Five Estate Documents Every Family Needs

What We Need to Grow, Episode 018: Five Estate Documents Every Family Needs. A Founder Talk conversation with Bryan Walley, CEO and co-founder of Forward Inheritance. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: Bryan spent twelve years running Exactuals, City National Bank's fintech payments platform. You spent twelve years building a fintech inside one of America's largest banks and then walked away to fix something you bumped into in your own family. I'm curious about the moment you realised this was a meaningful problem, meaningful enough to step away and solve, and what that felt like both as a founder looking at something unsolved and from your own lived experience.

Bryan Walley: I appreciate that question, thanks very much for having me. There are a couple of different origin stories for Forward Inheritance, which is the company I now help lead. The one I really knew was a few years ago. There was enough going on in my family that I had to look my father, my hero, in the eye and say, hey Pops, where's the will? And he said, it's fine, pal. And I said, buddy, we're past "it's fine." Can you please hand me the documentation.

That was a wild moment for a couple of reasons. One, it's wild when the role reversal happens with your parents. Mom and dad got us here, they're our heroes, and all of a sudden you realise, oh, you're in charge. I was thinking, do I trust him to pick the restaurant and drive us there, let alone hand me legal paperwork? That's a wild moment to sit in. And my daughter and son are going to have the same moment with me. This is the cycle of life.

As you noted, I was the CEO of Exactuals and I'd had a great career and it was a ton of fun. I'm very fortunate. I grew up in Southern California in a loving family. My mother died when I was very young, my father kept us together, I have three beautiful sisters. And I looked around and thought, I don't think my family is at all prepared for what's about to happen. And if I'm in this state, what is everyone else in? My father is a former litigator, and I asked, is that an eighth amendment on the will? And he said, no, it's an eighth amendment on the prenup. And I thought, oh, good guy.

And then I thought, where do I store this stuff? I shouldn't have this in Google Drive. I looked at the options available and none of them are for the family. Some are built for wealth managers, some for insurance folks, some for estate attorneys, and that's awesome. But who loves the family? That's why we started Forward Inheritance. To allow families to grow and prosper, to protect their estate, protect their legacy, and make sure there is money for the family at the end of the day.

Caleb: Can you take that one step further and help me understand it as though you're explaining it to me in grade six? The document goes from here, it's going to live here, so and so can log in, you set those permissions. Is there a way to explain it really simply?

Bryan: For all of us, and that's the thing, we're all in this and nobody actually explains it to people. I didn't know. There are some fundamentals every family should probably follow, and then you can always get fancy at the edges.

Where's the will? Do you have a will? Do you need a will? Is the will current? When was the last time it was dusted off and you said, yes, I still believe in all of those things? Are the people named in the will still alive? Get a will. That tells everybody what your intentions are, whatever they are, split it fifty-fifty, everything goes to my kids, this much goes to charity. Your will is your intentions.

Then, many families need a trust. Why do you need a trust? A trust is a different legal entity, separate from the will, a separate legal document, and it ensures your assets are tax advantaged and that ownership of the asset is not in doubt. If I die without a will, my family home goes to the state of California in the probate process. Which is a thing, right? Hey, if we don't know what to do with it, let's give it to the state and the state will hold it in trust until they figure it out. Probate, you're going two, three, four, five years, you're wasting 50 percent of the value of the assets in probate, and you have to go and fight with your state government that that is your family home, or your family bank account, or your family asset.

So a trust not only needs to exist, it needs to be funded. I had no idea what that meant. I grew up in Southern California, I look like this. I had no idea what "fund your trust" meant. It means I have to change the title. My home is not owned by me. My home is owned by the Bryan T. Walley Trust of 2024, or whatever the title is. Same with my bank accounts, same with my businesses. It's all in the trust. What that does is ensure that if and when I die, there's no legal question about who owns this thing. In fact, me dying, of course it has an impact, but it doesn't impact that. The trust owns those assets, not me.

The third thing I would submit you need is a power of attorney for medical decisions and a power of attorney for financial decisions. What happens when mom falls and breaks her hip?

Caleb: Oh man.

Bryan: Who's in charge? What happens when dad gets a dementia diagnosis? Who's in charge? Who can be in charge? If you do not have a power of attorney for medical decisions for mom and dad, in the state in which they reside, not where you reside. So if mom and dad live in Florida, you need a power of attorney that's good in the state of Florida, not necessarily the state of California, so you can be involved in their medical decisions. Because if not, the doctor is making that call for you. If not, the banker is making that call for you. If not, the lawyer is making that call for you.

After that, I would submit you need an accounting of your assets, what exists and what doesn't and what they're valued at, and an accounting of your liabilities. You start with those five fundamental things and you're probably going to be generally covered. Then of course you can get fancy over time. But that's really where every family can and should start. Get a will, get a trust, get the powers of attorney in, document the assets, be honest about the liabilities, so we have a good clean accounting of what's in the estate.

Caleb: If you had to guess, what percentage of people do you think have a trust?

Bryan: I don't even have to guess, I'm just going to say it. Publicly available data says that 50 percent of homeowners do not have a will. Think about that for a second. Fifty percent of homeowners in America do not have a will. There will not be a great wealth transfer. There will be a great probate.

