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This episode explores the intersection of wealth and life expectancy, delving into how financial status influences access to healthcare, diet, and overall quality of life. The discussion also addresses the role of health tech devices, such as smartwatches, in monitoring and potentially improving health outcomes. Additionally, the conversation covers essential estate planning strategies to ensure a smoother transition for heirs, including the importance of communication, planning for funeral arrangements, and the use of trusts and wills.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only, and is not intended to constitute financial, investment, or other professional advice, the opinions. expressed are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations. Investing in financial markets involves risk, including the potential loss of principle, past performance is not indicative of future results. Before making any investment decisions, you should consult with a qualified financial advisor, who can assess your individual financial situation, objectives and risk tolerance.
A transcript of the episode is provided below for increased convenience and accessibility. The audio should be considered the canonical version of the podcast episode. Errors in transcription may occur.
[00:00:00]
Kyre: What have you been reading this week?
Stephan: Besides all the I guess there was a bout of depressing news all weekend, right? With jet airlines and Jimmy Carter.
Kyre: Oh man, yeah.
Stephan: There was an interesting one that came up that I was looking through and I, it seems to be the theme of this past year is all the like longevity stuff.
Like. How long can someone live and all the things you do, which I think has always been an interest, but for some reason over the past year or two, maybe it’s the, all of the health tech stuff that’s starting to rise, but there’s an interesting article that mixed wealth and life expectancy together and started to break down at what point can you save more, earn more money to live longer, but as you expect it flattens out, right?
So really you’ve got no matter what you do, like 86 seemed to be like the number, like 86, 87 was the number that started to come up as the life expectancy.
Kyre: It’s if you have sufficient wealth, you can reasonably target 86 rather than the
[00:01:00] 78 or 79
Stephan: How many, how far it dropped off. And that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about today was get your thoughts on what would be your reasons for that?
Because the article had a few like minor things of, like the easy one access to healthcare, but it was broad, right? It doesn’t go into the specifics. And I know we see this a lot, especially people who are planning for retirement or just, Healthy lifestyles in general with money and what do you think would lead to such a drastic increase?
I say drastic because it drops down into the seventies for lower income levels. And there’s a pretty big spike between. Earning zero and earning like 60, 70, 000 a year. And then that marginal benefit of life expectancy starts to drop. And then after a certain point though, it really plateaus. I have to look up the numbers, but I want to say it was something like once you have 200, 000 or so.
In your bank account, then it really starts to drop,
Or the marginal age benefit starts [00:02:00] to drop
Kyre: Oh, of
Stephan: where you’re not seeing too much of an increase anymore,
Kyre: Yeah. So having 200, 000 versus half a million Correct. doesn’t change your life
Stephan: exactly, I think the difference between between having 200, 000 and 1. 5 million was only Like I say, only it was like a year or two, so it’s still significant ish, but not nearly as significant as jumping from a life expectancy of 70 to 75
Kyre: or
something like Yeah, first thought would be access to healthcare, right? Are you going to seek care when you need it? Are you going to have access to preventative care or diagnostic care ahead of time that catches a lot of these more, Devastating style diseases, right?
I think it’s a luxury to not only be able to pay for the healthcare, but also to have the time in your schedule to pursue the healthcare, because this is what we see with a lot of folks, especially that we’re paycheck to paycheck, they don’t participate in a lot of aspects of society that higher income folks [00:03:00] do.
And it’s not because I don’t think that they don’t want to necessarily, if you don’t go and vote, maybe you can’t get time off. To go and vote, and if you aren’t scheduling your regular annual physical with your primary care doctor, maybe that’s because you just don’t feel like you have the time.
A three hour break that you can carve out of your schedule and, for higher income individuals, that sounds so foreign. It’s what do you mean? You can’t carve out an hour, two hours or three hours to go. And the, I think the world that people live in that are one paycheck to paycheck, that are hourly, that are highly dependent upon seeking or maximizing their hours worked rather than the, the.
Or perhaps the quality of the work product that goes out at the end. If you’re hourly based versus project based, for example, and so many careers in our economy are that way. So access, but also time for care. And then my next thought would probably [00:04:00] also be tied to time and stress time to relax, time to step away.
