Get it Together: What You Need to Know to Organize Your Estate
Nicole Garton, TEP
Heritage Trust
LinkedIn
As the President of Heritage Trust, Nicole leads the fastest-growing independent trust company in British Columbia, offering executor, trustee, power of attorney, escrow and multi-family office services. Nicole is the Past Chair of the Canadian Bar Association Wills and Trusts Subsection (Vancouver), a member the Society of Estate and Trust Practitioners (STEP) and the Estate Planning Council of Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Nicole is a certified Family Enterprise Advisor. Nicole received a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of British Columbia and was called to the Bar of British Columbia in 2001. Nicole obtained a Master of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School in Dispute Resolution in 2019, with a focus on dispute prevention and management for family businesses. Nicole has published four books, most recently Before It’s Too Late: the Estate Organizer for Canadians 2nd Ed.
To download the PDF version of the workbook, please see: Heritage Trust: Before It's Too Late: The Estate Organizer Guide for Canadians, 2nd Edition
In the podcast, Nicole mentions there is a US equivalent to the Heritage Trust workbook (not affiliated), while the workbook is applicable to US residents, you may want to check out: Nolo: Get it Together
Cindy Radu
Welcome to the Tamarind Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Cindy Radu, Chief Learning Officer for Tamarind Learning Canada. Today's topic is Get it Together. Everything you need to know to organize your estate. This topic is going to be of interest to everyone regardless of your level of financial wealth. And I'm very excited to have Nicole Garton as our guest to share a really amazing resource that she's created. And we'll get to have a look at that a little bit later on. I just want to introduce Nicole. She is a recognized expert on estates and trusts. And as President of Heritage Trust, she leads the fastest growing independent trust company in British Columbia, which offers executor trustee, power of attorney, escrow, and multifamily office services. Nicole's education includes a Bachelor of Law as well as a Masters of Law, and her LLM focus was on dispute prevention and management for family businesses. Nicole is the past chair of the Vancouver Canadian Bar Association Wills and Trust subsection, a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and of the estate planning councils in Vancouver and Fraser Valley. So today we're talking about one of Nicole's books.
Cindy Radu
She has published four books, and today we're going to dive into her most recent book, which is called Before It's Too Late the Estate Organizer for Canadians. And Nicole, we are really grateful to you for allowing us to share this book with our audience in PDF version. And thank you so much for being on our podcast today.
Nicole Garton
Oh, thank you so much Cindy, for asking me.
Cindy Radu
So this topic I think, is so important, and I'm very confident that every one of our listeners is going to have many takeaways. But I'd like to get a sense of like, this is really the type of work you do isn't something that a lot of lawyers gravitate to, and it's very personal and emotional work. So what attracted you to this type of practice?
Nicole Garton
Well, Cindy, I'm glad you asked me, and I've actually never shared this before, so I will share with you the genesis of how I got into this area, which was when I was in my early 20s, my sister and I unexpectedly lost our dad. And it was, as you can imagine, extremely traumatic time. But the other piece of it, as people that pass away unexpectedly, they're often not as organized as they would like to be in their estate plan. And as a result of not being as organized as it could have been, it was a very convoluted situation with significant tax, and we unfortunately ended up losing a lot of what he had built. And the accountant who assisted us with that estate is actually Brian Doherty, who's now my business partner in Heritage Trust. And so that's actually the first time I've shared that. So Brian and I had that experience together. And the genesis of Heritage Trust was to help families basically not just bounce back, but bounce forward in terms of our family and not teaching other families good preventative strategies to ensure that they leave their legacy. And the legacy isn't just financial, it's family, it's intellectual, it's philanthropic and ensuring that everything they worked for, they're able to leave to their families in an organized and efficient manner.
Cindy Radu
Love that bounce forward. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I'm very privileged that you did that with us for the first time. I want to move into this idea of organizing affairs. And I think there's probably quite a bit of misconception about who needs to organize their affairs. And I'm sure you've got this similar experience. Like I hear people say all the time, oh, my estate's really simple, or we don't have that much, or our kids are going to sort it out. Is this something that you've experienced? And how do you or how would you respond to people who come at this idea of estate planning and organizing their estate from this perspective?
