Welcome back to Diary of a Financial Advisor! In today’s episode, we’re tackling an often overlooked—but extremely important—aspect of personal finance: estate planning. Joining me for this conversation is our frequent guest, Kobe Bolanos, an advisor with BFG Financial Advisors who brings tremendous energy and advocacy for financial literacy. Kobe’s background includes experience in investment operations and advisory, as well as active involvement with the Baltimore County Bar Association and the Baltimore Estate Planning Council’s Emerging Planners Group.
In this discussion, Kobe and I dove into the “alphabet soup” of estate planning, exploring why regular reviews of beneficiary designations are crucial. We examined the risks of neglecting financial and medical powers of attorney, particularly for young adults and families going through life changes like marriage, parenthood, and home ownership. Our conversation covered practical tips for simplifying asset transfers and preventing common mistakes—such as out-of-date beneficiary forms that can unintentionally disinherit loved ones or leave money to unintended recipients. I also shared insights on the importance of coordinating legal documents with financial decisions and reiterated the need for ongoing education regardless of where you are in your financial journey.
Kobe’s perspective underscored the generational benefits of good estate planning, and he shared his passion for making these topics accessible to younger professionals and families. We wrapped up by highlighting how reviewing your documents, maintaining clear communication within families, and being intentional about these decisions can prevent heartache and confusion down the line.
5 Key Takeaways:
Review Beneficiary Designations Annually: A beneficiary designation on an account or insurance policy trumps the instructions in your will, so it’s vital to check and update these designations every year, especially after major life events.
Understand and Use TOD/POD Accounts: Transfer on Death (TOD) and Payable on Death (POD) accounts are simple ways to ensure assets go to the intended recipient without passing through probate. Even vehicles in Maryland can have beneficiary designations.
Don’t Forget Powers of Attorney: Medical and financial powers of attorney are essential documents for everyone over 18. They allow trusted individuals to make decisions if you are incapacitated and shouldn’t be delayed, even for young adults.
Communicate Roles and Responsibilities: Assigning someone as a healthcare or financial agent is a big responsibility. Talk to your family about why you’ve made your choices and make sure everyone knows what’s expected to avoid unnecessary conflict or confusion.
Align Legal Documents with Your State of Residence: Laws vary significantly between states, and moving to a new state means you should review and update your estate planning documents accordingly to ensure they remain valid and effective.
We hope this episode inspires you to take action on your estate plan, whether you’re just starting out or revisiting your existing documents. As always, subscribe, rate, and share Don’t Retire… Graduate! with anyone looking to take control of their financial future and legacy. And for more resources, visit bfguniversity.com.
Eric Brotman [00:00:01]:
This is Eric Brotman, Chairman of the Board and Chief Growth Officer of BFG Financial Advisors. Welcome to our webinar series, Diary of a Financial Advisor, where our BFG team talks about current events in financial planning and shares their professional journeys and their passion for helping others succeed. Today, I’m pleased to be joined by our frequent guest, Kobe Bolanos. Kobe joined BFG Financial Advisors in August 2021, going on five years.
Kobe Bolanos [00:00:26]:
Pretty good.
Eric Brotman [00:00:27]:
He joined as an investment operations associate. He transitioned to The Advisory Team 2022. He’s born and raised in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and later relocated to Maryland. And he’s now working with lead advisors to develop and update clients financial plans and to prepare for client meetings. He embodies our mission of spreading financial literacy, and he’s passionate about helping families gain the knowledge and resources they need to encourage quality financial decisions for generations. Kobe, welcome back.
Kobe Bolanos [00:00:53]:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like I’m a regular now.
Eric Brotman [00:00:56]:
You are. I mean, you’re almost a co host. Almost. In fact, you might just take over this host. I might be retiring. We’re graduating.
Kobe Bolanos [00:01:02]:
We might have to rebrand the name a little bit.
Eric Brotman [00:01:04]:
A little bit personalize. We. We can do that. So today, what. What I thought we would talk about, because it’s a new year, is some of the estate planning types of things that. That clients that all of us need to consider doing just on an annual basis, just to refresh, to update. And you know, Kobe, you’ve been working with the Baltimore County Bar association and also with the Baltimore State Planning Council, the Emerging Planners Group. Um, and I wondered if you would start by just talking a little bit about why those two groups were appealing to you and why you wanted to get involved in this.
