and my children anyway. You know, that’s how it works. But that’s not exactly the case, right? You and I both know. So, especially if you have young children, young couples definitely want to have those things in place. You want to think about who is going to be the guardian for your child or your children if both of you pass away. And a lot of people don’t think about that. And those only cause problems in the long run. I’ll give you a quick example if we have time. But ⁓ Frazer Rice (02:02)⁓ please do. Johanna C. David (02:03) – Long Term Planning Issues and Avoiding Problems I remember, this was several years ago. I must have just started practicing and I had been a young attorney. So it was about 15 years ago and a woman came into the office and she and the decedent had been living together for about 30 years. They held themselves out to be married. Now, Frazer, you and I both know that New York does not recognize common law marriage. Frazer Rice (02:30)This is true. Johanna C. David (02:32) – Correcting a Big Will Mistake She was not aware of that. And so they were married for 30 years. Everything was in his name or excuse me, they were not married. They were together for 30 years, held themselves out to be married, not legally married. He owned the co-op apartment. Everything was in his name. Now he had a daughter from a previous marriage, legal marriage that was a strange. And you guessed it, our client did not get along with the daughter. So the father dies and guess who inherits the co-op that this woman has been living in for over 20 something years, right? And who inherits all of this man’s assets. It ends up being the daughter and the woman is out. Frazer Rice (03:09)It’s not the intent. Johanna C. David (03:13) – The Price of Neglect and Other Costs of a Mistake Right, exactly, not the intent. And you know, this man didn’t have a will. He did not have a will. Again, there are so many myths out there about estate planning. You know, this woman was under the impression that, hey, you know, we’re common law married. If he passes away, if I pass away, everything will go to each other. That’s not the case. So I always remember that case. I always give people that example because it’s so important to have a will. Frazer Rice (03:38)The other part too on that is that the poor person who has to administer that estate has to go through the court and all that. You’re not doing your executor any favors by not having a will. And, you know, there isn’t technically an executor in that case, but someone’s left to clean up that mess. Johanna C. David (03:45) Yeah, the administrator has to clean up the mess and it’s not an easy thing, believe it or not. It’s funny because this week I had a client come in and this one is a little interesting, but I’m going to, you know, just stay with me because it gets a little hairy. OK. Frazer Rice (04:09)Gosh. Johanna C. David (04:11) – Difficult Phone Calls It gets a little hairy. When I teach at school, cases like this, I like to draw out on the board. So I hope that our listeners can kind of follow a little bit. A woman comes in and she tells me that her cousin died. OK? This man died in, I believe, 2012. Up until his death, she was his power of attorney. OK? Another myth. People don’t realize power of attorney dies with you. Okay, she’s no longer the power of attorney. He died in 2012. She was the power of attorney. He was a widow, a widow were rather. His wife had predeceased him. He had no children. She’s a cousin, but they’re very close. She’s the power of attorney. All of a sudden, and I don’t know how this happened, she figures out that there is a fidelity account that has about 300,000 numbers in it. What now? She’s like, well, you know, what do I do? I asked if he had a will. Of course, he didn’t have a will. So I explained to her that, you know, we have to go through what is called an administration proceeding. And I tried to figure out his family tree. He had no children, his wife pre-deceased. He was survived by a brother. For example, for this example, let’s call the decedent Will. William will call him. Will and his brother- let’s call him Dave. So Will was survived by Dave. Right after Will dies, Dave dies. Dave also didn’t have children but was married and had a stepdaughter. So Dave dies, right? As it’s go to Dave’s wife. Dave’s wife dies right after him. I know, it’s crazy. So now Dave’s wife dies. Dave’s wife has one daughter, okay? She dies. I’m not making this up, I promise. Frazer Rice (05:43)My gosh. Tell us where they live so we can avoid it. Johanna C. David (06:01) – Complication So daughter dies, okay? So now, so the brother, Dave, his wife, his stepdaughter, they all die. Daughter had no children, okay? Whose daughter’s next of kin? Frazer Rice (06:18)You’ve lost me, if you go back up, I think there’s a stepdaughter in there somewhere. Johanna C. David (06:22) – Tracing the Lineage Right, so that’s daughter. Her next of kin would have been her biological father. So guess who’s entitled to the assets? So let me bring it all back for our listeners. Basically, Will’s assets, so Will died. His assets will end up going to his sister-in-law’s ex-husband. Frazer Rice (06:28)Right. gosh and they may not have ever met. Johanna C. David (06:49) – The Family Tree Correct. All because if, again, none of these people had wills, and when you don’t have a will, you know, New York State basically writes one for you. And those are called the laws of intestacy. The laws of intestacy determines what happens when someone dies, who inherits, who are their heirs. So we have to follow the family tree. It’s very unfortunate. I had to explain to this woman that the truth of the matter is, yes, we needed to administer all these people’s estates. But then at the end of the day, assuming that this man is alive, which we think he is, right, he will be entitled to the assets. Imagine getting that phone