Nicole Garton
So I think people realize that they should be organized, but I think there's two factors preventing them. And I think number one is the natural human inclination to procrastinate things that are stressful or difficult. Right. People don't necessarily want to face existential questions of mortality and, you know, it feels overwhelming and so, you know, it's just like getting your teeth cleaned or getting your car serviced or something like that. It's like something that you know you should do, but it's easy to push off to another day. So I think that's definitely a factor that all of us have probably experienced at some time. And then I think the second piece that holds people back is the perfection as the enemy have done, and that I think they feel like not just organizing, but also their estate plan generally. So half of Canadians, shockingly, have done no planning at all. And you think, well, why is that? And I think people sometimes get immobilized because they think, well, this is so important and I want to make sure that it's exactly perfect. And that prevents them from sort of the messy first steps of just getting started and getting the basics done.
Nicole Garton
So I think those are the two factors that hold people back.
Cindy Radu
How can we encourage them to move forward? Obviously, one of the tools is this book that you've created, this organization for state organizers, the estate organizer, and what kind of conversations do you have people to say, yeah, let's get this started? It feels like a lot, but how do we actually get people taking the first step?
Nicole Garton
So what I would say is something is better than nothing. In the book, we have one of the chapters is what to do if time is short. So as estate planners, we all encounter when we end up having to gown up and go into the hospital to do death benefit. So some people really leave it to the last minute. So we have a chapter which is, what do you do if time is really short? And maybe I'll just go back to the book itself. So in the book itself, it's actually a very easy read intentionally. And what we have is a link on one of the pages, which just has word forms. And so what you can do is download the forms onto your computer, and then you can actually just print them and write on them, or you can actually just go into the word and just enter the information that way. But we do have what would you do if time was really short? And I think what I would do is there's personal information, personal info and ID, and then there's the digital information, and also just making sure you've got your bread and butter documents.
Nicole Garton
So a basic will, a basic enduring power of attorney. So you could go to those forms, and if you just did personal info, digital info, and just made sure you had basic documents done, that would be 100% better than nothing. And even if you did that alone, it would leave your family that much more ahead of the curveball, I guess you might say, if something did happen to you.
Cindy Radu
Okay, and so what if you've got somebody like that says, again, our situation is so simple, my kids are going to be able to take care of everything. How do we kind of move the needle on that?
Nicole Garton
The average North American has 100 digital accounts, right? So I think it's like defined simple. So what is your biographical data? So what is your date of birth and the date of birth and project information of your beneficiaries? Where are your important ID documents? What is the login info for social media accounts? Your family can access it. Where do you bank? Even the most simple estate plan is going to have that fundamental information that's going to be critically important. Where is your will? So I would say even if you think, oh, it's really straightforward, there's still critical pieces of information that if you don't have it documented somewhere, then your family is going to be scrambling to try to figure it out.
Cindy Radu
So this idea of, again, we kind of get our wills and our personal directives and powers of attorney, whatever they're called in the province that people live in, in place. And then I would think most people would say, okay, that's it, I'm done. I've got all my affairs in order, and I've told my kids that my will is in this box in the basement, underneath the giant thing of paper towels from Costco or whatever it is. Why should people then go this next step? Because the workbook which I've looked at, I think it's fabulous. It's not a 1 hour project. There's a fair bit involved there. So what really should be the motivation for getting organized in the event of possible capacity or eventual death?
Nicole Garton
So I think motivation number one is making sure that things are done the way you would like them to be done. So there's a section after I'm gone where you can actually specify what you want. So do you want to be cremated or we actually have one estate right now where on the opposite end of the continuum, she wants a gold casket. By the way, those are hard to find. So whatever it is that is your intention, do you want an obituary? If so, what are the critical pieces of information? Or maybe you want complete and total privacy. Do you want a funeral or memorial? And what is important? And so sometimes people say, I don't want anything. And what I say to them sometimes is, well, it's not for you. Or we've had things where I had one where they said, we want only Bob Marley played in an open bar. So whatever it is that's important to you, number one, it's like you get to determine what happens. So if you don't write this stuff down or tell anybody or if it's not easily accessible, then something totally contrary to your wishes could occur.
