The Head and the Heart of Estate Planning with Marvin Blum

Marvin Blum
LinkedIn
The Blum Firm, P.C.

Marvin Blum established The Blum Firm, P.C., over 40 years ago. The firm has law offices in Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, and Houston and specializes in the areas of estate planning and probate, asset protection planning, planning for closely-held businesses, tax planning, tax controversy, and charitable planning. The company has grown to be the largest group of estate planning attorneys in the State of Texas.

Mr. Blum is known for creating customized, cutting-edge estate plans, now serving hundreds of high net worth families, several with a net worth exceeding $1 billion. Mr. Blum was chosen as one of the “Nation’s Top 100 Attorneys” by New York’s Worth magazine, and was also named one of the Top 100 Super Lawyers in Texas by Thomson Reuters. He was selected by his peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers of America – Trusts & Estates. Mr. Blum has had the honor of asking questions to Warren Buffett at Berkshire-Hathaway Annual Meetings three times, attracting international media attention. He is a highly sought-after speaker, has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for his expertise on the estate tax and income tax and also serves on the Editorial Advisory Committee for Trusts & Estates Magazine.

Mr. Blum is dedicated to his community, having previously served as Treasurer of the Fort Worth Symphony for over 40 years, and is a Board Member and Former Presiding Chairman of the Board for The Multicultural Alliance, a service organization fighting bias, bigotry, and racism. Mr. Blum serves as Treasurer for the Texas Cultural Trust to help raise public and legislative awareness of the importance of the arts in Texas, and after serving over 40 years as Treasurer, he is currently on the Emeritus Council of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. He is a member of the national Board of Directors of TIGER 21 and is also a member of The University of Texas School of Law’s Alumni Association Executive Committee. Mr. Blum has also recently been named to the Anti-Defamation League Texoma Board of Directors.

Mr. Blum, an attorney and Certified Public Accountant, is Board Certified in Estate Planning & Probate Law and is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. He earned his BBA (Highest Honors) in Accounting from The University of Texas in 1975, where he graduated first in his class and was named Ernst & Ernst Outstanding Student in Accounting. Mr. Blum received his law degree (High Honors) from The University of Texas School of Law in 1978, where he graduated second in his class and was named the Prentice-Hall Outstanding Student in Taxation. Mr. Blum and his wife, Laurie, reside in Fort Worth, Texas.

 Kirby Rosplock

Welcome to the Tamarind Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirby Rosplock. And today, I am welcoming a very special guest, Marvin Blum. Marvin is a nationally recognized estate planning attorney and CPA with a firm that has been in existence for 40 plus years. Marvin tells me we're talking 47 years, in fact. So we are so lucky to have Marvin because he He's been advising ultra high networth families and is the founding partner of the Blum firm in Fortworth, Texas. But he also has offices in other places like Austin and where else? Marvin In Dallas. In Dallas. Okay, who can forget Dallas? And so I'm so excited to talk to you because he's well known not only for his deep expertise in tax and trust structuring, but for his rare ability to blend both the technical precision of estate planning and trust and tax, but with a heartfelt values-based guidance. So he's really thinking heart and head. And And he's been a long time champion for the idea that estate planning isn't just about saving taxes, which I know a lot of us care a lot about taxes. I know I do. But it's also about protecting legacy and preparing heirs and crafting a future with meaning with our money.

Kirby Rosplock

So today's podcast is really focused on the head and the heart of estate planning and building legacies with intention. So today we're diving into both of these concepts and really excited to talk to you today, Marvin. So welcome.

Marvin Blum

Thank you. I'm excited to be with you today, Kirby.

Kirby Rosplock

So let's jump into the head side of estate planning, because I think that's where I lean first a lot of the time. And let's start with the technical side, what do you see as the most urgent estate planning moves families should be considering today, especially with this looming 2026 exemption sunset?

Marvin Blum

We are living in very uncertain times politically. That's an understatement. And as a result, we really don't know what tax law changes may be coming our way. But here's what we do know. We do know that right now, the conditions for estate planning are better than they have ever been. I started law school 50 years ago. I can tell you in my entire career, this is the best environment for estate planning I have ever seen. And so my urgent advice is take advantage of the opportunities that we have now because they're extraordinary, and we don't know what will be down the road. I want to start with the most obvious, and that is we have this extremely high exemption level. I'm going to call it 14 million. It's $13,990,000. The exemption level, the amount that you can own without having to pay a state tax, but once you get above that level, you get hit with the 40% estate tax on all assets above 14 million. Well, the first piece of advice is to lock that in, because if you do, you'll be grandfathered. Most assuredly, the government will honor the fact that you have already used that exemption.