Time to, just to lower that baseline burden that people feel. There’s a lot of research on individual stress levels and cardiovascular health, for example. So I think a lot of that, that probably ties together to that wealth as well. If you feel wealthy enough. Then you can perhaps carve out time and maybe that’s why there’s diminishing returns on wealth, because to achieve very high levels of wealth, typically that means you are in a high stress, you’re in a high stress job or industry, and therefore, the wealth takes you up to a certain point, but as you add stress and other, I think, challenges that come from being in a high earning, high stress situation that maybe caps you out somewhat
Stephan: Makes you wonder of the difference of [00:05:00] workplace stress, right?
In the sense of if you were in a labor job, and then your body’s going to be taking on a lot more physical stress that you’re going to be dealing with, which I imagine would contribute to both lower wages and also, Lower overall health of your body, especially over time, right? It’s in a longer time period.
So that is an interesting mix there of whether or not you exchange one type of stress for another, and how that would impact it. The one that I’ve seen. Come up more and more is especially when it comes to access to health care is even at the Kind of higher wealth levels there does start to be different tiers of access to health care as well we’ve seen this with just different types of insurance so I think access to healthcare is probably a large factor here.
And then you start getting up into the higher levels of wealth. And then it’s a matter of maybe you do know you have, you’re more likely to have personal referrals to the [00:06:00] hospital and know which physicians you should see. You have
things that’s been around the past. Year two, I’d say probably two to three years in a bigger way has been access to concierge medicine as well, which is always, something we’ve talked about with the different kind of outsourcing of different tasks, but providing that healthcare need immediately and removing even the barriers for people who are busy to say that I have a barrier to healthcare because Even if I could carve out a couple hours of time, I’m not going to for this small illness.
And then if that’s the case, then concierge medicine, it gives you the best of both worlds. You don’t have to carve out the few hours, but you’re still getting access to that type of healthcare later on.
I’m curious to see though, with that same idea if concierge medicine fills that gap of saying quick access to diagnostics or whatever, how do you think this plays or the health tech movement that we’re seeing with things like the Apple watch being [00:07:00] better, right?
You have these aura rings and everything that people have that give them real time data on their health and stress levels and everything. Do you think that has? Any factor or are those things too low of a cost? And I say too low of a cost in quotes, right? They’re definitely not cheap, but they’re attainable compared to having a concierge doctor on call.
Kyre: Yeah there certainly have been insurance companies that subsidize the purchase of these smart devices and continuous health monitoring devices. I think in part, because they want to collect the data if they can, and two, because it makes people aware of their health situation, but I do wonder where the point of diminishing returns is.
And maybe that’s, Is that really what we’re seeing that the method of delivery of care is less important that there is some upper bound on life expectancy, that increasing quality of care, this can only take you so far in this was a while ago, but I was [00:08:00] reading an article on. The incidents of super centenarians.
So super centenarians would be those that live above the age of a hundred. And sometimes I think that’s even defined as above 110
and the conclusion of this article is that supercentenarians do not actually exist in the quantities that they’re reported, and their analysis focused on the fact that.
Ultra or super centenarians are more likely to be reported in the lowest income districts of countries.
Stephan: Oh, interesting. What was their reasoning?
Kyre: Their conclusion was that welfare fraud drives the reporting is that, if you can falsify your age in the system and begin to collect old age benefits earlier, it’s a very pessimistic view of humanity.
If you can falsify your age and begin to collect old age benefits earlier, Then you live to a normal age. Your reported age will make it [00:09:00] seem like you’re much older than you really are. And they did a lot of really interesting analysis. For example, countries where birth records become more reliable, see fewer super centenarians.
And there’s a couple of other things that they looked at in, in the in the research. So it does make me really wonder if that 86 or 85 age that higher wealth individuals are more likely to achieve. If we’re already pushing up against some upper bound of like human biology. Because necessarily if it’s an average age of 85, then that still means a lot of folks are living into their nineties to hit a life expectancy of 85.
So I don’t know. It’s a, it’s an interesting question. I’ve worn an Apple watch for many years and I use it for sleep tracking and I use it for counting my steps and all of these other things and tracking all my workouts. And, it is nice. But I just, I don’t know if it’s really [00:10:00] leading to different meaningful outcomes or it’s just telling me all the stuff that I’m already doing.
Stephan: I always, I have a love hate relationship with some of these devices when it comes to health. Like it’s in a way ruined running for me, but in a good way. Garmin watch telling me like all the data afterwards.
The run to me almost becomes worthless. It’s like I’m halfway through the run and be like, I don’t know why I’m running at this point. I’m not going to know whether or not I’m going fast or slow at the end. And then, because afterwards I’ll download the data and I can see quickly on my phone, like what my split times were, what my mileage was and everything gets broken down.