Eric Brotman [00:01:35]:
And then we’ll give some folks a couple of tips they can take with them today.
Kobe Bolanos [00:01:38]:
Yeah, yeah, sure. Thanks. You know, I think estate planning, for one, for me, it’s something that’s not very quantifiable. And you know what I mean by that is, you know, when you go on the news and you’re on the Internet, you’re seeing, you know, Your portfolio is up 3, 4%, but you never see that your will or your financial POA is up or down 2 or 3%. So it’s something that I think people neglect a lot. And I think there’s a lot of importance to it. And unfortunately, in these situations, you know, you don’t realize it, that it’s so important until the bad thing happens. And that’s where we see a lot of clients that come to us or new people of that, you know, they’re saying, you know, I’m so thankful that we had legal documents in place or we didn’t have legal documents in place.
Kobe Bolanos [00:02:19]:
Can you help me? Because this is such a mess. So I think that was really, you know, why I got into it, to bring, you know, focus and importance to that area of financial planning that I think it gets neglected a lot.
Eric Brotman [00:02:29]:
So the financial planning has six key components to it, of which estate planning is one. And just to be clear, none of us here at BFG are lawyers. We’re not lawyers. Some of us speak lawyer, we play one on tv, but we are, in fact, not lawyers. We do not practice law. We do not draft legal documents. And so as a result, our role is really to help with the financial impact of legal decisions and also to coordinate the beneficiary designations, the asset titling and things on financial accounts and insurance policies and other things with the estate documents. Now, if someone out there has an IRA account and their IRA account, let’s say you have an IRA account and you’ve named our friend Manny as the beneficiary, but your will says, I leave everything to my friend Eric.
Eric Brotman [00:03:19]:
What happens if you die?
Kobe Bolanos [00:03:20]:
Unfortunately, it’s all going to go to Manny and it’s not going to go to you based on the beneficiary designation trumping that, which I think a lot of people don’t necessarily understand until, you know, we. Someone brings it to their attention. And I realize that, oh, I probably should have made that update, but, you know, if there’s not a quarterback, and that’s where we come into play to, you know, navigate all of that, you know, that would never be adjusted.
Eric Brotman [00:03:43]:
So. And just to be clear, because you, in fact, aren’t leaving anything to me, and now my feelings are hurt this morning. But just to be clear, if there are accounts with beneficiary designations, life insurance policies, health savings accounts, IRAs, 401ks, 403bs for federal employees Thrift Savings Plans, anything that has a beneficiary designation. The beneficiary designation supersedes anything in the will because the will only will govern those assets that pass through the probable estate, which is legalese for anything that didn’t have a beneficiary on it or a survivor on it. Correct. So there are also accounts where they’re not IRAs and they’re not life insurance policies, but they’re individual accounts. And you can add what’s called a todi. Want to talk a little bit about that?
Kobe Bolanos [00:04:27]:
Yeah. So. So the todi, it’s kind of similar to a business beneficiary designation on the ira. It’s just for after tax accounts. So, you know, your Fidelity brokerage account, if you don’t want it to go through the probate process for the beneficiary, you’ll just simply add it to that. Or you have the pod, what you do to bank accounts as well, which is the same process as well. I know you can add pods to cars now. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can add a beneficiary designation on things that are not retirement accounts to, you know, not have things flow through the will, if that’s what you.
Kobe Bolanos [00:04:57]:
So please.
Eric Brotman [00:04:58]:
All right.
Kobe Bolanos [00:04:59]:
Situation’s different.
Eric Brotman [00:04:59]:
So we’ve thrown out a bunch of Alphabet soup. T O, D, I is transfer on death. Individual POD is payable upon death, which is weird because upon starts with a U, so I guess it’s payable on death. Yeah. But nonetheless, you get the point. And. And Kobe’s right. The.
Eric Brotman [00:05:15]:
The.