Marvin Blum

The way you do that is you create some trusts and you begin to move assets into these trusts. There's a lot of different ways. You could pick the version that makes the most sense for you and your family. But you lock in that 14 14 million exemption now because we may be in a use it or lose it situation. The way the law reads right now, the 14 million cuts in half at the end of this year. But we don't know what Congress is going to do. A lot of people speculate that they will manage to extend it. It doesn't matter. If it gets extended, fine. The point is, take advantage of that 14 million. Earlier, the better because once you move the assets into these trusts, any growth that happens after that is out of the estate. So the sooner you do it, the sooner you begin the process of moving even more out of the estate because you're shifting not only the assets, but also the future growth on those assets. And listen, as unpredictable as the government is right now, we don't know what this exemption is going to be down the road.

Marvin Blum

And I suggest now's the time, lock it in.

Kirby Rosplock

Lock it in. So that's your best advice. That sounds like pretty darn good advice to me. So do you feel like your advice to clients has really evolved in response to recent tax and legislative developments? Or has it been... Yeah, for sure.

Marvin Blum

It indeed has. And I can tell you, I want to ride the clock back to 2021. That's where it really began to evolve because it was Because in 2021, which was the first year of Biden's administration, we had what we would refer to as a triple D government. We had a Democratic White House, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate. All of a sudden, these tools that I love to use, which I refer to as squeeze and freeze tools, all of a sudden, all these tools were under attack. They had pretty well been under the radar. Most of the decades I've doing this, no one talked about them. All of a sudden, they were in the spotlight. There were a lot of people in Congress who were up in arms over the opportunities available for the rich to get away with saving millions of millions of dollars of tax. What I discovered is that this toolbox is at risk. We We almost lost it. We came within two votes of losing most of these tools. There were two holdout votes in the Senate, and that's what avoided us losing these tools. But it was a very big wake-up call to me and to my clients, and I preach to everywhere I go now, we're in the golden age of estate planning.

Marvin Blum

Now is the time to take advantage because There will come a day where this toolbox won't have these tools in it. What's very important to know is that in the legislation that almost passed, they provided that anybody who had already used these tools would be grandfathered. We learned that you can do this stuff as long as you get it done before the law changes and you'll be protected. But once the law changes, it's too late, the door shuts. That's a very, very big takeaway from the recent legislative environment that we've been in. It's been a roller coaster environment. Now we have triple R, but with razor-thin majorities, and it's really anyone's guess as to what's going to actually happen. I say, squeeze and freeze right now. Squeeze means take advantage of valuation discounts, put assets into entities like a family limited partnership so that you can shave off some value there and then move the ownership of these entities into some trust where you freeze the value of the entities at today's discounted value and all the future growth is out of the estate. We're very active in squeezing and freezing to the point that we recently saved a client over $1 billion.

Marvin Blum

We recently saved a client over $1 billion. That's my best war story of my 50 your career. I used to talk about the Walton family as the poster child, but they weren't my client. Sam's Club and Walmart, because they've got all this great track record of not having paid estate tax through doing different things. I said, Well, now I have my own war story that's even better. I submit that anybody at any level of wealth can avoid a state tax through proper planning.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah. I think for anyone who's not maybe so familiar with that squeeze concept in discounting, because that might not be so familiar, illiquid, limited partnerships and other tools, but closely held companies, there's not a market. We can't just go out and buy and sell those interests. There's a discounting effect that goes into process when we're looking at those types of assets. So that's what you're talking about with that squeeze principle. And so there are common commonly valued at a lower valuation because there's no market to buy or sell those interests. And so you wouldn't value them at fair market value like you would a stock on the Dow Jones or S&P. So I just would want to add a little color on the clarification because some people might be like, I still don't get the why it's discounted. Why wouldn't it be the same price?