So it becomes really useful. The only other time that It maybe is, I don’t know if it’s beneficial or not, but I have noticed can I coach the, my, my son’s little league baseball games and teams. And in the middle of the games, I’ll get warnings all the time from my watch telling me that I’m in a high stress environment and I need to take a breath, which I found been pretty consistent, especially depending on how they’re playing I’ll get [00:11:00] warnings regularly in the middle of the third or fourth inning that I need to.
You need to take a breath.
Kyre: you’re not working out, but your heart rate is elevated. What’s going on? That’s exactly right.
Stephan: It’s sit down, take a breath. Now’s the time to breathe.
Kyre: Yeah.
Stephan: But you think that at scale, maybe that is benefit of just of just realizing That’s there or providing an incentive for exercise.
Kyre: Yeah. But to what extent it makes me wonder to what extent is that data actionable if you are in a high stress. Job whether that’s as a physician in a busy ER, which is extremely high stress, or, you might work in some sort of construction or other more manual trade. If it’s giving you these warnings, Hey you’re high stress.
I don’t know what action you can take on that. Could you admit, I got, do you go to the floor supervisor for the night? And I came, I watched this, told me I’m a little stressed out. So I’m going to go. I’m going to take 45 minutes off. I don’t think
Stephan: Yeah. So maybe it’s not actionable in the moment, but I wonder if it is actionable [00:12:00] over time and I’ll use my, not to compare my little league example to to the ER, but I would argue that it gets pretty intense out there, right?
With the parents in the crowd. But it’s not like you can leave the game, or you can’t like walk off the job to your point. But does having those types of alerts regularly make you aware of situations that are putting you in high stress environments? And maybe that leads to you finding other ways to cope with stress or bringing awareness to, Hey, this is not normal, what you’re feeling right now, right?
Kyre: Yeah. So you could bring in leisure activities outside of that work time to try and balance or help you recover in a more active way from the stress that you’re exposed to.
Stephan: And then the question is who’s collecting the data right on, on all of that is the big one. That’s the one that’s always to your point of like the insurance companies want the data. That was a, this was a long time. I want to say maybe it’s going to be 10 years ago. There was a thing. I can’t remember what insurance company did it.
It might’ve been progressive. It was one of the auto companies. They [00:13:00] had this whole deal that you could plug like a little chip into your car. And it would read how you were driving and then you would get discounts for being a safe driver. And that was the whole pitch to it, but really the.
The risk was that most people have a heavier foot than what is listed on the speed limit sign. And it was leading to the opposite of that and being able to understand your actual driving habits a little more closely.
Kyre: I think all major auto insurance companies have a device like that.
So they use the onboard diagnostic port of your vehicle. Or my insurance company offers an app that it recognizes whenever you’re driving using the builtin APIs of the phone. And then we’ll record your drives. So you’re, you don’t even have to use your your your The little puck that you plug into your onboard diagnostic port anymore.
Yeah. And it tracks things like hard accelerations, hard breaks, [00:14:00] and then time traveled at above 75 miles an hour, I think are the three things that my insurance company tracks. And maybe total miles driven, although I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, I’d have to go
Stephan: What would they be able to track phone usage during drives?
Kyre: Yeah. Probably
Stephan: because that would, I think would have a high probability of causing accidents.
Kyre: probably. That’s a good question. I don’t know.
Stephan: They wouldn’t collect, they’ll do the whole, we don’t collect it.
And then the subtitle is, but we’ll gladly buy it from the other apps
Kyre: Exactly. Yeah.
There’s so much data out there that we are generating. Whether we realize that we’re generating it or not is such an interesting question.
And
Maybe at least you’re getting paid for it. Whereas, Google’s monetizing you and you’re getting hopefully value out of searching with them, but you’re not getting a direct cash payment
Stephan: No, for sure.
Kyre: from them.
Stephan: So what do we have here? We [00:15:00] have.
We
have better access to healthcare at different levels. We have, monitoring better act, I guess we’ll consider that better access to diagnostics and what about food choices as well? And there’s one of the things, which is obviously a hot topic issue these days around different types of food assistance programs and everything is the amount of Like soda and food purchased on them, right?
Do you think that has a, plays a role as well as higher income, higher wealth, better access to higher quality food?
Kyre: Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like all of the processed foods that are least expensive or fast food, which is inexpensive and quick. I think. And there’s a lot of research on, so socioeconomic status and nutrition.