Eric Brotman [00:05:15]:
Even here in the state of Maryland, you can. You can add a beneficiary designation to your vehicle. You know, we often encourage people not to have cars, even married people, not to have cars titled jointly because it can impact liability in the event of an accident. And so it’s sometimes better to have cars titled individually, but you don’t want to have to wait until the will is probated and the estate is settled to figure out who’s actually getting the car. So by having a beneficiary designation, I think the DMV charges 30 or $40 or something nominal to do that. And it’s worth considering. Now, sometimes we want things to run through the estate, sometimes for either tax reasons or dispositive reasons, we want that, and sometimes we don’t. Yeah.
Eric Brotman [00:06:02]:
And in Maryland, because the limit for passing assets free of estate tax is so much lower than federally, it’s something we have to think about quite a lot. And a lot of times people don’t realize that if you own a life insurance policy on yourself, that policy. You’re apparently not leaving me either. If you own a policy on yourself, the death benefit of that policy is actually includable in your estate, which could be a very large number. It’s not just the. The cash value or the nominal unearned premiums. It could be the whole death benefit. And the state of Maryland has plans for some of your money if you don’t.
Eric Brotman [00:06:34]:
So. So here it’s especially important. We are the only state in the US as of this moment that has both an estate tax and an inheritance tax. We’re very proud of our ability to continue to tax coming and going. Yeah. But let’s talk about some other documents while we’ve got time because, you know, one of the takeaways today, I think is check your beneficiaries on absolutely everything. Yeah. And don’t just assume you did it right.
Eric Brotman [00:06:58]:
If you, if you have an account, a 401k or something with a former employer, if you have life insurance that you bought 12 years ago and since that time you’ve gotten married or divorced or had children or your life has changed materially, sometimes by accident, it’s just something we don’t think about.
Kobe Bolanos [00:07:15]:
Yeah.
Eric Brotman [00:07:15]:
And by accident you can disinherit one of your kids. You could leave money to your ex wife, which I don’t think any of us want to do, generally.
Kobe Bolanos [00:07:22]:
Sure.
Eric Brotman [00:07:23]:
And so generally speaking, you should check your beneficiaries once a year. Legal documents don’t have to be updated every year for sure, but you should at least read them over and make sure they’re what you want. But in addition to the will, there’s two documents that I think people need to start with even before they have any assets. Talk about those.
Kobe Bolanos [00:07:41]:
Yeah. So one being, you know, the medical power of attorney. So you know what that is, is that lets someone, you know, if something happens to you and you can’t act on your own interest, they’re able to make health decisions for you. Why is that such a big thing? Like I said, if something happens and you’re no longer able to, to act on your behalf, you want someone that you trust to, you know, quote, unquote, handle your life or your, your health decisions. You know, once you turn 18 and, and you know, your kids go off to school, you think as, as the parent, that if something happens to them and they’re in the hospital, that you can just get information on them right away, but that’s not necessarily the case because they’re an adult. And then on the other side, the financial side, kind of similar to it as well, if, say you’re out of the country and you need someone to handle a financial affair for you, you know, you want to have someone do that or else maybe a bill is not going to get paid or, or you’re away from something like that. So it’s just, you know, with, if a bad thing does happen, you have those trusted individuals that you have that are able to handle things so you don’t really miss a beat in the interim.
Eric Brotman [00:08:38]:
So there’s, there’s a lot of ways to accomplish this. One of them is by having a durable financial power of attorney. And I do think as soon as your offspring are 18, they should have that. Yeah. Because it will allow you or your spouse, else in the family or other trusted person to, to act for them to essentially sign their names. I mean, a lot of parents don’t know this, but when your kids go off to college, unlike high school, where you can request their grades in college, you can’t even get their grades, even if you’re the one paying the tuition, because they’re an adult and it won’t be shared with you. Same thing’s true with medical. If, if you’re, you know, heaven forbid, you have a son or daughter or something and they’re in a car accident and decisions have to get made, and these don’t have to be end of life decisions.
Eric Brotman [00:09:19]:
It might just be, it might just be a medical decision and somebody’s not in a state of mind where they can answer. Physicians are afraid to act and be wrong. Yeah. And, you know, I always encourage people, and again, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not practicing law, but I encourage people to name a single individual and not a class of individuals. You know, if you’ve got three children and you name all three of them to be your health care agent, these three kids, if you’ll recall, couldn’t agree on where to have dinner or what movie to see. They may not agree on something that huge under duress. So name one. Communicate to your kids why you’re naming that one, because then you’re less likely to have conflict when the time comes.
