Gregg Garofalo is the Founding Partner at Garofalo Law Group, he has been practicing law for 20 years with a strong focus on probate matters and estate planning. Gregg talks about when it’s right to do estate planning and what are some basic estate planning one should have outright.
Gregg also talks about estate planning if you have a special needs child, how you can maximize their benefit to give them the best care they can receive from both your estate and the government. Lastly, he talks about how estate planning must be revisited at least annually to review how it can be adjusted to changes in the family’s life, decisions, circumstances, or just life in general.
Timestamps:
“It’s never early to start planning - literally, we tell parents that when your kids turn 18, they should come in and do the basic estate plan...” - Gregg Garofalo
Gregg Garofalo of Garofalo Law Group
Website: www.glgfirm.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GreggGarofalo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregg-garofalo/
Gregg Garofalo, Founding Partner at Garofalo Law Group
Estate Planning
Gregg has been practicing law for the past 20 years with a strong focus on probate matters and estate planning. As a father of a daughter with special needs, he is passionate about educating families on how they can achieve their estate planning goals. As a result of Gregg’s vast experience, character and devotion to clients, the families he serves can rest assured that he will do everything he can to meet all of their expectations. Gregg is frequently appointed by the Court to serve as a Guardian ad litem in Guardianship matters. He is also routinely appointed by the Court as a Special Administrator in complex probate matters.
Gregg is an active member of the legal community, where he is serving or has served in several leadership roles within the Illinois Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Association. Gregg is a past Chair of the Chicago Bar Association’s Probate Practice Committee, where he served two years as Chair. Gregg is also a past Chair of the Illinois State Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division, a member of the Trusts & Estates Council, and starting his third term as a member of the General Assembly after taking the mandatory one year off between terms.
Gregg serves as a member of the Illinois State Bar Association’s mentor program, and a speaker in the area of probate and trusts and estates.
In addition to his passion for law, Gregg works with professional and civic organizations. Gregg has worked with the Children’s Assistance Fund and the Illinois Bar Foundation chairing their annual holiday party, which has grossed over $150,000 during his ten-year involvement. Gregg is also a Past President of the Justinian Society of Lawyers, a past board member of the Italian American Political Coalition, and a board member of the Justinian Society Children’s Endowment Fund. In addition, Gregg volunteers for the Central Illinois Sheltie Rescue.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregg-garofalo/
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Episode Transcript:
Ron Bockstahler 0:29
Welcome to the 1958 lawyer. Good to have you here. today. We got an outstanding guest, by the way, I'm your host, Ron inboxdollars. So my good friend, Attorney Greg Garofalo is joining us today Greg has been practicing law for more than 20 years helping families achieve their long range goals through proper estate planning Greg's a father to a daughter with special needs. So he has Insider's an insider's view and planning for a child's long term care. He also serves as a court appointed to guardianship matters in guardianship matters, and complex probate matters. God I've known Greg for 20 plus years, his activities in legal and charitable organizations are too many to mention, but he does serve in leadership roles with the Illinois Bar Association, the Chicago Bar Association, he's the chair of the CPAs, probate practice committee president or past president of the Justinian Society of lawyers. He's a board member with Justinian society, children's endowment fund, where he's helped raise a lot of money. And maybe most important of all, he's a volunteer with the central Illinois Sheltie rescue, Greg's had many, many shelties, since I've known as well kind of chat a little about that, Greg, welcome to the show.
Gregg Garofalo 1:29
Oh, thanks, Brian. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. And Glad to be here. Thanks for the introduction. I just want to say a lot of those board member positions with ISBA and CBA. Those were a lot of those were in the past since the one board that I takes up most of my time is the board member of my family. And I say board member because I'm not the chair.
Ron Bockstahler 1:48
Yeah, to your youngest turns four here coming up in October. Yeah, yeah. And I just started kindergarten. So yep. And become time consuming.
Gregg Garofalo 1:57
They do. And Rebecca, Rebecca, my wife, our Rebecca systems, people that Rebecca is also aware and she practices. So it keeps us busy. It keeps me busy.