Marvin Blum

And to add to that, if what you own are stocks and marketable assets, What we can do is we can engineer a discount by creating a family limited partnership. You create this FLP, you put the stocks into a partnership, and then you transfer interests in a limited partnership. The partnership agreement has certain provisions in it that an appraiser would review the document and come back with an appraisal saying, We're going to give you a discount. Yes, the assets inside this partnership are marketable. They're worth 100. But your ownership interest is worth 65 because we have engineered a 35% discount for lack of marketability and lack of control. Even though the IRS has been unhappy with that. The courts recognize these discounts and honor them as long as you do it right. You got to dot your I's and cross your T's, but it works.

Kirby Rosplock

And it's legal. We're doing everything. Absolutely. Everything's above board here.

Marvin Blum

Every bit of the planning that we do, we are totally upfront and transparent with the IRS. We file gift tax returns, we disclose everything to the IRS. We have nothing to hide. It's all above board and legal. The IRS is aware that this is stuff that's legal, and they beg Congress to please shut this down because they said, The only way we're going to get this shut down is if you change the law. And so far, the law has not changed.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah. Well, we just answered my next question, which is when families own operating businesses, real estate, and other complex assets, what structures or planning tools do you recommend? So for tax efficiency and continuity.

Marvin Blum

But I will say, let me throw one more thing on that. And this business succession planning. The TV show, Succession. It got such extreme notoriety. But there's an awareness now in the public that people who own business businesses need to engage in what I call either business succession planning or transition planning and give their loved ones the gift of a roadmap for how to operate this business when the founder is no longer there. And most business founders act as if they're going to live forever. But surprise, surprise. The day will come that they will not be there. And the family needs to know what to do next.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah, for sure. I couldn't agree with you more. Let's talk a little bit about control and flexibility and some of this long term planning. How do you help clients think about the balance, and especially when setting up trust in other entities? What does that look like?

Marvin Blum

Most of my clients do want to maintain control, and I want them to retain flexibility because my experience is that people change their minds. And so what I try to do in the plans that we create is have our cake and eat it, too. I try not to make it a choice. I try to figure out a way to engineer where we can get both. And here's what you can do for retaining control. Let's say you put your assets into a family limited partnership, which has a managing partner, which is a general partner. Let's say that you are the President of the general partner making management decisions. Now, when you do the transfers, you just transfer the limited partnership interests, but you retain the general partnership interest. So you're still in control, yet you're shifting the value. Let's say you have 99% of the value in the limited partnership You're still going to shift 99% of the value out, but still stay in control. Then there are certain types of trusts where you can either be the trustee, if you're carefully, if it's drafted very carefully, or you can be what we call the investment advisor in the trust where you can continue to make the investment decisions even after the gifting.

Marvin Blum

There are ways to keep control. For flexibility, and I'm really big on this, when we draft trusts, they do have to be irrevocable in order to get the assets out of the estate. But there's backdoor ways to address things that might arise if circumstances change. One is to give people powers of appointment. There's ways when you're drafting to... I I can create a trust for my kids and I can give them a special power of appointment to direct where they want these assets to go at some point, and we're not locked in. I can do a trust for my wife, Laurie. Look, a SLAT, a spousal lifetime access trust. They're very popular now. I can create a SLAT for the benefit of my wife, Lauryn. I transfer assets into this trust for her benefit. I have now used up my exemption. These assets are out of my estate. No No matter how big they grow, they're out of our estate. I can give Lauryn a special power of appointment to direct where she wants these assets to go down the road. She can change her mind. She can go one way today and then down the road change her mind.

Marvin Blum

We build in flexibility. I also believe in building in a special trustee or sometimes called a trust protector into our documents, some independent party who would have the power to make changes. Because you look in a crystal ball, we all do, and my crystal ball stays pretty fuzzy.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah, mine too.

Marvin Blum

I want to have some ways to alter things.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah, I hear you. I'm going to ask the question that everyone wants to know, what are the most common mistakes that you see or oversites to some of these foundational documents like wills, powers of attorney, trust agreements? I mean, what are the things that go make you cringe?

 Marvin Blum

The first thing is people have a tendency to sign these things and put them away and feel like I've done it and never go look at them again. Then they fail to remember that, Oh, the person I named as my executor is now either deceased or is now suffering from dementia. Life happens. Things change. Family members change. Assets change. You may have had an estate this size at the time, and now it's this big or something. You need to update your documents periodically. I have a rule of thumb. I tell people every presidential election, pull out your estate planning documents. It's just a way to keep you from going more than four years.

Kirby Rosplock

I love it.