call, Frasier. Frazer Rice (07:28)And not only getting that phone call, but then having to make that phone call when you find this all out. And then part of that too is, some people, and it’s easy to get confused, is that you have beneficiary designations. So the fidelity account, guess in theory, could have also been designated, but that doesn’t sound like that happened either. Johanna C. David (07:49) – Beneficiary Designations All right. There was no beneficiary designation. So you’re right, he could have had a will or he could have at the very least if he was very close to his cousin, you know, she was taking care of him. She was power of attorney and healthcare proxy. He could have at least had her as a beneficiary, which he didn’t. Frazer Rice (08:07)Well, as I tell people, ⁓ yes, the beneficiary designation is useful and powerful, but don’t let that act as a substitute for a will because there are going to be other things going on in your estate, most likely. Johanna C. David (08:19) – Dealing with Institutions Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes people put beneficiary designations. They forget all about it. And then they pass away. So I have seen beneficiary designations that might have been a parent, right? Maybe you had this account since you were young and you were not yet married or had children. And so you put your parent on the account, you know? Now you pass away. Maybe your parent has passed, but now the assets may end up going to, you know, who knows? ⁓ And ex-wife, right? And ex-wife and ex-husband, exactly. Frazer Rice (08:43)An ex-wife ⁓ or… ⁓ Johanna C. David (08:48)- Having Everything Line Up And so

We’re going to be talking about the current incoherent world of US ENERGY POLICY. ANNA KRAMER joins the podcast to help us get our arms around the future of energy in the United States. Anna is a reporter for NOTUS, a non-partisan longform journalism outlet. She has written a series of stories on the the disconnect and frustration around US Energy Policy and paths forward. We talk about: The chaotic policy at the federal level (and beyond) The huge cost overruns and administrative complexity The role of nuclear The increased energy demand in this country Finally, we muse about what can be done about it going forward. https://youtu.be/3k-N-AGTNfU Outline Section 1: The US Energy Policy Transition: The Goals and the Problem. Discussing Brandon Shores Coal Plant and electricity prices in the Mid-Atlantic Region. https://www.notus.org/policy/biden-clean-energy-coal-maryland-brandon-shores https://www.notus.org/policy/electricity-prices-spiking-biden-clean-energy-transition https://www.notus.org/policy/nuclear-power-energy-crisis-cost Evidence that the transition is happening. Electrifying = efficiency. Cheap wind and solar, look at the free markets in Texas — ballooning wind and solar there The reliability, capacity, and resource problem: Needing certain amounts of energy and voltages at all times of day. Leads to keeping coal plants online past scheduled retirement dates, plus spiking prices How much do emissions and climate change goals matter to the industry? What role does nuclear energy play? Section 2: Interconnection Queues and Permitting Reform. Bipartisan and Industry wish for Permitting Reform: Why is it so hard for US Energy Policy?  https://www.notus.org/policy/permitting-reform-bill-manchin-environmentalists https://www.notus.org/policy/solar-farm-culture-war-biden-climate-change Section 3: Trump’s US Energy Policy “dominance agenda” disappointing every part of the energy industry. Idea is not aligning with reality. DOGE cutting into the basic functions of energy governance. https://www.notus.org/policy/doge-cuts-trump-drill-baby-drill https://www.notus.org/policy/donald-trump-tariffs-trump-energy-agenda Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01)Welcome aboard, Anna. Anna Kramer (00:03)Thanks for having me, really psyched. Frazer Rice (00:04)I went through a bunch of your articles covering the power industry and energy generation and a lot of things that are happening federally, state level, and it’s going to be a lot to get our arms around, but you were the person to do it. So just generally speaking, we’re at a point in time with energy and transition ⁓ that policy is moving. Maybe take us through a little bit about the goals and the problem we face. Anna Kramer (00:31)So there are sort of two, I would say, competing problems right now. ⁓ The first one is load growth, which means basically more demand on the electricity grid. And that is something that we haven’t seen in this country in decades. for really around 2000 up until maybe a couple of years ago, energy demand on the grid has been fairly constant or even declining slightly. And the reason for that is that everything has become more efficient. Like every appliance you use, every light bulb, your car, everything that could possibly have a demand on the grid is more efficient than it used to be, which is awesome. There’s a lot of wonderful benefits that we get from that, including the fact that for a long time utilities and transmission planners and states and the federal government have not really ever had to think about the grid or about like where you get your power aside from these sort of technical conversations that the average person doesn’t really pay any attention to. That has really started to change as of the last few years. There’s a large number of reasons for that. Basically for the first time in decades we have significant demand expected on the grid. We expect it to grow over the next several decades. The reasons for that are widespread and hotly debated. A lot of people talk about data centers and artificial intelligence which require huge amounts of energy to power At the same time, there’s a lot of research that shows that some of the larger sources of demand are actually going to be manufacturing facilities built in