Eric Brotman [00:09:59]:
Yeah. And of course, ask the one child you’ve requested, you’ve, you’ve assigned this responsibility to, to confer with his or her siblings and, and other family members when the time comes. But ultimately you need the doctors, the lawyers, the bankers, all the people to essentially listen to one person.
Kobe Bolanos [00:10:16]:
Yeah, no, and I think that’s a great point that you bring that up, that letting the people know who you’ve named as a responsible party. Because sometimes people just run into a situation where, oh so and so passed away. I’m the personal representative for their estate. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what to do with that. And it’s, it becomes very overwhelming. And I don’t think that was ever the intent when people were doing this. I just think, you know, it’s such a, it’s a conversation that, you know, you think about the end or you can’t do anything.
Kobe Bolanos [00:10:42]:
And, and we’re such control freaks in, in our nature. So I think people, you know, relinquishing that control and then going through that process, it’s tough and it’s something that you have to think about. It’s not something that you make in a, in a five minute, you know, thought process.
Eric Brotman [00:10:55]:
I would totally agree with you and your involvement. As we get ready to close today, hopefully everyone has, has taken this to heart. And we’ll check. Beneficiaries, look at your legal documents and if you don’t have them, please, we can help with that. We have a service that we work with that can help do really simple documents. We can refer you to one or more estate attorneys in your state of residence. If you’ve moved, you need to have your documents reviewed in the state where you now reside. It’s really important.
Eric Brotman [00:11:23]:
The laws are completely different in the 50 different states. And, and you need to make sure that what you’ve done, what you’ve done in Virginia will be fine. Now that you’re in Nevada or whatever it is. Talk a little bit about the estate planning council and why that’s important to you and then we’ll, we’ll get ready to close that out.
Kobe Bolanos [00:11:38]:
Yeah, you know, it’s super important to me just because, um, you know, where I am in my career right now, I see a lot of people, I’m on the younger side, so I see a lot of people neglect that area. And you know, when you walk in the room, it’s a little bit older, but people like you said, my age, they all need those documents. And I think being that younger voice to bring importance and be an advocate for it is super important. You know, where I am in my life right now, a lot of my friends and my family are going through, you know, huge life changes. Getting their first big job or, you know, buying their first house, getting married, having a kid. And like you said, it’s something that you need to all review on an ongoing basis because, you know, when you were 21, you might have just named mom and dad, but now that you have two or three kids on the way, you might want to, you know, look to name someone else as a beneficiary or else. Like you said, as, as we mentioned previously, those, those beneficiaries are going to supersede whatever you think is going to happen.
Eric Brotman [00:12:28]:
All right, well, for the record, number one, by saying you were on the young side, you were implying that I was on the old side. And number two, you just said that I could have two or three kids on the way. I do not. So just for the record, I have no kids on the way. Just. Just to be clear.
Kobe Bolanos [00:12:40]:
Clear.
Eric Brotman [00:12:40]:
Yeah. Thanks for doing this again. You’re always a pleasure to work with. And, and you know your stuff. And the Estate Planning Council’s better off for having you there. And, and I know you’re. You’re bringing good ideas back to BFG and to all of our clients. And Kobe, I thank you for that.
Kobe Bolanos [00:12:52]:
Thank you. I appreciate you for having me.
Eric Brotman [00:12:54]:
Like to thank everybody for watching and listening today. If you enjoy our webinar, please subscribe so we can continue to be a part of your journey to financial freedom. We’ll be back in two weeks with another entry in our diary of a financial advisor. And for more free content and great resources, visit bfguniversity.com we also encourage you to check out our podcast, Don’t Retire Graduate, which releases interviews with remarkable guests every other Thursday. For now, thanks for joining us. We’ll see you again in two weeks. Take care, everybody.
Eric Brotman [00:13:26]:
Securities offered through Kestra Investment Services, llc. Kestra is member finra, sipc Invisible Investment Advisory Services offered through Kestra Advisory Services, llc. Kestra as an affiliate of Kestra is Kestra is or Kestra as are not affiliated with Brotman Financial or any other entity discussed.