Marvin Blum

Updating them. I'm a big believer in having a living trust and poor over will. I mean, a lot of people just have will, and they put all the complicated provisions in the will. Well, the problem I have with that is the will is a public document. Not everybody wants the whole world to see all of that. We can do a private arrangement. You can have a simple will. We call it a pourover, P-O-U-R-O-V-E-R, you pour over will, and it pours over into a separate living trust. The living trust has all the complicated provisions, and the living trust is a private document. Those are some mistakes. Under planning, I will tell you that I think a lot of people need to do a whole lot more planning than they've done. They tend to think that they have a will. They've done all the planning they need to do. Well, a will is a start, but a will is far from being the entire realm of an estate plan. I don't want to talk about something I created in our firm. I call it a red file. Here's what this is. A red file is a file that you put together that gives your family a roadmap so that when you are deceased or when you become incapacitated, when you're no longer able, the family has critical information that they need to know.

Marvin Blum

And that information is not in your estate planning documents. I have had so many situations where beautiful set of estate planning documents, client dies, and then the family is lost. They don't know where the accounts are. They don't know the passwords. They can't deal with the social media issues and all of the Internet issues. A client becomes incapacitated, and the family is guessing on how the care should be administered because the client didn't leave instruction. So this is another area that I'm very high on.

Kirby Rosplock

That is incredible. Marvin, I can't wait to talk to you more about that. So we might have to sidebar on that because that's a whole another deep dive. Really amazing. Okay, you've worked with so many multi-generational families. How do you think about designing plans that hold up over time? I mean, across generations and through family changes, because we know that a family has has many lives, and then households have many lives. So how does this work? How do these legal documents survive all these different seasons, all these different households, all these different decades?

Marvin Blum

You're so right on with that question, because most of my colleagues and I draft what we call dynasty Trusts. We love perpetual trusts that have very, very long duration, and they're going to last from generation to generation to generation. Well, here's where building in flexibility is critical because none of us can read the future with certainty. The tools we talked about earlier, I believe you need to incorporate powers of appointment in these documents. I think you need some special trustees with some powers to make some changes. So you don't have to go to court to do it. If you don't have it built in, the family has to go to court to do these things. I try to build in a procedure that avoids having to go to court. Another way I think you can make a plan last is I encourage senior generations to be very open with the next gens. I started practicing law at a time when people were extremely private, very close to the vest with their planning, and parents didn't divulge to their kids. That era has evolved to now an era of open communication. We're now living in a time where parents are becoming far more open.

Marvin Blum

For one thing, their kids are finding out whether the parents want them to find out or not. In this information age, there's very little that's secret anymore. So let's manage the information flow. Let's have some family meetings with an objective third-party facilitator who can help the family navigate through this plan, explain things, address any concerns, and deal with it up front. And you have a whole lot more success with a plan like that, winning from generation to generation. I'm also a big believer in mentoring beneficiaries. I get on a soapbox here about trust babies. I've seen too many of them. You're not doing your kid a favor to just spill out a huge allowance to your kid every month and disincentivize your child from getting up and getting out of bed in the morning. And so for plans to succeed, I think you need beneficiaries who can be productive people. And I think you can do that by building all that into your family meeting agenda and having trustees who mentor your kids so that they are learning and getting trained and will become more responsible inheritors.

Kirby Rosplock

I love it. You're talking my language, and I couldn't agree with you more. I think there's so much opportunity to build those foundational relationships beneficiary to trustee, because let's be honest, we know that so many beneficiaries at some point in their life may be asked to step up as trustee in many of these families. And we also know know that many of these beneficiaries will have to have really strong relationships with these trustees because they're going to have to work with them, likely for their whole lives. It's not like it's a one and done. Can I ask for a question, and I'm good. I'm out of here. No, it's the most enduring relationship, perhaps more than a spouse, more than a financial advisor, even more than any other professional service provider that they work So hello. Yeah, it's super important. Okay, we're switching gears. We're going to go to the heart section and get a little bit more gushy, talk about values, legacy, just go back to that air preparation and the EQ side of this. You've talked about the importance of bringing heart into planning, but what does that really mean to you? And how did you figure this out?

Kirby Rosplock

Because this is not what you go to law school for. I mean, I don't know that there's any coursework, right, when you go to law school about like, Hey, bring your heart to the legal profession. So how did you figure this out?