Ron Bockstahler 2:10
So you want to talk about that raising children being and keeping your law practice going. I think it's amazing. So we're gonna get that in a minute. But let's kind of talk off a lot of people that maybe know you don't know that you started your career as an accountant, your CPA. So talk to us how you became how you kind of moved into being an attorney.
Gregg Garofalo 2:25
So and I know this can be added around. So just for clarification, I have an accounting background accounting degree from Illinois Western University. I graduated in 1992. With the idea that I was going to be practicing as an accountant, I ended up getting the family business full time, which I've been working in ever since I was 13 years old, which was running a restaurant. And so I did that for four years before I went to law school and going to law school, I knew what I wanted to do going in, which is kind of what I wanted to do. Even as I was graduating from undergrad, I wanted to work with families, I wanted to work with small businesses. Part of that was because I came from a family that owns a small business because I felt like I can really help them and be a part of their overall team and their business. And so going into law school, I knew that I wanted to do estate planning with them with my background and tax planning for my background with taxes. I thought it was a really good fit. And I finished up my law school my JD and started working for Ernst and Young and their tax consulting department. And while working there, I went on to get my masters in tax from Chicago, Kent university or Chicago Kent College of Law. So I've got my JD in masters of tax from Kent as well and my undergrad in accounting, and I stayed with Ernst and Young for a couple years before I started to go to private practice.
Ron Bockstahler 3:40
So let's think back What year did you start your practice are your own practice
Gregg Garofalo 3:44
1999 2000 and graduated, I graduated my way of switching I graduated law school in 99. Got my master's degree in 2000. Worked for a firm for four years, and then I started my own practice in 2004.
Ron Bockstahler 3:57
Okay, okay, so and then let's kind of fast forward a little bit. I think you were ahead of your time you moved to Georgia, you moved your family to Georgia while maintaining a law practice in Chicago. So let's talk about you know, how do you do law different what technology are you using? How do you make it happen? I guess that's the let's start there.
Gregg Garofalo 4:14
Sure. So when my what my met my wife in Chicago, I met Rebecca in Chicago. She's a practicing attorney with the law school here when we got married and decided to start a family. Rebecca is from Northwest Georgia, just south of Chattanooga. So we decided to go back maybe close to her family. She's got a twin sister and two other sisters to help raise our family. And so Rebecca was working with the firm at that time as well. So we were faced with the challenge of how do we make this work, a practice that I've had in Chicago for over at that point over 12 years? How do we keep that practice and operated from Georgia and be successful? So yeah, when I started my practice, even before that, I tried to institute software and plant management software which I think helped a lot and keeping things all digital because We early on, we tried to keep our files all digital, scanning all the important documents and keeping them online. So when we decided to start to make this transition, I didn't have to have my files with me, I didn't have to be in the office because I could pull up our client management software. And at that point, probably about 70% of the documents were already scanned in the system. So if I needed something was all right there.
Ron Bockstahler 5:19
No, I make funny a quite a bit. I call you a gate because you know, you're more of a techie than your attorney sometimes, or maybe both. I don't know. But how does someone that don't love technology like you do? How do they do it?
Gregg Garofalo 5:30
In all honesty, if you're if you're technology adverse, all I can say is then you have to work with somebody, you have to work with a firm, you know, even like all like Amada, you'd have to work with a firm that has the experience that can guide and guide you through it, because there's just no avoiding it. And we've seen that now with COVID. I won't say his name, but you know, my next door neighbor here in my office suite who's very technology adverse and always has been as long as I've known him. And now with COVID pandemic, he said he doesn't want to come back to the office and work if he had a choice because he likes it and he likes having an ease that means he's had to step up with a lot of the technology and step into the 21st century if you would,
Ron Bockstahler 6:08
I think he you know, an older generations, it's kind of funny, we we looked at and said, Man, if you're like over the age of 60, you're definitely going to be aching to get back to the office. But I find that that's not necessarily the case. It's the younger people that want to get back to the office, maybe for the social and the mentoring and the sex, the opportunity to grow their practice. But some of these, you know, seasoned attorneys that always love come to the opposite. Realize that, hey, it's pretty nice. I'm working, I get a lot done at home.