Do we want to give all of our money back to the government? Do we want to waste our time and our energy fighting with states over whether that is our family asset? It's going to take a little bit of paperwork and a little bit of adulting today. Harder now, easier later. Easier now, harder later. These are themes in all of our lives. Without doing a little bit of work today, you're going to have a paperwork crisis on top of the estate chaos, and the inheritance will be destroyed. I wish I didn't sound so doom and gloom, but that's the answer. Half of homeowners don't have a will, and I would argue half don't have a trust either.

Caleb: There are a couple of things I'm curious about. One is the catalyst, what usually triggers people, which is probably later than it should be. But I'm actually more interested in where the catalyst should be, and how that's framed. I'm wondering, from an emotional standpoint, where the organic entry point is in a family conversation. Because the signal that comes across to mom or dad is, hey, why would you be asking that, what's going on, do I look sick? So is there something you've found that's a more natural way in, that doesn't create friction?

Bryan: I think the word you're bouncing around is greed. Let's just name it. Do the kids look greedy asking about this? And the actual answer is, is it about money? Of course. But don't make it about the money. The money is the outcome, it's the result. It is not the reason, it's not the purpose.

So we offer five conversation starters to talk about the estate that have nothing to do with money. Some of those are things like, after my divorce I had to go get a new trust. That's a very easy way for me to look at my father, who's now 81, and go, Pops, I just got a trust, do you have one, where is it? That's a simple question. I'm obviously asking about the estate, but that is not an attack, that is not greed. That's just, oh, I had to go through this, have you done that before?

Or, I had to get a power of attorney for my son who's turning 18, so I can be part of his medical decisions when he goes off to college. That's a wild thing to think about as well. I need powers of attorney up and down, because I'm in the sandwich generation. We are the sandwich generation.

So it's ways to talk about the process and how we're going about it, as opposed to the outcome, which is the money. Because here's the thing: without proper planning, paperwork and process, there will be no money, or definitely less. Ultimately everyone understands we're trying to preserve legacy here and keep the family wealth. I think there's a fundamental human desire to give the next generation a better life than was given to us. We're always trying to evolve and do better. And yes, money is a part of that. Money's the outcome. Are we planned well? Does everyone know? Is the paperwork aligned? Are we running the business of the family like a business, or are we just yoloing it? It's not great, but the data isn't great. We can help.

Caleb: It's interesting, because the logic of waiting is counterintuitive. The longer you wait, the closer to the end it becomes for everybody, and the more awkward it becomes, because it actually is closer. You'll never be younger than you are today. But I love the way you put it. Get your own house in order, and in doing that, say, hey, we revisited our will this past weekend, and bring it up that way.

I had a conversation recently with someone about the benefits of creatine from a cognitive standpoint, for preventing things like dementia. I brought it up with someone a little bit older, and this is a person who probably has twenty or thirty years of really strong healthy life left. But I noticed a point in the conversation I hadn't anticipated, where I said this seems like a great thing to add into the mix to help prevent dementia, and I could almost see the gears turning: why would they be asking me that? And I thought, that's interesting. I wondered afterwards whether leading with the fact that I have creatine in my own diet, as a disciplined part of a routine for that purpose, would have landed differently. Framing it from your own perspective seems like a more gentle way to go about it.

Bryan: Yes, and there are two points here. First of all, I love my daily creatine to go with my AG1 and my Momentous, and I'm just going to pitch those because they're great. I do it for that exact reason. I'm trying to give myself the longest probability of hanging out with my own children for as long as possible, in the best way possible.

But think about it this way. If we want to get into mom and dad's finances, mom and dad are living longer, which is awesome, which means we get to spend more time with them, which is awesome. But let's take a step back and ask what the implication of that is. It means we're going to need more money for housing, for food, for medical situations going forward. Do mom and dad have enough money to ride off into the sunset the way they deserve? That's an interesting question, and it can start with creatine. What we're really talking about is that we're living longer, and whether we have the financial means to take care of mom and dad the way they want. It's all interrelated. Getting your own house in order allows you to have the conversation of, and what about you, mom and dad, how are we doing this, so that we can all live well and honour the legacy they've built.

Caleb: It'd be interesting, because sometimes it's neat when there's an annual rhythm for something. Spring cleaning. I don't know who coined that, but it's an interesting way to annually do a deep cleanse. And certainly having certain holidays on the calendar is a reason to get people in the same town, the same room, around a table. It's interesting when there are things that are just a norm. I wonder whether, spoken officially or not, saying we did our annual update to the will, and one of the things we were thinking about was that we shifted this with our trust, we learned this about it, and so we've added this. Making that more of a common part of conversation with loved ones might help remove some of the stigma.

Bryan: Spot on. I talk a lot about that. The business of the family needs to be run like a business. That's an annual board meeting, or quarterly business reviews, that kind of mechanism to look at the paperwork and make sure everything is in order.