Marvin Blum

Oh, you're exactly right. And unfortunately, most of my colleagues They're pretty much all head, and I was, too, for about the first 35 years of my law practice. And then I'll tell you what was the biggest wake-up call for me, and that was I have only one brother at age 65. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He lasted two weeks. It was so fast. And I had done his estate plan, and I thought of his estate plan as a stack of paper. And then I'm working through my brother's estate, and it hit me. This isn't a stack of paper. These are human lives. And the planning that you do needs to be very, very thoughtful because you have to tailor it to the real situation. What are the needs? What is the situation for his surviving wife and for his kids and all that? It was a wake up for me. Then I began to see in other families I represent. I saw families at war, like family business owners and the next generation fighting over running the business because it wasn't set up in a careful way. I've seen unequal inheritances and kids getting very hurt over parents not leaving things equally.

Marvin Blum

All of this started to impress me that there's a heart aspect to this planning. Yeah, I can draft whatever the client says, but it's not just words. You used the word values, and I like that term a lot here because what we're trying to do here is not just pass the valuables, but also pass down the values. I came to that having witnessed this stuff through my own brother's passing and my client's situations. And it's been quite a journey. I've been on this journey now for about 10 years, and I'm still learning. This is the area of the practice that's still very much evolving, but it's where my passion now lies.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah. Well, I think it's such a loaded practice because you think that you might be just drafting documents about stuff, right? Material things or assets or financial assets. But all of that stuff is really impacting emotional relationships and family systems. And all of that is tied to power struggles and and relationships around control and dominance and who has the upper hand. And then that gets all back to family systems and how siblings get along and parent-child relationships. And so there's a lot that's so embedded and charged in all of those relationships. And that gets to these emotional dynamics that we're talking about.

Marvin Blum

I want to add one thing here. It's interesting because during COVID, I was working working at home, like all of us, and I had a lot more time because I wasn't leaving my bedroom all day. I began to write a blog, and I kept to thinking, Okay, what can I use this extra time for? I began thinking, in my 40 plus years of being an estate planning lawyer, I have picked up an awful lot of tips on do's and don'ts to create a meaningful family legacy. I started writing this weekly blog. I'm now on post number 233 of this blog. I have never missed a week. And it's interesting, Kirby, because it talks about these topics. I started sharing about the hard side of estate planning. Interestingly, I also began leaking in a little bit of my personal story. Then the feedback came back to me from people that read it and say, We want more of the personal stuff. For example, there's a segment in the blog, We Happened to be in Israel at the time of the October seventh attack in 2023. We had been there for the week of Sako. It was a glorious week, and it ends in crisis as the attack occurs.

Marvin Blum

I put together, it was about a five-part series, five weeks of reflections from that time in Israel. What I learned from there with our family, I learned a lot as a result of experiencing that firsthand. And there's a whole section in my blog all about my experiences in Israel that people talk to me about how much that means to them.

Kirby Rosplock

Well, I'm so excited. You've given us permission to share that link to your blog. So thank you for the shout out because we really encourage people to check it out. And I know you're such a beautiful writer. So that is just a real gift to everyone who's tuning in to check out, Marvin, your blog, because there's so much rich, wonderful tips, tricks, personal stories, real gifts of enlightenment. I mean, you have so much wisdom that you share there. So I know this is a great podcast, but then there's so much more that you've given just through that conduit as well. What else do you feel like back to this air preparation and wealth creators, what else do you feel like should be happening as wealth creators are thinking about how their wealth is going to impact? You talked about values and valuables. What else could be done?

Marvin Blum

I use football to tell this story because in Texas, where I live, everybody listens more when I speak of football. Here's the image. I want to give credit to a wonderful consultant in this field named Jim Grubman, an author and consultant. Anyway, he described this, and I borrow it. Picture a football field. At one end of the field, you have a quarterback who is highly skilled, and he throws a beautiful pass to the opposite end of the field. Here's this football hurling down the field. Beautiful. At the other end of the field are the receiver, and they are standing around clueless. A football is coming to them. They've never been to a practice. They don't know the rules of the game. They've never tried to work together as a team. They don't understand teamwork. What are the odds that they're going to catch that football and go score a countdown? The odds are not good. In fact, the odds are only 10% that they'll succeed. The odds are 90% that they're going to fall victim, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. And so what I tell people is that quarterback is G1, Generation 1, the patriarch-matriarch.