the United States for things like semiconductors. Electric vehicles are a huge demand source on the grid. Basically, the more that we electrify, the more demand there is on the grid. So for the first time in decades, we have the need for a lot more power. And then at the same time, we also have climate change. And for those who really care about With the emissions we create in the United States or globally, there’s a compelling argument that we should be addressing the emissions from the power sector. These are quite significant between coal and gas plants, and then the emissions that come from regular vehicles. Those are somewhat competing because if you have increasing demand on the grid, while you’re trying to reduce emissions, you’re both trying to transition the economy from fossil fuels while increasing the amount of power that’s available. There are a lot of competing tensions there. Frazer Rice (03:06)So as we’re trying to get more efficient ⁓ and we’re sort of transitioning to electricity, how do you think about sort of the downstream effects of that? To me, energy generation is a symphony of measures you’ve got in everything from coal, the natural gas, to oil, to nuclear, to hydro, to solar, ⁓ hydro or sort of hydrogen based things, that type of scenario. Getting power generated and where it’s needed, everything you just described, that’s the part that’s tougher for everybody to understand. Anna Kramer (03:44)Yeah, definitely. And this is really where all the debates come in because… It’s not as simple as just creating the power in one place. The act of moving it to the place where it’s needed is complicated and equires transmission infrastructure. That’s the grid that everybody sort of sees, right? Your power lines, your substations. And there’s only a maximum amount of power that can move, know, or sorry, maximum amount of electricity. My power and energy sources would be very mad at me if I said power. There’s only a maximum amount of electricity that can move on any given part of the grid at any given time. So you need your transmission infrastructure to be really well built to sort of facilitate maximum movement of electricity to the people that need it. And it’s really hard to do that. And our…Transmission infrastructure system in the United States is not well built. It’s quite old. It’s aging. It hasn’t been well maintained. There are some incredible technologies that can be applied to transmission infrastructure to make it better. They can make one line have the ability to carry a lot more electricity than it does currently. There’s a lot of politics around who has to pay for that. When it comes to gas fire generation, one thing you can do is build a gas plant near a place that needs the electricity to minimize the transmission infrastructure that is needed. But there’s a lot of politics there too because the question is sort of like who bears the cost for building, for example, a gas plant next to a data center? If a gas plant isn’t going to contribute to the transmission network, should they have to avoid the costs that somebody would normally have to pay in to maintain it. There’s so many complicated political questions involved in all of this ⁓ down and there’s so many fights about who pays for what. And at end of the day, the average electricity consumer doesn’t know any of this is happening and doesn’t want higher electricity bills. But we’re now in a situation politically and practically speaking where Everyone has to understand how electricity moves around and everyone’s going to have to reckon with higher bills if we’re trying to meet all this new demand. Frazer Rice (05:59)So let’s take as a given, which it isn’t a given, but let’s take it that the costs could be figured out and we print lots of money and do all that stuff. Where does the world of NIMBYism kick in here? When do people say, “I don’t want the power line to go through my backyard or I’m worried about the externalities of a power generation plant within five miles of my house. I don’t want to breathe difficult air or radioactivity is a problem” – that type of thing. Anna Kramer (06:04)It’s probably the single greatest problem getting in the way of all of this. It’s not just NIMBYism necessarily. In general this very anti… It’s not just like I don’t want things built in my backyard, but people in general don’t really like to change the status quo, broadly speaking. So you have a number of things that happen there. The first thing is that… Anytime you try to build a transmission line, takes years to longer to build it than it should because people are fighting it in in local systems. The same thing goes for a gas plant and wind turbines. The same thing goes for a coal plant that, you know, might need upgrades and instead the local community wants that coal plant to close because of air pollution issues. But it’s even broader than that. One of the stories that I wrote was about a solar farm that was going to be built in somebody’s backyard. Basically they have a large farm, they were gonna cover a lot of the land with solar panels because the farm isn’t financially sustainable and the solar panels were going to help. And the local community essentially revolted against the farmer and prevented them from building the solar infrastructure. Not necessarily because any of them would ever interact with or see it, but the idea that this solar farm would sort of change the constitution of the community was so revolting to so many people that they essentially made this family like local pariahs. So it’s important to understand like just how passionate people are about energy infrastructure and specifically how mu