Gregg Garofalo 6:31
Absolutely. I think that's completely true. My associate her she comes from a family of lawyers and her dad, his firm, they're not even back in the office at all. And her brother is the same way they're back in the office maybe two days a week and they don't know when they're going back. But you know, I can even say Yeah, I agree with Ron definitely the older generation is really starting to I say older generation 60. And older lawyers, I'm that's but the 60 year olds, yeah, they really do appreciate and are enjoying being able to work remotely. I'm finding even some of the younger workers are enjoying that as well, too. They want their day or two maybe in the office, but they they definitely like the freedom of being able to work from home as well. So
Ron Bockstahler 7:11
I'm with them. I'm enjoying myself. Yeah, let's just jump into estate planning. Yeah, you know, I've seen a topic close to my heart. We've had Steve Sackler on recently talking about, you know, planning your future, what's the, you know, designing your life? What's it going to look like an estate planning kind of falls right into that, and most of us and most, especially attorneys don't just ignore their own state plans. So what's a good time? Let's start when do you start? What's the best time I've got, you know, six children? When do I start telling them? Hey, you need let's start focus on estate planning for you.
Gregg Garofalo 7:39
Okay, so we You and I were talking about before, and I think we just posted something on our firm blog on our website. It's never too early to start planning. I mean, literally, we tell parents when your kids turn 18, they should come in and at least to the basic estate plan, and the basic estate planning is just powers of attorney for health care policies, Attorney for property, a basic will author HIPAA authorization, and actually each university a little bit different five, access educational records access. And, you know, apparently, how common is that really necessary. God forbid, we don't know what's coming around the corner, nobody knew what COVID was going to be like this hand with everything happening. Having that in place, if your child gets sick at school, or something happened to them, you're prepared because without these documents, these basic very easy documents, you can find yourself in probate court in front of a guardianship judge trying to make medical decisions for your son or daughter just because you didn't know I mean, he didn't think about it that that you were procrastination, you know,
Ron Bockstahler 8:37
let me stop you real quick because I don't want to go over that what you just said records access. And I never thought about this until you'd mentioned is we're just sitting around talking recently. 18 all of a sudden my son turns 18 I can no longer access his records even if he's sitting in the hospital die. Yes,
Gregg Garofalo 8:53
that is that is correct. So under Illinois law, you as a parent under the Illinois healthcare surrogate act can make medical decisions for him without a court or without a power of attorney but here's the here's the catch you can't get access to his record you can't say hey you know what, I want a copy of all these records but I can get a second opinion from a different hospital because you don't have that authority under the health care surrogate act you can only make medical decisions it's kind of a an odd rule that allows acts as law that never changed so you're absolutely correct once he turns 18 you can't access those records without his authorization without Of course giving you that authority.
Ron Bockstahler 9:28
Wow. Now I know you practice in Illinois and you practicing in Georgia yet
Gregg Garofalo 9:32
I'm not but my wife is Rebecca is and Rebecca is doing estate planning and estate administration in Georgia as well too.
Ron Bockstahler 9:39
So are you familiar with other states? Is that a pretty common clause or is that as it just all state by state and across the board like so many other things
Gregg Garofalo 9:45
the healthcare surrogate act it's it's there's something similar in every state. Okay,
Ron Bockstahler 9:49
let's talk. Let's talk college kids. I know we talked about this too. Let's you know, what should we be thinking about for our kids or later in college, as far as setting up their state planning
Gregg Garofalo 9:58
their estate planning the kids estate plan Yeah, yeah, there's there's five basic things that we tell parents and I touched on them real quick. But other schools and again, five basic things were poverty for health care, so that you have the ability to make health care decisions for your child, because like you said, once they turn 18, you want it in writing exactly the power that you have without having to get a court involved, I HIPAA authorization, which the difference between them for those who don't know, between a HIPAA authorization and the power of attorney for health care, HIPAA, we've all signed those nowadays, with going to the doctor, it just means you have access to medical records, or you're giving somebody access to your medical records. And in most instances, the power of attorney for health care will cover that. But we recommend both just it's kind of the duel across across all T's and dotting the eyes, it's better to have both of those poverty for property. And this is one where I want my, my kids don't have anything, the only thing my kids have is what I give them. So why do we need to find a property that may be true, okay, but that poverty is also going to give you authority then to if something happens, your job, pay their credit cards, get access to credit card records, maybe cancel credit cards, just stop for whatever reason, it will give you the authority to execute tax returns for your child, because at the age of 18, they need to file their own tax returns. So that's how the property is something very important, even if they don't have any money, a last will and testament. And I know that seems very morbid, but it is very unfortunate if your child gets in an accident, at college, on their way to college, or even not at college. And it's a result of an accident where their estate inherits money or receives money, your child may want to say, well look, Mom, Dad, you're all set, I don't want to give it to you. I'd rather give it just to my siblings, or I'd rather give it to this charity that I'm so passionate about or so on, etc. So a basic will is something that's very important as well. And the last document that parents don't think about and is normally not part of a parent's estate plan certainly would be the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act authorization form. And each school has its own unique form. But in essence, that's giving you the authority to access your child's records, school records, because parents like well wait, I pay for the education, can I get access to the records? Not necessarily? No.