I think that would definitely play a role because that’s the kind of thing, maybe it is, or isn’t actionable in this [00:16:00] moment, but it definitely aggregates over time, right? If for decades you have a poor diet, then that’s going to aggregate over time to alter your life expectancy or your, just your overall health condition.
So I think. Yeah, higher income, you’d be more likely to shop for fresh vegetables and fruits and be more aware of the kinds of things that you’re eating. And also then to have time to put that extra effort into planning and executing a more high quality diet. And that may mean that the kind of food, when you go out to eat, is at a higher quality.
Even if you’re eating out the same with the same frequency, That’s somebody who doesn’t have access to the financial resources might be
Stephan: a really cool robustness check would be to go through and Look at an exogenous shock of people who win a lot of money.
So
big lottery win or big inheritance and see whether or not
life expectancy changes for those post [00:17:00] win.
Kyre: my prior on that is that it doesn’t change,
Stephan: change. You think that habits wouldn’t change?
Kyre: yeah, because you’ve come into an unexpected amount of money and very frequently that money gets squandered over a short period of time and second, you haven’t built, there’s no habits and so a lot of that is just the education, the, you The process that somebody has gone through gets them to that point.
So having that large endowment just given to you, I think is, it gives you the financial resources, but doesn’t give you the education. So it tell, it would maybe tell you the value of the education in isolation or
Stephan: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was thinking. We get rid of the, is it a money thing or is it a habit thing?
Because I think a lot of what we’re talking about is core wealth is correlated to these items, but it’s not the, Just having more money leads to healthier habits type of situation It gives you the option to have healthier habits Which may go into your comment about that. There are people living into their 90s plus Right in that if we’re looking at life expectancy as an [00:18:00] average Then average life expectancy in the high 80s for the higher group Could be driven by the choices or whether or not those options were exercised to take healthier lifestyle choices afterwards, because we have obviously access to healthcare, food, also to the point of time, right around time for activity, this activities, everything there rolls into play.
Kyre: Yeah.
So this whole conversation leads me into my question for you this week. As we contemplate life expectancy and how do we stretch that out? Like whenever we are working with clients. Our projections go out to what we would call the end of plan and which really matches the life expectancy of the person.
Although assets tend to survive beyond the person who helped to build that base, what are some things that people can do to make their passing? Easier on their heirs. [00:19:00] And we can talk about things like estate planning. And we talked gifting recently, which is certainly an aspect of that, but what are some other things that people don’t necessarily think about that should be included whenever they are, whenever they’re thinking about preparing for their own passing.
Stephan: Dang, this podcast got dark this time. I feel like both topics ended up going in the same direction. All right. So ease of passing. I think the communication is probably the biggest one that’s not, that’s outside of the realm of, And I guess we can cover the basics, right? Having a will and last will and testament is going to be huge.
And a trust definitely makes things easier because you have to, you get to avoid probate. And I guess the short, the long and the short of that one when it comes to probate is, do you want the courts to determine how everything’s going to be divided or do you want the trust to determine it? So if it’s in a trust, it’s going to be.
Executed as you wished with the trust. If it goes through probate and you have a will, they’ll still look [00:20:00] at it. And that will likely determine where most of it is, but people can contest wills and your long lost fourth cousin comes out of the woodwork and says that you promised them in second grade that you were going to write them a big check or something like that.
And then it’s holding up things. You’re just removing all that. I guess the small aspect of that is there are court fees associated with it too. So depending on how large the estate is you would save a little bit of money there, but generally not too much definitely legal fees but having the trust to take those documents.
And most of the time it can be set up really easily. Your attorney can set up something where it’s almost like a bill of sale for all of your goods on day of death, where everything just gets sold to the trust. So that’s not as big of a. concern. I think the bigger things that people run into that’s difficult is just the uncertainty or the surprises.
You’re just trying to eliminate surprise, right? You want everyone to know what’s going to happen. You want kids to know there’s an estate, there’s a [00:21:00] trust, right? This is the attorney. This is what’s going to happen. And how about we go meet with the attorney and you can ask the attorney any questions you want about what will happen here.
So that way everyone knows what this process looks like. I think that’s huge because it’s already such a stressful point by definition, right? It’s a horrible time. It’s a stressful time. The last thing you want to start dealing with in the middle of that are trying to look up how a state, how state planning works and how trusts work and who you’re supposed to call and where documents are located.
So communication, I think is the one I’d put at the top of the list of how you make that process go smoothly.