Family Office AI has become a dominant theme at the fancy dinners where families and their advisors chart a course to incorporate new technologies. As wealthy families grapple with the risks and opportunities of AI, institutional rigor and structure hasn’t kept up with the often informal world of family offices. This is a mistake High end governance must play a part in the family office AI space. https://youtu.be/n_KHB_gOc9M We’re going to be talking to TIM PLUNKETT, who’s the founder and managing partner of Plunkett PLLC. He advise families on structure, governance and the development of procedure around these exciting, but potentially dangerous concepts. We’re going to be talking about best practices for family offices as they deal with the artificial intelligence theme. Family Office AI “When looking at AI adoption in family offices it is important to remain true to the culture, operations, reputation and underlying trust among those who built the Office in the first instance. Remain true to your principles and don’t get distracted by the new toys.” – Tim Plunkett Family Office AI Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01)Welcome aboard, Tim. Tim Plunkett (00:03)Hey Frasier, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Frazer Rice (00:05)doing terrific. we’re in the midst of Trump tariff season, so it’s a little crazy, I’m sure for everybody. yeah. so why don’t we, we’re going to talk a little bit about family offices and artificial intelligence, which I think is a theme. both themes are, you know, big unto themselves, but how family offices integrate with the space. I think it’s something where it’s a, it’s an area where family offices can be very informal and. Tim Plunkett (00:11)We’re blessed. Frazer Rice (00:33)Getting some institutional rigor around them is important. And so to that end, you have a lot of broad experiences advising businesses from a governance perspective. Maybe describe your firm for a few minutes and what you do. Tim Plunkett (00:47)Sure, thanks again. I have three pillars in my firm. I can only do certain things well, so I try and limit what I do. My training is as a litigator, and so I consistently think of things always as having to explain them in front of a judge, which helps with a lot of risk, which goes along hand-in-hand with AI and governance. The second part is I’ve done a lot of government relations work, which is working across disciplines and organizations, trying to advocate for certain outcomes and create business environments that are efficient, compliant, ethical. Again, all that ties back to the same foundations in the world of AI. And the third component of it is, is obviously the AI work I do, which came out of working in data privacy and security over the last 10 years. The natural flow was to move towards this sector. And today my practice is Mostly helping companies learn how to implement strategies that are fair, equitable, just, but also compliant with the laws and keeping in pace with the technological change, is really at breakneck speed and an incredible place to be right now in the world of opportunities in front of all of us. It’s very exciting. Frazer Rice (01:57)So when you’re canvassing companies and families that are invested in them, what are the use cases that you’re seeing? Tim Plunkett (02:04)So use cases are, I mean, they’re kind of all over the place. you look at in terms of how do you define the practices, have, there’s operational use cases. so you have use cases that are like document intelligence and automation. Sometimes in places there’s expense tracking and anomaly detection. There’s dashboard creation for organizational purposes. You have investment use cases for deal sourcing. portfolio risk management, alternative data, source and analysis. You have governance use cases for succession planning, philanthropic impact analysis. So there’s a lot of different cases that are out there. Each one of those has lots of different levels beneath them. But back office integration in the family office space, like you said. Some places are single jurisdictions, some are multiple jurisdictions, some are international, some are local, some are really formalized, and some are not. And so you have basically two buckets that everything fits into. One is AI for adoption and operational efficiency, and one is for investment. And those are viewed and treated very differently. Others overlap, obviously. But when you’re talking about getting down to the fundamentals of building the rigor around these things, and what the institutional rigor looks like. That’s where everything emanates from. Risks Frazer Rice (03:31)Got it. So, you know, it’s difficult to put sort of a roadmap around this. It’s all evolving so quickly. And, you know, just when you think you’ve got everything in mind, there’s some new use case that pops up as a litigator, as someone who is trying to advise companies and families around governance so that they stay safe from the various risks that are out there. How do you group those? Tim Plunkett (03:54)Well, the risks are there’s risks that are from compliance. Okay, you have regulatory risk. You have family, know, reputational risks, operational risks. Then you have the obvious investment risks, due diligence, things like that. But and then the fundamental thing about family offices is they’re about family, and they’re about protecting that asset more than anything else, in my mind, at least. And so and so What are the risks that go with that? Those are family reputation risks that you want to mitigate as much as possible. There’s obvious data risks and security risks. Once you start pulling data in places, then it makes it more of an attractive target. You have risks that go around that make them more attractive targets because people seem to think that some data family offices don’t have a strong data governance strategies or security strategies that they may have decentralized security. There’s all kinds of risks once you’re inside the office as well between family members, between generations. One generation looks at technology one way and another generation may look at it differently. That creates a