Ron Bockstahler 12:01
So your simple question that someone like me thinks about is I'm sending my kids out to this college and we do the enrollment and and you know, pay tuition are these things the school brings up like, Hey, here's a checklist, make sure you're covered all these things.
Gregg Garofalo 12:12
You know, a lot of times they will bring up and I'll use the acronym, the FERPA release for the records, since that is a unique form that each school has felt that may be something that they kind of shove in front of the college students, they are assigned this at registration, but the other documents generally know generally what's a family
Ron Bockstahler 12:28
do? Do they call someone like you and say, Hey, I'm in a bind. My kids in the hospital is in college. I can't access his records. What do I do?
Gregg Garofalo 12:35
Right? So we sit down and we go through and we have to open up a guardianship estate. And I've had that happen a couple of times during my career.
Ron Bockstahler 12:42
I'm most curious what so give me a ballpark something like that happens. And we're talking about the college student knew what are we talking about money just open a guardians. I know I know, attorneys don't want to talk about that. But I just want to ballpark we talked about $5,000 thing a $20,000 thing.
Gregg Garofalo 12:54
in Cook County, in the collar counties generally you're looking at just to open it probably about $5,000. And that's not all my that's not all the attorneys fees, that's filing fees, the attorneys fees, the court usually appoints a guardian ad litem that also has to be paid from the guardianship estate. So all these fees come into play that has to be paid. And from start to finish, it's usually about 5000. And people who hide that so expensive. Or if you're coming to me, because you need to make medical decisions for your child because they're in the hospital, that's just not a regular guardianship. Now it's a temporary guardianship based on an emergency basis. So that's even more fee. So all these fees add up very quickly, because you need to start making decisions very quickly. And so it's like anything in life, we tell our clients all the time, a guardianship usually is set up as a reaction to something happening. And with the powers of attorney and sitting down and educating your children and educating parents. That's that's you're being proactive, and you're planning ahead of time. So the cost versus that. I mean, the cost to do basic estate planning for a college student of a client, we give them a discounted rate for for if they're an existing clients, I mean, could be minimal, could be 10%. It could be 20%. It could be 1000 $2,000, which is extremely less than this issue. Plus no court, no court involvement, public, private. So
Ron Bockstahler 14:13
this is the sounds like you know, an area of law that I never even thought about, you know, sending your kid off to college is enough. But now said I should make sure that we have all these forms these documents filled out they got an estate.
Gregg Garofalo 14:22
Yeah, that's true. Absolutely. Like I said, there is a blog, a really quick blog that goes over the five different documents that we suggest for children. So and we are doing a little webinar because we have more and more parents that have called us this year. And I think part of that is has been fueled by COVID.