Nicole Garton
So that's reason number one. And reason number two is if you're not organized, your executor slash family members will be scrambling and stressed, right? So what I find is that particularly if someone passes away unexpectedly when they come into the office, they're of course, immediately in shock and grieving. But what the most immediate stress is often that we see is people are scrambling to say, was their life insurance. What did they want for funeral? Oh my gosh, where's the keys? We want to notify these critically important people, but we can't locate their contact information. Like people, the family is actually often immediately really quite stressed out about those scrambly things to find critical pieces of paper and information. So save your family that stress if you can, by at least having this organized in one place and knowing where it is. So I'd say, number one, you get what you want. And number two, you save your family from more stress and upset than they're already going to feel.
Cindy Radu
So we're going to dive into the book, and I'm going to ask you to walk us through the estate organizer book itself. But one of the (things I) recall in a prior conversation that's very interesting that people probably don't think about is their pets. And you've shared an interesting example about people and pets and how important it is to think about our furry friends.
Nicole Garton
So that's actually a really good example. So if somebody dies unexpectedly and there's pets, there's immediate issues. So we've had some scenarios where somebody died unexpectedly. We actually went and picked up doggie. So we ended up as inheritors' trust, as executors, so we're not going to take doggy to ASPCA for goodness sakes, right, so we actually take the animals right into our homes. But we're talking like immediate things like what is the particular food and when do they get it, do they have medication, where's the vet, what particular person would you like to have this dog? And I mean those are critical pieces of information that we just end up guessing at. And one of the dogs, we ended up, it was actually really nice. There was a dog walker, so the person was a really busy professional and there was a dog walker service that walked the dog and one of the dog walkers just loved the dog, but that person died intestate, which means they didn't have any will. And so this dog walker loved the dog and wanted to take the dog but they didn't have a ton of money and the dog wasn't super young.
Nicole Garton
So what we ended up doing was negotiating with the beneficiaries to agree that they would give $10,000 to this individual that was going to take the dog. So it ended up being okay, we ended up finding somebody that really loved the dog and we ended up convincing the beneficiaries to basically allocate that person funds. But they could have gone different ways. We may have had no clue. The beneficiaries might have been nasty. We had another one where she had two dogs and one was just a puppy and one was older and actually had diabetes and needed like shots and things like that. And again there was no provision with respect to who should get the dog and there was no allocation of funds for the dog. And again you've got a diabetes elder dog. I mean that is a huge logistical, but also financial burden. So those are really good examples where you know how much we love our pets and they truly are part of our family. So just indicating who gets the animal, where the vet is, what the particular feeding or medication things are, and also making sure that there's fence set aside is critically important.
Cindy Radu
So I'd like to dive into the resource and the proper name of it is called Before It's Too Late the Estate Organizer for Canadians. We will have people hopefully that are interested in this that are outside of Canada. So can you just comment before we get into it on its applicability in other jurisdictions?
Nicole Garton
So this actually would be useful to any people in other jurisdictions. There's actually a good book in the US. It's a Nolo print and I think it's called, I can't remember the exact title, but it's very similar and the publisher is Nolo. So if you're in the States, you can use that one. And when we do I think the notes, I'll get the exact title and link to it, but this would actually be pretty usable. For example, a US resident. So where we refer to RSPs, you could just say that means 401K in the States, right? So it's actually not that different. Or you could just use the Nolo product or equivalent tools in the States. But I think the first thing is you're going to create a quote binder, but it doesn't have to be paper. I think there's like three options. So number one is all paper. One, number two is sort of half paper and number three is all digital. So if you wanted to do all paper, what you would do is when we've got instructions here, you just go to Staples or your local supply store, you purchase a binder.