The flip of that, and what we do at Forward Inheritance to help with it, is that every family on the platform, to your point about spring cleaning, has a spring cleaning module, or ritual. We go in and say, let's look at the sheet of paper that has mom and dad's doctor and lawyer and accountant and executor. Hey, is that still your executor? Are they still alive? Most people's executors are their own age. It's a fair question.

So that spring cleaning, where you go through and dust it off and make sure it's all still okay, and say yes, we're probably still good for another year. And then you can post it securely online and share it with the family members and the professionals who help run the business of the family: your estate attorney, your tax accountant, your wealth advisor. So that everybody knows the plan. So that when we all get that terrible phone call and we have that surprise Wednesday, there is not a paperwork crisis compounding an already complex and emotional situation. That annual ritual will help destigmatize it, or normalize it, which is maybe a better way to say it. Because these are things we need to do for ourselves, and for our parents, and for the next generation. We owe it to them.

Caleb: We worked for a number of years with one of the largest privately owned funeral homes, and it was fascinating to learn a lot more about the industry and to see how they operated from an ethical standpoint. There are shady things, and I'm sure they exist in different industries, but to hear about some of the major publicly traded corporations, and the pressure when you're optimizing for sales and volume and numbers, but at what cost, and at what moment are these people making these decisions.

Hearing story after story of situations where people did not have things organized, but also seeing the reverse, when things are really well organized and planned. A will and a trust being part of it, but also arrangements in the will, often even looked after in advance, for how you would want to be remembered. It was eye-opening to see how beautiful it can be. The term celebration of life gets used a lot, and I think the phrase does have merit, in terms of being able to reflect on something that is such a great treasure.

There was a phrase I remember when we were first working with that brand and doing discovery, trying to understand and hone in on the exact point. It's like there's water on the property and you're trying to find where the spring is. And the words that came together for me were, death is so hard because life is so valuable. When you look at it from that perspective, the amount of pain, and how much people want to push away from it. That's the reason. The unlock for that brand was that we got to talk about that. A lot of other funeral homes' messaging was about something else, and we said, no, this is what you do, this is where the conversation is. Even at a funeral, that's where the conversation should be. Because as much as we remember the person, and people are gathered and there's time for stories, really what should be happening is that it's shoulder to shoulder, it's breaking bread, it's sitting together, whatever the differences or the distance may be, to recognize how immense a treasure it is to see that sunshine, to feel that embrace, that sip of water, so many things that are so common and such a treasure. And I love the way you've reframed it, and I feel like it's one of those things that once you've heard it you can't unhear it. That idea of looking at it first from the perspective of getting your own things in order, and then being able to much more naturally bring it up with others.

Bryan: You said many beautiful things there, and I'm going to try to touch on them in some semblance of order. I think families tend to have the estate conversation in one of three places. They can do it at their kitchen table. They can do it over a hospital bed. Or they can do it at the funeral home. Take your pick. You're going to have this conversation one way or the other, and you choose where you and your family are going to have it.

Harder now, easier later. Easier now, harder later. When you do the work early, like you were saying, you get to have that celebration of life. You get to have that calm. What compassion is, is sitting in it with somebody else with passion. Being able to sit with family members and friends and really celebrate what will never happen again. That life is no longer here. I lost my mother when I was young, and that is a hole in my heart that will never be filled. A lot of that compassion comes into how we approach Forward Inheritance and how we help families have these conversations, so that we can have better family wealth, better family outcomes, better estate planning. That's the result, that's the money, to go back to it. But the process of it, we can do this better. We can help each other. And as we do, we're going to have fewer families fighting each other over money they didn't earn. Everybody's better. We can do this.

Caleb: So what markets do you serve? You're in California. Is it across the US, is it international?

Bryan: The platform is across the United States. And look, there are regulatory nuances and laws and I'm not going to pretend to be good at all of them, but I'd bet Canada and the UK and Spain, fundamentally you need some legal documents to account for your assets. There are going to be nuances in the form or in what's required, but generally speaking we could be global, we're multi-language, all that kind of stuff. You just start in your own backyard, and there's so much opportunity here in America, especially with the great wealth transfer. That's why we started here. But going international, that's not a problem.

Caleb: For anyone who wants to check it out, what's the first step? Visit the website, and is there a first step you'd suggest?

Bryan: It's forwardinheritance.com, and we have a demo of our app up there. We also have resources, like the five conversation starters to have with your parents that have nothing to do with money. We offer those for free because we think it's the right thing to do.

You can sign up not only your own family, you can sign up your parents' estate next, and have two estates, and we can manage both of those for you. Because some parents are not computer literate, or will not want to face this, but that doesn't mean the organization doesn't need to happen. It can be, hey, let's organize it on behalf of mom and dad and make sure they are head of household and invited. It's their money, it's their estate, it's their legal documents, but we can handle that situation.

At the end of the day this typically falls on a 50-year-old mom who emotionally has to support the aging parents and probably has kids in high school and college. That's our ideal client profile, because we're all in it. We're all in this sandwich generation, just trying to help.

Caleb: So important. I feel like it's almost everybody, and maybe not the topic people feel they want to add to the list of things to do, but you've set the table in a very inviting and streamlined way. Bryan, thank you so much for sharing it.

Bryan: This was an absolute honour. Thank you, man.