Ron Bockstahler 14:39
Let's talk about children. Let's talk about it because you've got first hand experience with the serafina What special guests actions do you need to take to make sure that you know serafina is taken care of if something were to happen. God forbid something happens to you and Becca, so it's
Gregg Garofalo 14:54
so serafina she is going to be six in December like we talked about. She has autism and so she He's not verbal at this time. And so the prognosis for autism, medical experts don't, they can't tell you. So for us, and what we try to tell parents in similar situations is the planning should start now. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen a year, five years, 10 years down the road. And it's always to me, again, getting back to, you need to do the planning now. So you're not reactive and scrambling down the road. And so what are some of the things we do? Well, we set up you know, consider setting up a special needs trust for for your child now, and you want it to be a special needs trust, a, what we call a third party special needs trust, which is one that we create, we find and we put our money in now. And a lot of parents who said, Well, you know, I get I'm not worried about it, when when the time comes and I pass away, I'll just make sure that she gets half of the assets and the other half, go to my other daughter, whatever the case may be, but an outright gift to your child like that could disinherit them and not just in here could disqualify them from potentially getting governmental assistance or qualifying for certain government programs and make them spend down all that money first. So example, parents pass to what both parents pass away, and the other child that has special needs may inherit $200,000. And it's a direct outright gift to the child, well, that child has spent all that money down for their own care before they can qualify for any kind of governmental benefits. And the alternative set up a special needs trust, and you put it all into a special needs trust. Now that child qualifies for all the governmental benefits and whatever they don't receive from the government or whatever programs don't provide for them, the money in a special needs trust can supplement. So it's taking that $200,000 and stretching it out, hopefully, for a longer period of time to provide better care and have more assets available for your child.
Ron Bockstahler 16:41
So is that going to be the case if the child's already receiving some kind of government assistance?
Gregg Garofalo 16:46
Absolutely. Because if they're receiving some kind of government benefits or assistance, and you pass away, and they receive this outright gift, those those programs are usually asset and income based. And so you'll you the child will lose those benefits until the money that they received is spent down in the benefits benefits picked back up again.
Ron Bockstahler 17:02
So Greg, does that included the insurance policy? So say there's a $5 million insurance policy the child is going to be the beneficiary of was that would that actually count towards that to spend that money down to also? Absolutely, yeah. So how do you get around that?
Gregg Garofalo 17:15
If it goes out right to the child, then absolutely, it would be a spend down that they have to spend so how do you get around it you've just set up a trust for the child. In most situations, parents will set up in their trust distribution to the children or not outright, it's held in trust for the children and so since the children never have access to it, then they will continue to qualify for governmental benefits.
Ron Bockstahler 17:38
So I'm going to tell you you and I never really talked about this as far as special needs special needs trust pride before serafina so is this something you had to go out? And you know, it doesn't seem to me like the normal area that if you're in state planning that you're really focused on and maybe I'm wrong with that but did you have to go out when you know when you went surfing, you found out serafina had autism and do a little more research and then that make you even better at setting these things up than the average estate planning attorney.
Gregg Garofalo 18:04
So in my career when I was the first firm that I started working at and and why needed to do estate planning, I was kind of thrown into a state administration and guardianships pretty quickly as a practicing attorney. And so I had had a great deal of experience before serafina was born with special needs trusts and the different types of special needs trusts and qualifying for governmental benefits and you know, how do we plan to make sure we can maximize benefits all around so when serafina was born, I had a pretty good base and background in that already so we were prepared as much as you could be prepared for as a as a parent in general but as a parent with a child with special needs we were somewhat prepared for how do we plan from an estate planning perspective?
Ron Bockstahler 18:46
Yeah, I think I look at it as having someone with first hand knowledge and understanding makes it a little more maybe a little more empathetic under when talking to a parent is kind of going through similar situation so that to me is a plus right deal with
Gregg Garofalo 18:57
that it really is I've gotten I've got I've got a lot of clients who have come to me because they know our situation I'm I don't try to hide it. Surfing is a by opinion, a beautiful, wonderful young young girl who hopefully as a as much as possible normal life. And whatever normal is I had averse, but I don't hide what her special needs are. And so I think that openness resonates with a lot of families who are faced with the same thing because they know that I know what they're going to.
Ron Bockstahler 19:25
Let's kind of flip back to you live in Georgia, you have a practice in Chicago, how often you're in Chicago,
Gregg Garofalo 19:30
pre COVID. I was here every week. Post COVID or in the midst of COVID I come up maybe once a month not even maybe once every other month it just depends right now with everything still kind of in flux in the court system not completely open and everything being via zoom. There's really not much of a need to be here. Most clients enjoy zoom now you know where I thought we all thought there would be this adverse I don't want to deal with that they've really taken to it. So I think that this has worked out well for me Because it's more convenient for them, Hey, can you meet at six o'clock at night after the kids have had dinner? Sure. I don't think well, it's your house. We'll jump on zoom and I can take a call real quick and we can you know, go through stuff now.