risk from an investment perspective, an operational perspective. the world is fraught with risks, but for every risk, there’s a solution pretty much. And a lot of that comes down to really building the governance strategy properly from day one, focusing on what your foundational documents should look like, your AI governance policy, and that is what your, for lack of a better term, your constitution. That’s what guides you. Frazer Rice (05:32)So a client walks into your office and they’ve got some level of complexity, they’ve got an interest in the space, they’ve got wealth and assets in there. It maybe takes us through your process as how you get them to get their arms around the issue and then put structure. Tim Plunkett (05:50)I think the first thing to do in talking to anybody is finding some common ground. And there are certain principles that guide people, decent people, professionals that have licenses and things like that or certain mandates to do certain things. Tim Plunkett (06:08)I think that when you’re looking at building the bridge, the first thing you have to establish is trust. And trust is something that is in the background of every decision that’s made in the world of AI. So once you’ve established a level of trust, you can start talking about philosophically what the family is looking for, whether it’s from an investment perspective or a philanthropic perspective. But you have to understand what the family is all about, what the family office is all about and their mission. Before you can start putting on legal tools or technological tools or anything else you have to have that that trust at the beginning. Once you do that you start to build your your your frameworks Your legal frameworks and that’s what I said to your AI governance policy becomes your Constitution The good news is that there’s so much information available now on how to set up governance programs. It’s not that hard depending even if you’re you know small office or a big office foreign domestic whatever, there’s frameworks for everything. But at the foundational level, the first thing is to get the trust together, to get the AI governance policy document together. And that will be comprised, if you go down the line from there, we can get into talking about what the specific core rails are and what you’re trying to accomplish there. Frazer Rice (07:26)Sure, and let’s do that. One of the things I think about when we go from paper to operation as many times that, you know, in my world, the trusts or the wills or whatever are well drafted and they stand up to lots of different things. However, the people who are administering them are the weakness on that front. When you’re thinking about the guardrails and the legal structures, how are you advising these families as far as staffing them? Tim Plunkett (07:45)Right. Okay, so staffing, again, This is about knowing your people. It’s about knowing what you have, doing an inventory of what’s inside your organization, who’s good at what. And there’s legal frameworks that you put around those based on what people are good at and what they aren’t. So when you’re looking at staffing in particularly, you basically want to build a structure where there’s accountability. You have to have, there’s expectations in the office for returns on investments and things like that. And then there’s also expectations on how these places behave and how they’re viewed publicly. So you have to define the roles and responsibilities very clearly. You’re gonna want an executive leadership team to begin with. That’s a strategic oversight role. That you’re gonna have ethics officers or maybe an ethics committee, depending on the size and structure of your organization. You’ll have technical teams. which would be your data scientists or your

BARRY RITHOLTZ’s new book “How Not to Invest” has received a warm reception. We talk about investing mistakes, the Trump Tariffs, and curating a good media diet. https://youtu.be/pS4f45v2iRk https://www.amazon.com/dp/1804091197/ “How Not To Invest” Transcript Frazer Rice (00:03)Welcome aboard, Barry. Barry (00:04)Well, thanks so much for having me, Frasier. Frazer Rice (00:06)Well, we are recording in the midst of chaos and disorder. We’re basically in day three, trading day three of the tariffs and trying to understand all of that. But back at the matter of hand, your new book, I read it really good. I thought it did a really good job of sort of colloquially putting some process and structure around not making bad investing decisions. Tell me a little bit about the impetus for the book. Barry (00:35)Sure, so the last book, Bailout Nation, was 15 years ago when I’ve had a lot of friends and family say, when’s the next book coming? And, you know, I had a little, like, hey, that was kind of a slog, stuff blowing up and forcing me to rewrite entire sections of the book every time some new company went belly up. And I came home from Christmas break from vacation. You have that dead zone a few days before you’re back in the office January 2nd. And I just started thumbing through some old quarterly calls for clients and research notes and market commentaries. You know, I had moved the blog from GeoCities in the nineties to Typepad in the two thousands to WordPress in the 2010s. And so I was looking at some of these old things and like, God, I never revisited this. This is such a great piece of research. I love this academic take on where alpha or even beta comes from. And I’m just kind of mulling it over. I start writing down chapter ideas on three by five cards like these. And I end up using this giant bulletin board on my wall. It just basically I start putting stuff up and I start rearranging them. And pretty soon it becomes obvious. Hey, these ideas, a lot of them are don’ts. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Avoid this. Try not to make this bad mistake. And ultimately, I kind of came to the conclusion that, know, we’ve part of the reason I held off writing a book is there have been tens of thousands of investing books telling people what to do. And we’re all pretty mediocre investors still. Maybe it might be useful if we learned what not to do and thus “how not to invest” was born. Frazer Rice (02:35)We found kind of an interesting crucible to test all of this with sort of Trump’s tariff initiatives and a bunch of chaos on that front. As you think about what we’re living in right now with uncertainty, whether manufactured or not, what are some of the top things that you think about that you tell people, your clients and otherwise? to keep in mind as we sort of weather this storm and try to learn a little bit about what the future is going to look like. Barry (03:06)Right. I had no idea what what the sequel would be named. Maybe it could be how not to run an economy or what we’ll play with that. But so so what’s happening these days are kind of fascinating because the first third of the book I spent a lot of time talking about how little we really know about about what’s happening right now. And we learn even less about the future. And so our Frazer Rice (03:12)Ha Barry (03:34)A hot take on these things is maybe we shouldn’t build portfolios based on having to predict where the economy is going to be, what the hot sector is going to be, where the hot geography is going to be, what the best companies are. Maybe we need to be a little more robust and capable of withstanding this. And the tariffs are a perfect example of how little we know. Look, the obvious examples of “How Not to Invest” Nobody had heading into 2020 in their year had forecast global pandemic that shuts the world’s economy. And by the way, stocks go straight up. They just after a 34 percent crash, they go straight up from there. Nobody had that. Nobody had Russia invading it. Ukraine, Israel Hamas war, 500 basis points of Fed hiking, double digit losses in stocks and bonds in the same year. So when you look at all the annual predictions, You would think we would be a little more humble, have a little more humility about this. And the ironic thing about what’s going on, I keep pointing to the television. The ironic thing about what’s going on is like this should have been completely foreseeable. It’s a failure of our own imaginations to imagine anyone would do this. Trump, for his whole adult career, has been enamored and enthusiastic about tariffs. He calls himself Tariff Man. He ran on tariffs and he tried like half a dozen different rationales. We’ll protect domestic industry, we’ll protect our borders, we’ll reduce bad things coming into the country, we’ll get other countries to lower their tariffs and cover more of their own defense costs. Like he said all of this and collectively, and I include myself in this, nobody had the slightest idea that, and he will Completely upend the world’s economic order. He will tear the band-aids off of long-standing allies and relationships and supply chains and all these things in pursuit of a goal that I don’t think a whole lot of people think makes a lot of sense and the market obviously Was wholly unprepared what we see going on now is simply the market saying hey The price today is our expectation of profits and revenues a year forward times some multiple, which typically reflects collective psychology. And we thought the revenues and profits are going to be much higher. This new regime is going to make everything more expensive. It’s going to reduce consumer spending. They’ll have less discretionary cash, less capex spending, less hiring. let’s ratchet our GDP expectations down, you know, 100, 200 basis points. And so it just goes to show you nobody knows what’s coming. Even after a presidential candidate says this is what I’m going to do. We still can’t wrap our heads around. Frazer Rice (06:41)One of the things I think too is, you know, I don’t really ascribe genius to Trump on anything, certainly not economically. I don’t even put it to him politically, but he is in the same sentence as P.T. Barnum as far as understanding ratings and media. And I… Barry (06:55)No, he’s a genius. I will tell you, he in his own way has an incredible feel for what excites the public. As did P.T. Barnum. He knows exactly how to get people enthusiastic. He knows how to craft a message. Just look at his performance in all the debates. He has this incredibly intuitive sense of here’s how to catch people’s attention, keep their attention, and get them behind a story. Now, whether that story is rational or makes sense or, you know, forget even heterodoxy, whether it can be done, that’s another conversation. But credit where credit is due, he’s a communication genius. And you mentioned P.T. Barnum, another showman of the highest order. Trump is a brilliant Showman, we can have another discussion about how effective he is as a steward of the economy and every time he’s won an election, he’s won against a weak unpopular candidate, both times a woman, he’s never been able to beat a man, he’s able to tap into a certain angst and a certain anger that exists at a certain level of the country and it’s kind of fascinating. mean hold the disaster that is this past week aside. There is something fascinating about watching a master at work even if it’s towards ends that seem to really be damaging the US and global economy. Frazer Rice (08:46)Yeah, I mean the other part too is I mean he’s very good at declaring victory or jettisoning things that aren’t working very quickly and moving on and sometimes leaving a path of destruction in his wake that everyone else has to fix. Barry (09:01)No doubt about that and you know when you look at when you look at what’s been going on here They keep coming out like my best-case scenario here is no no this is a negotiating tactic There’ll be a whole bunch of side deals You know we’ll cut a deal with Israel because there’s