Kyre: Yeah. Cause over time, as we build our lives, we know where everything is. We know where we have our funds. We know what professionals we trust our financial advisor, our accountant, our attorney, we know how we expect things to be [00:22:00] divided. We know, where is this one life insurance policy?
And where is this other thing? And. Having all of that stuff just held in your head as you age is a very risky situation to be in because if something were to happen then how do you communicate any of that to, to your heirs or to your surviving spouse or to, to your family? To someone else who may be tasked with being the executor of your estate or caring for your minor children or whatever the case may be.
So having that. Information aggregated together in an easy to follow way that takes the stress away. Cause people will always ask, am I missing something, right? Is there something about this process that we’re missing? Is there a way that people can take care of non financial assets to make it easier?
We live so much of our lives online. What are some things that people can [00:23:00] do to pass along some of that information or people’s photos live online, right? Their notes and their their writing lives online. Like all of these things are trapped there. Is there something that people can do to help that be easier?
Stephan: Yeah, I think Password managers. I know you use one. I use a password manager are huge. And one of the things that they do is it’s not only an ease of, I have my passwords written somewhere so I can find them whenever I need to log into a website, but they usually give an alternative user.
Access, right? In the case of your death, they would be able to log in and they get access to everything. And that’s a huge pain. Imagine if you lost all of your passwords right now, there’s no, that would be a disaster, right? To try to find, to log into everything and figure everything out. I can’t imagine being in the shoes of someone who’s not me, losing all of my passwords and then try, they have just no clue. Of what’s going on, where things are held. They don’t even know what they don’t know, to your point. It’s like [00:24:00] you, you don’t even know if everything’s accounted for. That’s one, I’m a huge fan of a, so I’ve got a, when I die document on my computer and it lists out exactly what you’re talking about.
It goes through, it’s a really basic document, but it’s where accounts located, who should you call? These are the phone numbers of the people you need to contact immediately. This is where life insurance policies are held. Just really basic account numbers, basic information. And also things like, this is the email you’ll use and you can log into.
Get passwords and everything gets pulled together to hopefully make that work. Processes as simple as possible because it is a rough time anyways. So it’s, I think everyone gets caught up sometimes on the financial assets of I know mom or dad had a retirement account and that’s where a majority of the money is.
That’s not the stuff that’s going to cause the issue. And the stuff that causes the issues are. To your point that the [00:25:00] non financial stuff it’s whether it’s individual things or it’s a real estate typically comes up as an issue. It’s who is supposed to inherit the property and how does that get split up?
Because it’s not easily divisible or divisible. And we can’t go into
For
an IRA, we can chop it. Two ways or three ways or whatever it’s going to be. It’s hard to take a house and say, all right, now we need to split it up. And there’s a lot of dynamics there because now you come into the problem of, if you can’t just split the house up in thirds, how do you determine who gets what and what happens if someone needs the money from that house?
I know. I don’t know if you’ve, I imagine you’ve seen in this well and talked to why that becomes an issue there.
Kyre: Yeah. Fractional ownership in a real estate property is liquidity. And then you have family members who are arguing and very frequently, the first response to that is we’ll have the other [00:26:00] siblings who want to maintain the house or heirs, who want to maintain the house, buy out the.
The air who needs the cash, but what if you don’t have that liquidity? What if they want to maintain the house, but they don’t have the liquidity to buy out the. The air who wants to liquidate, then that becomes all kinds of messy. And it’s okay, then take out mortgages on the property.
And then what if they don’t have the capacity to maintain those payments or the credit, frankly, because we can’t always count on. So a lot of those types of things are challenging ahead of time and to plan for them. And we’ve mentioned this in other episodes where if you can build expectations. With your heirs of what you’re thinking.
Of course that introduces a whole nother dynamic and that perhaps politicking starts to occur if you’re talking about your plans openly. So there’s some trade off that, that exists, but.
Stephan: I think to be to clarify that one, there’s [00:27:00] absolutely politicking that begins, right? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a scenario that doesn’t have. Once you open up that can it’s out there and everyone’s going to start throwing opinions and whether they’re directly or subtly
Kyre: yeah. And whether it’s arguing about division of financial assets or who gets grandma’s China,
Stephan: to be fair is why this is why the communication usually doesn’t happen.
People know that’s going to happen, so they don’t want to open that up and open that conversation. So instead they try to write a will that breaks everything down and that brings the risks we’re talking about that unless it’s completely airtight and every single thing is accounted for, aren’t likely to account for everything in there.