Ron Bockstahler 20:10
So but you're also court appointee and many guardianship matters. You do do some litigation, probate courts not back in person doing trials, Correct. Correct. So that could change things going forward. When they do assuming they'll come back. I mean,
Gregg Garofalo 20:23
well, no, no, we're doing we're doing hearings, we're doing the hearing, guardianship and probate administration is that really generally not advert is not an adverse proceeding. So a lot of the hearings and stuff we do we can do online, but what we're not doing is we've got at least two jury trials that can't be scheduled yet. We'll contest and another one disinheritance contest, and we can't schedule it, because there's no juries that are available yet for probate matters. Okay,
Ron Bockstahler 20:49
so that might change a little bit. So everyone's probably wondering you Okay, you live in Georgia, come Chicago, but how's your practice doing? Are you busy, like I hear so many are you kind of things tough.
Gregg Garofalo 21:00
I mean, we're busier than we've ever been. We've, you know, as much as we were prepared for this in living down in Georgia. Now, for a little over seven years, we really started to move everything from server base to cloud base. So again, we were kind of prepared for this. It didn't matter where you live, the most far my employees took their laptops went home, and they could start working at home. But we've also tried to streamline things quite a bit from a staffing perspective as well. So we're busy, we're very busy, and the staff is very busy, but things are going things are going well.
Ron Bockstahler 21:29
That's good to hear. You know, I'm a big proponent of changing the way laws practice in so many ways. And I you know, if anything, COVID is bad as bad, it's really accelerated some of the changes that were kind of slowly coming our way. And I think you were on the on the forefront seven years ago when you made the move.
Gregg Garofalo 21:44
Yeah, absolutely. It definitely thrown a lot of, you know, attorneys into, okay, I got to figure out this cloud thing. What is it? You know, it's quiet, it's in the cloud, it's up in the sky, you know, can't remember that movie that that that was from but yeah, they've had to sit down and say, Okay, I don't have to understand that necessarily, but I definitely have to get on board with it, figure out how to use it.
Ron Bockstahler 22:04
Absolutely. And I think that's we had a webinar, I think maybe under 46, the ABA guidance that came out saying, hey, you still need to understand technology, you know, you're still it's an ethical rule, you know, ties into 1.6 rule one point 60, you still got to be able to know what you're talking about and serve your clients, which means you have to understand the technology, or at least somebody in firm needs to understand it. You're still responsible, right at the end of the day. No last question. We always like to talk. First, I'll leave it to us. Anything else you want to add about probate or estate planning that we've missed on things you want to hit on?
Gregg Garofalo 22:35
Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of new hot topics, you know, people like tell me all the time well, estate planning, Greg, it's the same, it's the same as it is today, as it was, you know, 1520 years ago, and you know, it seems it's going to be you know, five or 10 years. So I have because I often tell clients, once we do your estate plan, we should still sit down once a year and see what's changed. What's changed in your life was changes. And when they tell me Well, you know, nothing's really changed. Well, yeah, a lots changed. COVID is something that definitely changed. One thing you and I were talking about at the beginning, cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies are something that definitely has has changed. And I think that with clients having several of our clients investing in cryptocurrencies, it's something that we need to look at your safe plan and see how that plays into it.
Ron Bockstahler 23:17
Yeah, that's just yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Because I'm thinking to myself, that is not a safe investment, as a guardian actually required to have, you know, maintain safe investments. So you fought Do you have to sell that cryptocurrency? If there all of a sudden you take over
Gregg Garofalo 23:29
that, you know, and that's exactly you pretty much hit the nail on the head on on, on the concerns that we have, as estate planners, and the challenges that trustees would have, generally speaking a the general rule and trust, it states that your trustee has to invest the funds pursuant to what we call the prudent investor rule, which just means it has to be reasonable, it can't be risky, etc, etc. We all know that cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile. So would your traditional trust actually tie the hands of the trustee to manage those assets? Or would they just be required to sell all the assets immediately, because they're too volatile, and they don't have the authority to manage those pursuant to the prudent investor rule. So it's, it's definitely something to look at. So that's interesting.