a special relationship there and then something will happen with the UK and then Korea and Japan and before you know it like When we look at what’s going on now No one really believes that we expect the trade deficit with Vietnam to be closed. I mean, if everybody in Vietnam spent every last penny of their salaries buying U.S. goods, it still wouldn’t close the trade deficit. Unless you’re going to get a Ford F-150 pickup truck, unless you’re get three of them purchased by every Vietnamese, that trade deficit’s never going to be closed. So… It doesn’t make any sense. What was said on its face. We’re tariffing penguins in Antarctica. Like part of me, I am I am both bemused and comforted by that. Because it allows me to hold on to my wishful thinking that dear Lord, please let this be a negotiating tactic. We’re really not tariffing penguins. Are we? Frazer Rice (10:26)No, mean, part of it to me is it feels like that economically speaking, we’re firing Bill Walsh and hiring Woody Hayes to install the wishbone and then drafting a kicker in the first round and a punter in the second round. And I look at it and go, this wasn’t how I was brought up. And I’m not quite sure I ascribe that notion. How do you think about this in terms of the things you talk about in your book in terms of I love the William Golding quote, nobody knows nothing and I subscribe to that too. I I feel like a lot of people are sort of opining on things that they are six or seven levels of abstraction away from and therefore, you know, it’s useless opinion. And then sort of taking data that we don’t understand and then getting all worried about things that they don’t really have a lot of control over. If you were just…sort of take someone right off the deck and say, you know, here’s some things to think about as you’re analyzing our current situation and “How Not to Invest.” What are you thinking about? Barry (11:

As the United States acclimates to the “flood the zone” governing style, reasoned discourse around civics has crumbled. https://youtu.be/ngx0GxJjmDM There are many causes. Polarizing media, bombastic claims, and systematized gas-lighting on both sides have created one of the most toxic political environments since the Vietnam War. However, the absence of civics and good citizenship concepts have laid the groundwork for the hysterics of today. LINDSEY CORMACK has a way forward. She is the author of the book “How to Raise a Citizen “ https://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Citizen-Why-Its-ebook/dp/B0DBWYTXJ4/ Outline: Why are Civics Important? Recent stats on the absence of civics Understanding structures Understanding the “why” of structures and civics Knowing what the Constitution says Knowing that the Constitution evolves too Understanding federalism Government funding mechanisms Communication- how to broach inflamed subjects How to raise the next generation What makes a good citizen?  Going beyond jury duty and voting Civics and Active participation Intersection with wealthy multi-generational families Joint decision-maling Believing in something greater than self Guardrails of ideals melded with open-mindedness and curiosity Right holder vs Duty bearer (Rights come with obligations) Justice vs compliance  Control vs grace Right and wrong in civics Contacting Lindsey Links: www.howtoraiseacitizen.com IG: @howtoraiseacitizen Lindsay discussing civics on Errol Louis’ YOU DECIDE Podcast The Intersection of Civics, Money and Presidents Rights and Obligations with David Haass (Civics) Background LINDSEY is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. She is the former Director of the Diplomacy Lab. She is the secretary of community board 8 in Manhattan and the co-chair of the Street Life Committee. Lindsey is the creator of DCInbox, a comprehensive digital archive of Congress-to-constituent e-newsletters.  Finally, she is also the author of Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis. Frazer’s interest in citizenship and civics: You may be wondering why a show about wealth management (and beyond) would be interested in citizenship and civics.   In a nutshell, I get asked three times a day what can be done to raise responsible kids.  Because families (and the answers to those questions) are different. The answers should come from within, I ask what they (the parents or grandparents what think it takes to be a “good citizen.”  The answer to that question can then lead into the discussions I need to have about stewardship and a variety of other concepts. Additionally, good civics is good business. Businesses ignore the politics around them at their own peril. Board dynamics are also the intersection of civics, joint decision-making and constituent accountability for businesses. Executives have to be good at this. The values that make people successful are also the ones that people want to pass down to their kids Personally, politics and civics are ingrained in me.  I majored inhHistory and political science major in college. I worked in many NYS campaigns, the NYS Department of Economic Development, and ran the Republican Party in Bedford, NY for a year. More recently, I was on the board of my co-op for 7 years and president of the NYC Estate Planning Council. Civics and participation are a big part of my worldview. Transcript Frazer Rice (00:32.447) As we get acclimated to the new flood the zone component of politics, reason discourse has crumbled. And I think absence of civics in public life is the cause. Lindsay Cormack has a way forward and she’s the author of How to Raise a Citizen. Welcome aboard, Lindsay. Lindsey Cormack (00:46.978) Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk with you today. Frazer Rice (00:50.025) This will be a lot of fun. It harkens back to my background before wealth management and lawyering and all that stuff. Tell us a little bit about what you do and the impetus for the book. Lindsey Cormack (01:02.574): Background Sure, so for the last 10 years, I’ve been a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. This is primarily in an engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey. It is one of the reasons that I ended up writing this book. I have some of the brightest students that I’ve ever been around. They have really high test scores. They know how to do school. When I teach them intro to American government, I realize most of them have been failed by our school systems. They do not understand the landscape of the government. They don’t understand their own routes of power. They’re not practiced and having hard conversations. I’ve got wonderful students who are going to go on to successful careers in everything. We should make sure that they have this positive look at government and this better understanding than they’re getting. And it’s true that it’s not just happening in New Jersey. It’s kind of everywhere. Frazer Rice (01:47.737) What does the absence of civics look like in the education system? I seem to recall a stat that you put forward that it’s almost like less than 1%. It’s actually focused on in a curriculum in public schools. Lindsey Cormack (02:00.652) on Civics Yeah, so it’s really hard to say here’s how civics instruction happens. Every state has its own approach. Within every state, the independent schools have different approaches than the public schools. The charter schools or the mini schools have different approaches. The modal form of delivery across the United States is usually in your seventh or eighth grade of school. At that grade, you have some social studies class. That’s where students are going to learn a little bit about the founding. They’ll learn about some like westward expansion. They’re taught a history lesson about like how we got to where we are. The actual lessons that they hear vary. But that’s like the basics. We usually wait until the second semester of 12th grade to give students a class called government. The amount of instruction time that we’ve had on civics and government has only gone down from the 1940s. It is the subject that has the least amount of focus and time allocated to it. And it also has the lowest amount of federal dollars spent on it. For every $50 that gets spent on STEM, the science, technology, engineering, math disciplines, only five cents go to civics. We don’t give it enough attention in schools and we haven’t been doing that for a very long time. Frazer Rice (03:07.564) I mean, I’m never going to be one to say take money away from STEM. At the same time, to not have that background is crazy. With the polarization of information that’s out there, the ability to deal with information is vital. The news that you get, the values you have and the understanding of our structures are vital. How do you think about that in terms of structuring your curriculum? Lindsey Cormack (03:34.734) So for me, in my intro to American government class, it moves very, very slowly. Like we’re coming up on midterms. We’ve been in school for about eight weeks and we still are not done with the Constitution. We’re still in the amendments. That’s because I know that if our students know the rules of the game, they can figure out everything else with a clearer brain. And so we go really line by line figuring out what did this mean? What were they trying to say? What are they not saying? I think that’s animportant starting piece that we don’t have in most K through 12 educational systems. It doesn’t surprise me that we don’t have this. The end result is for most kids in high school, it’s a score on an SAT or an ACT. Neither one of those exams has any components of social studies. And if it’s not tested, it’s not taught. So I understand why it’s not in the curriculum, because we don’t think we need to evaluate students on this. Frazer Rice (04:25.531) You dive into the Constitution, which is a great underpinning of how the United States works. I’m sure you go into the history of it and where many of the concepts and values came from. What else surrounds what you’re teaching on that front? Lindsey Cormack (04:41.336): Learning to Communicate Usually I start with:, “what have they heard so far?” I like to start any conversation that might be controversial with this. It’s helpful with students who have difference of opinions. I just like to set the table and say like, well, what have you heard? Here’s something that I heard a few years ago that really stuck. The constitution doesn’t say anything about slavery. And I was like, that is such an interesting take. Let’s go read it with a keen eye for that. Like if you just do a control F and try to find slavery, you’re right. It doesn’t say slavery. There’s three to four oblique references to the practice that are in there that takes a little bit more observation. You just have to have a keener eye to it. And that’s something where I like to go with like, what are they starting with? Then how can we get to something that lets them appreciate something in a bigger? Or fuller or more robust manner? Frazer Rice (05:24.169) The history of the Constitution is important too, For example, you can get things like three-fifths voting for slavery, There may be previous incarnations of slavery, but it’s been changed to reflect different values and cultural norms. Lindsey Cormack (05:40.962): The Evolving Constitution Yeah, that’s right. That’s something that I think our schools do an OK job at. We teach them this is a historical form of theater. You know, we say to our kids 250 years ago, some really smart guys got together and wrote this document. Isn’t it great? But I like my students to think of themselves as the caretakers of this document and the entire enterprise what we’re doing. And in order for that to be true, they can’t see it as a history lesson. They have to see it as an active lesson where they’re a participant in moving this forwa