Nicole Garton
It should be pretty thick. If you're going to go all paper, make sure it's sort of three or four inches thick and you're going to want to get some tabs and you're going to want to have those sheets that you can stick the clear sheets that have the whole tabs that you can stick documents in. So pick up some of those. And then what you could do is just photocopy the because the book actually has all the forms or you can even actually even just pull them out of the book if you liked and then just whole punch them. Or you can go to the link at the front of the book where you can just print them and then you could just handwrite on the forms. The forms are very user friendly and then in each section there's a recommendation that you have photocopies of important documents and then at the end in the plastic sleeves, you can put all the original documents. So it'll be sort of a one stop shop. So that would be all paper or a hybrid. Thing is you could download the forms, update them in Word so you're not handwriting them, but then also have the original documents.
Nicole Garton
Or you could go all digital which means you could update the documents in Word and then you could use a service like Dropbox or Google for example, and then give your executor or trusted family members access to that particular document. And then what you would need to do is have a secure location for your original documents. So we actually recommend that you buy a small safe and you keep it in your house and you make sure that important people have the access to the safe. The other options are you can use a safety deposit box or you could use a lawyer's vault just in practice. I'm adverse to safety deposit boxes because it's actually difficult to get into the boxes so the banks don't make it easy. And the other thing is, in the fine print I find this actually kind of hilarious, but they don't guarantee the content. I don't know this is something that people don't know, but in the fine print of the safety deposit box contract, they don't promise you that it's secure. And I've had, over the years, two scenarios where the box was just not there. Oh, my I've been practicing over 20 years, but yeah, two times the Oops just not there.
Nicole Garton
It's difficult to get in, and there's no guarantee. And plus, you have to pay for it. So I think that's a bad option. But, I mean, people should make their own decision about what they feel comfortable with. The other thing you could do is you could use a lawyer's vault. So we have a vault at our office, for example, and sometimes what clients do is they create their binder and they put it in a sealed envelope. And we'll often hold people's original wills and powers of attorney. And so what we do is we just stick the sealed envelope into the vault next to their will. The good thing is that secure and we don't charge people. But the thing is that you want to update this over time. And so if you have it in a lawyer's office, that's kind of a hassle if you want to access it or grab some documents. And so based on that, I think the best option is to have just a small safe and stick it in your house somewhere and then just tell your beneficiaries and or executors where it is and make sure they've got the code.
Cindy Radu
Excellent advice. Just on the safety deposit box. I actually had sent your resource here to a number of people, but I'm the executor on my parents. Well, and I was over there and he said, okay, I learned so much from this that I thought I had everything in order, but there are a bunch of things that I've missed. And he said, and by the way, the bank, the safety deposit box where the original documents was, they have closed that branch down. So it's all here at home. Now, that's another gyration of that. So what do you need to do? Like we talked about, getting a binder, go to Staples, you get your tabs. But how do you actually again, logistically, I think this might seem overwhelming for people, but what are some simple steps people can take to not make it seem overwhelming?
Nicole Garton
So I've got the book in front of me. So I think the first thing is you're going to decide paper, digital, or in between, and then you're going to go get your supplies, and then you're going to figure out where you're going to store your binder. So you want to figure that out pretty soon because you're going to be collecting all your critical documents. So figure out before you get organized where the secure place you're going to store it, and then you're going to want to get started. So there's sort of two ways to do it. So you know the Marie Kondo house organization thing. Her strategy if you ever read her book is you're basically going to allocate a weekend and you're just going to go bananas, organize your whole house. So you could do it that way. Like you could allocate a couple of days and you could collect all your important contacts, your important and official documents, all your financial accounts and asset information, your home and vehicle info, all your ID and all your digital estate and asset info. And we actually have a form in the book that is like a checklist to get organized.
Nicole Garton
You could do that and just collect it in one big pile and then just go for it and just create the binder from start to finish. But some people are going to say that's just going to be horrendous and I don't have the time or I just don't want to spend like two days doing this. So the other thing you could do is and by the way, it doesn't have to take two days, but however long you want to do it. But the other way you could do is you could just go section by section, right? So I mean I think that would be my preferred thing is just say, okay, if I'm going to do this over four Sundays, I'm going to do it 1 hour and I'm just going to just go section by section. So what we have is our sections are personal info and ID and then is when. And then digital info is when real estate and personal property, your financial information, your legal documents, and your sort of funeral information. So those would be the individual sections. So you basically decide, am I just going to do this in one fell swoop or am I just going to allocate it in chunks over time.