Marvin Blum

The receiver's down there, the G2s and G3s, the kids and grandkids, you've got to prepare them for the football that's coming their way. And so I urge the parents here to shift from being a quarterback, and they need to become the coach.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah, I love that. I think that's such a great metaphor, and it's a great visual, right? To think about gameplay in the field.

Marvin Blum

Yeah, exactly.

Kirby Rosplock

That's great. Choosing fiduciaries and trustees, it's deeply personal. Do you have any wisdom there?

Marvin Blum

Yeah. People get the impression that this is some great honor that I'm designating person as my executor or trustee. It's no great honor. Let me tell you, it's a heavy, heavy burden that you're putting on somebody. And very commonly, it's put on someone who doesn't really have the skill set do it. And there's tremendous liability exposure, too, because you've got beneficiaries hovering around, and if you mess up, they can sue you. And so it's a very risky endeavor on top of it. So my belief is that the fiduciaries that you choose need to be people who are prepared and capable of being in that role. I would say if you have kids who are like most, who don't necessarily agree on everything, you name one of them as a fiduciary over the others, that's not a good recipe either. It's not fair to either side to do that because now you have, let's say, there's a very famous case out of New York where a brother was in charge of the estate, and he was running the show, and his three sisters were very unhappy with the fact that they felt left out. And of course, they sued him, and you have this massive lawsuit goes on.

Marvin Blum

So you want to be very careful about who you name in that role, and better to have somebody with an objective voice in the role. Family members can play a role. I'm not suggesting that they not be included. They could be as a fiduciary along with others, or they can be investment advisors or distribution advisors. There's places you can, family members, but be very realistic about what this is going to look like after you're gone.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah. Well, I can share one quick story where we had siblings, where one was put to be the fiduciary over the other. So that was very contentious. And the story goes that the other was mentored by a coach through our attainment learning. And after they got more education because they didn't actually understand their trust, they didn't understand the role of the trustee, they didn't understand the provision provisions of their trust. But actually, once they got to understand more about the whole inheritance, their trust, the trust provisions, and then actually the job of their sibling in that trustee role, then they were like, Oh, I don't want that job. And they actually were like, I'm glad it's her, not me. So it actually created more trust and actually reduced the tension and brought them closer together. And so I think sometimes education goes a long way, too, because sometimes it's just fostering conflict because they don't understand. They just don't know. So I agree with you. Just a couple of last questions. Can you share a story where a family was able to successfully integrate both the head and the heart in their estate plan? Do you have any good stories?

Kirby Rosplock

Anonymous, of course. I don't want to hear.

Marvin Blum

I do. I have so many, but I have a favorite. I have a favorite. I have gotten very close to this woman who is a very elderly widow now. And about 20 years ago, she lost her husband, and he ran the show. And they had four kids, and nobody knew anything about the estate. And they were left completely in the dark. And what ended up happening is they stepped up. The oldest son took over the head part of the planning, and the widow, the mom, took over the heart side of the planning We developed a head and the heart plan. This family began meeting annually. First, they met more because it took some frequent meetings to get everybody educated since they had all been in the dark. But now they meet annually. I got a wonderful email from my dear friend Jane who said, Thank you, Marvin, for helping our family get off on the right track all those 20 years ago. I am so proud of our four children and how they are using their inheritance as well as their own resources to do the most good in their own communities. She says, With the adult grandchildren following closely behind.

Marvin Blum

She said, My deceased husband would be blown away to know how many people, programs, and projects he has helped as we used his resources to begin this journey. She says, I'm very fortunate we benefited from your counsel. She said, Thanks to you, we do these meetings. She ended up saying, We just returned from our annual family trip. In addition to four G2s, seven G3s, and all their spouses, we had nine G4s. She said, Seven-year-old Jack. They asked him, What was your favorite part of the trip? And he answered, Being with family. My dear lovely Jane, she ends it by saying, I didn't know whether to say Amen or Bingo. We hit the jackpot. So they're my favorite. I love that family. Jane gets my weekly blog, and I get feedback from her often and quotes like that from her. So you can repair. This was a case where 20 years ago, they were not in shape, and now this family family is functioning beautifully.

Kirby Rosplock

That's such a beautiful story. Thank you so much. I just love hearing all that you have to share. It does my heart good. If there were one mindset shift you could inspire in every family when it comes to wealth transfer, what would it be?