Kyre: Yeah. What about, pre paying funeral services or retaining a funeral home Or [00:28:00] other, service provider in that area, again, upon the passing of an individual, this is a stressful time. And then you give them, you’re giving them this responsibility to care for somebody’s, last and final needs, and then to handle the funeral services, would that be valuable to go ahead and line up as well?
Stephan: I think it depends. This one’s always been an odd one to me. Because it depends on how far in the future you’re planning. And I think that’s where maybe the line gets where I’m more open to that being a thing is if you’re later on in years and that is, and you’re having these conversations in a realistic way of, Hey, we need to start looking at making this a state as easy as this whole process as easy as possible.
Then I think starting to. Plan out the funeral needs. We think wouldn’t be necessarily horrible. I’m always hesitant to prepay for things in general, because now you’re dealing with counterparty risk of [00:29:00] what happens if that company no longer exists. How does that work or the cost of the services change?
But obviously again, As time shortens in that counterparty risk drops as well. I’d be hesitant to pay for anything like that over a longterm. I think the better option is to go and you can go meet and benchmark costs and say, this is the type of service that I would like, and what is the cost of it?
And then. Earmark that as part of the financial plan or to the more extreme version, you could set it aside in a separate area and say, this is for funeral costs. Which has always been the pitch of life insurance policies, especially on kids, it’s these are unexpected costs that show up, but you’re talking about I haven’t benchmarked these lately, but five to 10, 000.
Kyre: Maybe a little low, maybe
Stephan: A little higher.
Kyre: Yeah. Maybe 10 to 20, depending upon
Stephan: So [00:30:00] 000, if you’re wanting to put that away. I think at that amount of money I would be hesitant to write a check to somebody for. 20, 000 unless there was a strong chance that it would be used within the next year or two. I
Kyre: I think for me, the only exception to that, which I think is really good advice is the location of your burial.
So
Stephan: I agree with
Kyre: the availability of burial plots is.
Becoming more and more limited through time. So if you have a particular city or cemetery that you hope to be interred in even a crematorium where you’ve got a, You might have a mausoleum or something where you’re just storing somebody’s ashes.
Those
are also running out of space.
So if you are very particular about the location that you and your spouse, for example you may go ahead and lock those locations in [00:31:00] because it’s It’s buying real estate
Stephan: Yeah. Just a very small plot
Kyre: and in perpetuity.
Stephan: 0, 0, 0 acres.
Kyre: So that I think would be the main exception to that prepaying. If you are particular now, if you’re not, if you’re more flexible about the location then that might be something you consider waiting on as well.
Stephan: But even though I completely agree, that’s a great point of the actual plot of land is something that could be taken care of ahead of time without having to pay a a funeral home or anything along those lines.
I would, the only thing I’d add to that is, Ambiguity is only stress right at, during that time. So you saying it doesn’t matter to me where I’m going to be buried. No that, that is only going to add stress on the people who have to make the decision at that time. So if you don’t care, then pick a random place And have it decided on.
So that way they’re not having to make those decisions right afterwards. I [00:32:00] think that’s the bigger factor there of that ambiguity. It’s not giving options to people around the funeral are, is not helpful. It’s probably one of the few times option value is actually negative, right? Where it is not useful to
Kyre: The disutility of choice, right? That’s
Stephan: Yeah. No one wants to make those decisions at that time of what color flowers you want, or, the stain on the casket type of scenarios. I just make the choices and then add a caveat that says, now, if any of this is unrealistic or unavailable, I don’t care. Because then you just take that pressure off completely of the people who are then left making those decisions for you.
Kyre: Yep, for sure. Yeah. And I think that’s, I think that’s a really good reminder of really what all of this advanced planning is doing is it’s making that transition for your heirs and survivors easier rather than of course, and part of the reason to [00:33:00] set up a trust is that you want to have some control over those funds and how they’re managed or disposed of over time, right?
So you can instead of just distri, distributing assets at your death you have some say over how they’re managed, really after our passing, it’s about those that survive us. And if we can make that transition,
which
is going to be stressful, regardless of the circumstances.
If we can remove some of that stress through planning and through communication, then that can be extremely helpful.
Stephan: Yeah, I completely agree. But to put it on the brighter side, everyone here can go get an Apple watch or one of those rings that tell you about your health. So you’ll live a long time anyways.
Kyre: that tell you about your health so
Stephan: Exactly.
Kyre: a long time anyways. make it easy on the heirs.