Don’t know where to start? You’re not alone. Heiple Law Office has taken the guesswork out of knowing where to start when thinking about preparing a will. I sat down with Jeremy Heiple Principle of Heiple Law Offices to talk about wills and estate planning as a preview to the conversation we’ll have on March 7th at the free estate planning seminar at our real estate office at 3622 N Knoxville Ave in Peoria, located at the southeast corner of War Memorial and Knoxville Ave.
Missed the seminar? Fortunately, we videoed the event. We’re working on a digital download of the will and estate planning seminar. You can take control of what happens after you pass. You can tell your loved ones you love them but you can show them how much by reaching out to Heiple Law Offices to start the process today.
Transcription on the interview:
[00:00:00.030] – Mike Van Cleve
Hi, I’m Mike Van Cleve, realtor with Mike Van Cleve team at RE MAX Traders Unlimited. I am an expert in real estate here in the Greater Peoria area, providing clients with the information, resources, and counsel to make a great decision when it comes to buying or selling real estate.
[00:00:16.720] – Jeremy Heiple
Hey, everybody, I’m Jeremy Heiple. I’m a lawyer here in Peoria. One of our areas of concentration is estate planning. We help people with things like wills and trusts and powers of attorney. Then we help families later when those documents need to be carried out. Look forward to seeing you at Mike’s seminar in March seventh.
[00:00:32.640] – Mike Van Cleve
Thank you so much for agreeing to sit down with me in preparation for our upcoming estate planning seminar on March seventh. Have some questions prepared for us that I thought we would go through and just give people an idea of what they could expect.
[00:00:51.160] – Jeremy Heiple
On March seventh. Absolutely.
[00:00:53.080] – Mike Van Cleve
We often think about estate planning being something that only wealthy people do. Who else needs a will?
[00:01:01.200] – Jeremy Heiple
There’s a really easy answer. My general advice is you don’t need a plantation to have a plan. Everybody needs to have a will. Talk to anyone who sees what happens when families don’t have this stuff done. Everybody needs a will. But by having a will in place, you have decided who’s in charge and where things are going. With the proper document that’s going to happen, and now instead of having family dysfunction spill over and have all this legal stuff superimposed on top of it. We actually have some legal tranquility as things get worked out properly.
[00:01:34.780] – Mike Van Cleve
It’s not an expensive process. Can you talk briefly about what somebody could expect from something like a basic.
[00:01:46.520] – Jeremy Heiple
Will preparation call. Yeah, not a costly exercise with our office. Now, I will say some of my colleagues, I think, must do what I call the billfold biopsy. They stick a needle in the wallet and see what they think they can get away with. That’s not how it works here. For the typical couple to get the fundamental documents in place, either a will or living trust, depending on which one is the right vehicle, and a health care power of attorney and a property power of attorney, to get that basic set of documents in place would range perhaps somewhere from $850 to maybe $1,000 depending on what we’re needing to do. But it’s not some thousands, plural of dollars to get that accomplished.
[00:02:23.600] – Mike Van Cleve
Thinking about some of the difficulties that happens when somebody passes, there’s a lot of emotion involved. What do you see being the biggest hurdle that people face in thinking about estate planning or preparing a will?
[00:02:39.460] – Jeremy Heiple
There’s really a couple of things, both psychological, really at their core. One is people do not like to think about dying. The idea, the myth is, Oh, my. If I get my affairs in order, that means I’m going to die. No, there is no connection between you got your plan done and that caused you to pass. That’s not how it works. Having your plan done or not, there’s a day on a calendar we can’t see circled in red, and when that day shows up, it had nothing to do with whether your documents were fine. The other one, though, is really just basic procrastination. I think a lot of folks live in the world of good intentions. One of these days they do want to get around to getting this stuff done. They’ve probably made a resolution a few years in a row of I want to get this thing done. But then life gets busy, other things are in the way, and they just don’t get around to it. So those are really the barriers I see with folks.
[00:03:27.080] – Mike Van Cleve
What are some of the myths or misconceptions that you’d like people to understand?
[00:03:31.440] – Jeremy Heiple
That’s the benefit of the seminar is we’re going to have an opportunity to sit down and explain first some of the jargons. What are these words that are floating around? What do they mean? People talk about trust or living trust and all that thing. I basically give them some good understanding of what are the fundamental documents they need to have, what are the operative terms they should be thinking about, and demystify all of that. But then I walk them through what would be the best path for you, give them some examples and some illustrations. really the real resource for the folks who come to the seminar is you’ve got a thing that doesn’t normally exist, a free lawyer who’s here to answer your questions and give you some concrete recommendations in a setting that it didn’t cost you anything other than your time to come and be a part of the class.
[00:04:17.070] – Mike Van Cleve
Excellent. So if this information was useful to you, I encourage you to join us on March seventh at the RE MAX Traders Unlimited office located at 3622 North Knoxville in Peoria at the corner of War Memorial in Knoxville. And you’re going to want to enter going northbound from Forest Hill towards War Memorial. You can sign up at mikevancleve.com/estate and that website will be linked below.