Marvin Blum

I'm going to use just two words. Don't procrastinate. People hate to do estate planning. They put it off. They find every excuse that's very, very risky. Sometimes you don't have a warning when you're going to die.

Kirby Rosplock

I love that. Maybe it's not even going to die. Maybe it's just you start to diminish your faculties. Exactly. I feel like that's the scarier thing is that you don't know that your faculties are diminishing, and then you're not as sharp to do the greatest planning, right?

Marvin Blum

Oh, you got it. And so now's the time.

Kirby Rosplock

Now's the time. See, semperify. Seize the day. Carpe diem. Carpe diem. Semperify is the other one. I love it. Carpe diem. Okay, we're going to do the lightning round here because that's how I love to end the Tamarind Learning podcast these days. And I'm going to hit you with about three, four, maybe five that I gave you in advance, so maybe you have some thoughts. Here we go. One book every family should read on legacy or estate planning.

 Marvin Blum

I have a favorite author in this area. His name is James Hughes. It goes by J, J Hughes. My favorite book is called Family Wealth: How to Keep it in the Family. Then he quickly says, as you read it, he says, When I say how to keep it in the family, he said, By the word it, I don't mean money. There's five capitals he talks about. There's more wealth than just money. And one of the quotes I love from the book, he speaks of a grandmother who says, We've always been rich, and sometimes we've had money.

Kirby Rosplock

That's awesome. Well, yeah, Jay is epic, larger than life, and I think that is the best book in the world to recommend. So perfect, perfect book. Number two, biggest myth about estate planning.

Marvin Blum

Well, people seem to think it's only for the wealthy, and then they go on to think, And I'm not wealthy. The fact is, it's for everybody. On top of that, not only for everybody of every level of wealth, but also your adult kids. If you've got kids who are adults, 18 years and over, they need some documents, too.

Kirby Rosplock

Wow. That's good advice. Really good advice. Number three, legacy. Is it something you build or something you leave?

Marvin Blum

Well, I'm all about building it. You got to build it, and you have to be intentional. I love a line I heard from a guy once. He says, Hope is not a strategy. So if you want to pass down a meaningful legacy, then Do intentional steps, family meetings, indoctrinate your family with. And in the Hebrew, we say, l'ador v'ador, from generation to generation. That's my mission, is I want to pass this down, l'ador v'ador. I got to build it first.

Kirby Rosplock

Got to build it. Love it. Number four, what do your clients most often forget to plan for?

Marvin Blum

I'm going to go back to that red file, and we can talk about it a bit more. But they get this beautiful set of documents, but they fail to put all this information together that their loved ones need to know that's not in those documents. And especially, like we were saying, if somebody becomes incapacitated, And they can't communicate. And now you're trying to feed them and all, and you don't even know what foods they like or dislike. I mean, it's helpful to know this stuff.

Kirby Rosplock

So helpful. And last but not least, if you weren't doing this work, what would your second act be?

Marvin Blum

Well, if you look over my shoulder, there's some paintings up on the wall. And if you got close to these paintings, you would see that the signature on them says, Marvin Blum, because my tremendous advocacy is I'm an artist, and I love to paint. I do impressionistic paintings. My dream is to be Marvin Monet. I'm far from it, but if I weren't a I'd be Monet. My parents weren't having that, though. When I grew up wanting to become an artist, they said, How about becoming an accountant and a lawyer and paint on the side? I said, I did what I did. They were right, and I did what they said. But you know what? Estate planning is a creative endeavor that really draws from both the left and the right side of the brain. If you do it the way I think it should be done, it's really not just a left brain activity. It should also be a right brain activity. I feel like my bringing my artistry into my work is something that I never imagined would really happen, but I think it actually has.

Kirby Rosplock

Marvin, thank you for joining us today for sharing your deep expertise, your creative genius behind you, and all this wisdom. Your work reminds us that the state State Planning isn't just about minimizing taxes. It's about maximizing meaning. And you truly embody what it means to bring both the head and the heart to this work. So I can't thank you enough for being our guests on the Tamarind Learning podcast today. And to our listeners, Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the Tamarind Learning podcast. You can find us on several different channels, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube. Share it with your network. And until next time, I'm Dr. Kirby Rosplock. See you again soon. And please remember, we have Marvin's link to his blog. We're going to have some other resources also available. And we just really appreciate Marvin, again, you being here today on the Tamarind Learning podcast.

Marvin Blum

I'm honored. Thank you very much.