Nicole Garton
And everybody has their different ways of working. So you'll know yourself.
Nicole Garton
So for time is short, I'm just going to go to that page, which is page 93. So if time is short, what we say is number one, get your basic estate documents in place. So a simple will, a simple enduring power of attorney, and a health care directive. So get that done. And again, you don't have to be fancy. So I would say if you're simple, which is not a US citizen, nobody's First Nations, you don't have a blended family, which means you've got a second or third or fourth marriage. You don't have a disabled beneficiary, you don't have a significant conflict. Your state is 5 million or less, which is the vast majority of people. If those are your circumstances, you could go like there's extremely good notaries. You could go to your neighborhood notary and just get a simple will, simple power of attorney, and simple healthcare directive. If you tick the box of the things that I just mentioned, you should go to an estate planning lawyer that specializes in this. And again, it doesn't have to be horrendous or expensive, but you want to go to somebody who has that particular expertise, because it's going to save you a ton of money and time on the other side.
Nicole Garton
So that was a long way to say just get your legal documents in place, number one. Number two, I would say do the digital information because that actually is something that people really can't find. And then number three is the personal information. Like a lot of the biographical data people scramble to find. If you do that, you're good.
Cindy Radu
So, Nicole, I just want to ask you about will kits. What's your view on will kits? Like, if somebody went to Staples or some other stationery supply store?
Nicole Garton
So I don't think you can really find will kits as much anymore in Staples. Like, I've actually had funny experiences where clients actually dragged themselves into my office because they couldn't find the Will kitten staples. But you can do a lot of stuff online, so there's a lot of online will providers. So what do I think about that? I mean, something is better than nothing. And maybe if you are truly simple, like you didn't tick the boxes, it would be okay. But the reality that people should know is nobody wants to go to a lawyer because they don't want to spend the money and stuff like that.
Nicole Garton
But what people need to know is, like, will kits or their online substitutes now are huge sources of business for estate litigators. So people that make boo boos or don't appreciate some sort of complexity that they weren't aware of and they do a will kit and it's a mess, are just giving money to lawyers later and then giving a legacy of stress, delay, and expense to their beneficiaries. So it's mostly not worth it. And again, if you're an individual and you come to a lawyer, like, a basic estate plan for a lawyer is usually like about $2,000.
Nicole Garton
I mean, that's not nothing, but it's, in the scheme of things, dramatically less than what litigation would be. And I think notaries will even charge less, and it's worth the minimal, I'm not discounting $2,000 is a lot of money for people, but it is worth it to get it done properly in terms of saving expense, delay, and potential conflict later for your family.
Cindy Radu
I'd like to talk a little bit as well about digital assets. So this is something that I think is number one, there's the passwords part of it, but there's also like photos. People don't realize the full range of what would be in that category of digital assets. So can you expand a bit more on that for us?
Nicole Garton
So let's talk about digital assets. There's things that are digital assets themselves, which are like important photos or crypto, or if you own URLs and things like that, those are actual digital assets. But then there's digital information, which is like the log on to get to your brokerage account, for example, right, the log on to get into Facebook, for example. So let's sort of delineate those two things. So one of the things I would say is every digital company has their own procedure for what happens if people become incapable or pass away. And it's actually quite complex and difficult to actually get in. So one thing that if you look at the book, or if you read about this online, is a lot of the digital companies now have legacy contacts. So for example, facebook, now called meta, google, Apple, you can actually go in. And if you go into their settings, the book has how you get into it. But for all of those entities, you can actually appoint a legacy contact. So if something happens, and LinkedIn, similarly, if something happens to you, then somebody has control of the account. People often get really upset about not being able to access these digital or social media accounts.
Nicole Garton
And I've had disconcerting things where there is a professional that I was very close to, and obviously nobody can get into his LinkedIn because I just got a notification congratulate him on 20 years at this company and he passed away eight years ago of cancer. It's concerning not to be able to access these accounts. So number one, do that. But the other thing is, photos for example, are often deeply valuable to families. And if you can't get into Facebook, that's it. You don't get those critical family photos, which is often the most important thing. And so one of the things we say is just identify what the most important photos are and then download them into some sort of hard drive that you control because you don't want to have your critical family members controlled by some company. And then the other thing is, I think with older people that have passed away, we've been able to reverse engineer their finances and information generally. Okay, so if older people pass away, we can go into their office and they're often and this is a stereotype, but they're often still more paper based. And so we can basically go into their files, redirect their mail, and basically figure out where they bank and things like that.
Nicole Garton
But some people have passed away in their fifties, and that is... We have an estate where there's a significant amount of assets in bitcoin, and we don't have the key. So. We just cannot find the key. So we've hired very expensive IT people to basically comb the laptop and a computer to see if we can find it. And also a lot of people bank online and there is no paper record. And so the reality is that you could end up not finding critical assets. So we have one estate where somebody tragically passed away. And so what we're doing right now is she was only in her late 30s. So what we do now is we've got an address of every financial institution that we're aware of and we do a sort of blanket mail out with the death certificate and we found like $80,000 at CIBC that nobody knew anything about. But there's all kinds of online banks where they offer offer high interest rates and things like that and your family might not find that information. So I would say, number one, make sure you protect your photos. Not that many people have sophisticated digital assets and not themselves, but almost everybody has photos, so protect those.
Nicole Garton
Number two, appoint a legacy contact for those social media accounts so somebody can go in and turn your page into a memorial page or close it, whatever your wishes are. And number three, make sure that you've got like a list of what your online accounts are and that the username and password are. And one thing I should mention is it's actually technically a breach of almost every user agreement to actually give your username and password. So if you at least say where, if it's TD or RBC or BM or whatever it is, just say I'm with TD Direct Invest or whatever it is, just make sure you disclose that. And then your executor is actually technically not allowed to log in, by the way, but at least they know about it so they can notify that organization and at least get access that way.
Cindy Radu
And is that the same with Power of attorney? How does that work with power of attorney documents?
Nicole Garton
Similarly. Right, so the power of attorney would again, you're technically, as POA, you're not actually supposed to log into the financial institution using the username and password. I know people do and I'm not judging them, but it's technically against your user agreement. So what you're supposed to do is get materials, certified copy of the POA and your ID, get it to the bank, and then they'll get you access that way.
Cindy Radu
Excellent. Nicole, our time has quickly gone by. We could talk probably for another hour, I'm sure. Can you just if you have one or two key takeaways for our listeners that you'd like to share, I think.
Nicole Garton
Roughly done is 100% better than not done. Just like the basics. Honestly, you're so much further ahead than doing nothing. And then I would say there is research that people that have undone tasks or live in messy environments, like if you measure their cortisol, it's actually higher and so it's sort of like life with those sort of annoying tasks that you should do but you put off. Once you actually do it, you're going to feel more clear and in control. Once you organize all your personal and financial information and documents in one place, you're going to feel more organized and in control. And then you're also going to know that you're not leaving sort of a mess for people and important people. And so I would argue that that's going to free up your mind space for what really matters, which is being present and enjoying your life and focusing on whatever it is that gives you meaning. So I would say, yes, it's annoying. And who wants to spend their Saturday organizing financial paperwork? Like nobody or nobody normal anyway. But on the other side of it, not only are you making it better for your family, but I would argue it's better for you, too.
Cindy Radu
Well, I think that's a perfect note to end this chat on, and I'm really just so grateful that you shared your time with us on this Tamarind Learning podcast. I, as I mentioned, have personally shared your book with family, friends and clients with tremendously positive feedback. So I encourage everybody to either download a copy or where can they buy a copy if they prefer the hard copy, Nicole.
Nicole Garton
So you can buy it on Amazon. Amazon. Just go to Before It's Too Late and you'll find it.
Cindy Radu
Excellent. Well, thank you so very much and look forward to hopefully having another chat with you at some point in the future.
Nicole Garton
Sure. Thank you so much Cindy