Ron Bockstahler 24:12
And it actually gets me thinking that we recently had Steve Metro Metro financial on a webinar and talking to attorneys about how they can save more money for their retirement and shelter, their income from taxes. And one of the big things they brought up was a cash balance plan. Are you familiar with the cash balance plan? No, you can save up to 150 to $250,000 of your income each year as an attorney if you're a solo, and you know, you can if you have employees also, but also you got to contribute to their plan also, but it was really interesting to me that you can do that above and beyond a 401k plan, a five part of an IRA plan. So there's a there's definitely a way to be sheltering a lot of your money from taxes today, if you're an attorney making 500,000 a million dollars a year. You know, what just makes a lot of sense to look into that. Notice that when having Steve on the show was amazing and I'm thinking okay, if I'm doing that kind of savings, I better have a good estate plan in place right because that becomes substantial very quickly.
Gregg Garofalo 25:04
It absolutely and you know to your point with having an investment advisor a lot of times if you have unique assets or you have an investment visor that you're very passionate about and you feel they do a great job a lot of times that's why we'll tell people then you we need to sit down to your safe plan and we need to work them into it in that maybe they'll be the investment advisor going forward even after you pass away because you feel very strong this person number one does a good job number two knows what you want you know you guys have usually with an investment advisor an attorney does your estate planning to have somewhat of an intimate relationship with because they know a lot about you and you know a lot about your finances your family makeup and things of that nature. So you know, Ron, you may say, this is the person I want to be my investment advisor for the trust for my kids after I passed away. So the only way to really ensure that is to make sure you have a good estate plan that dictates what your wishes are,
Ron Bockstahler 25:57
it becomes more and more important so anyone listening the attorneys I know they're listening this show make sure you're getting out there talking to an estate planning attorney and getting the state in place going oh, you know, we tend not to do things for ourselves that's kind of the nature of who we are. Yeah, these things become very, very important. So definitely recommend get out there and talk to an estate planning attorney and you know, listen to Stephen Metro or guys in the financial industry to understand how you can save more money and you know, defer tax tax payments for a little bit out there. So Greg, what we just finished off of that last question, what's the one thing in the legal profession that you would like to see changed?
Gregg Garofalo 26:28
The one thing in the legal profession I can see change taking the business side of or just anything, believe it anything
Ron Bockstahler 26:33
I'm generally I generally focus on the business side. But if you got something other than that, bring it on. Oh,
Gregg Garofalo 26:37
I don't know there's there's several different different things I can tell you from an estate planning. And this is going to send a really big thing, but with the way that the world is going and we've all had to adapt to the changes of technology and and working remotely. I personally don't feel like certain states have passed the rules and the laws that would really make it easier to keep up with technology as well. Illinois, for example, the notary law in Illinois, I don't think is where it should be in could be as compared to other states that makes it very difficult to do remote signings and things of that nature. So I would like to see that our legislators try to keep up with the changing times to make our practice easier, which really makes our practice easier, which makes it easier for our clients.
Ron Bockstahler 27:20
It's interesting, you bring that up, because in many areas of law, you can actually accept the digital signature, but in estate planning, you still need to hardcopy signature you still need witnesses. So you got to get together eventually with your client at some point physically.
Gregg Garofalo 27:32
Yes, yes.
Ron Bockstahler 27:33
I see what you said. All right. Well, Greg, great having you on your show. Really appreciate taking the time out and look forward to talk to you down the road. Best way to reach Greg. Greg, what is your email?
Gregg Garofalo 27:41
My email is Garofalo at GLG firm COMM
Ron Bockstahler 27:45
And we will get that out there when we post The show also, so we'll make sure you got his contact information. Great guy to work with highly recommend Greg known for a long time. So thanks for joining us on the show today, Greg. Yeah. Thanks. great having you. And thanks for. Absolutely and thanks for listening to the 1958 lawyer podcast. We'll be back in two weeks with Steve mesereau talking about you know, kind of we just brought up how you can save even more money with a cash balance plan and protect your income. Have a great day everyone.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai