December 19, 2019

Episode 77: Mark Goodfield: The Ins and Outs of Estate Planning: Making the Right Arrangements.

December 19, 2019

On today’s episode, we are joined by Mark Goodfield of The Blunt Bean Counter blog to talk about estate planning and wills. Mark is a partner at BDO Canada, a national accounting firm and has created a wealth of content on investing, tax and the relationship between the two.

He provides full-service wealth management, but does not advise on nor manage investments. Estate planning is a difficult task because you are confronted with your mortality, but it is hugely important because without a clear-cut plan, those left behind will have to deal with many complications in the midst of grieving. Mark has seen these complications with some of his own clients and the negative effects it has had on them. Along with conventional estate planning, such as drawing up a will, Mark also strongly advises transparency about your finances both with your partner and your children. This will not only ensure that there are no surprises, but also allow them to gain a level of financial literacy to deal with money, if they currently do not have that responsibility. He believes that people are not open enough when talking about money, which has implications long after they are gone. While estate planning is largely to do with finances and assets, Mark does not believe that money automatically correlates with success. This is why it is equally important to consider the legacy you leave behind in other ways, such as strong relationships and giving time to good causes. For this and much more, join us today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• What it entails being the executor of an estate. [0:02:47.0]

• The implications of dying intestate. [0:04:32.0]

• Why it is important to disclose assets liable to probate tax. [0:07:27.0]

• Ensure that both spouses are relatively financially literate. [0:08:40.0]

• Why you should involve your adult children in financial conversations. [0:11:07.0]

• The two ways of consolidating your investment holdings [0:12:23.0]

• The tax, legal and personal implications of giving up ownership. [0:17:03.0]

• The distinction between known and presumed inheritance. [0:20:11.0]

• How to deal with potential uneven distribution in an estate. [0:23:23.0]

• When it makes sense to hire a corporate executor [0:25:49.0]

• The five ways that success is not always linked to money [0:27:06.0]

• How Mark has defined his own personal success [0:29:55.0]

Read the Transcript:

Let's start off. Can you just tell us and our listeners a little bit about your practice?

I am a partner with BDO Canada, LLP, which is a national accounting firm and it deals with mid-market private companies and high net worth individuals. But my background is tax specialist and estate planning, but I now use those skills in a wealth advisory capacity to assist my clients basically in planning their financial affairs, from [her 00:02:13] Perspective, from estate planning perspective and a financial planning perspective. I do not, however, provide investment advice. I leave that to the likes of PWL, but I do oversee the results in my clients and investment managers.

That's perfect. Then today we're going to focus a lot of the questions that we have on exactly that, preparing your estate and estate planning. In a lot of cases, when we're talking about estate planning, we will see people naming a spouse or a sibling or a child as the executor of their estate and their will. Can you just give us a little bit of insight into what's involved with being an executor? Is that a small task?

I'd say no. I personally have been an executor a few times and I've advised numerous executives in my capacity as an accountant for their estates of these people. And I can tell you it's an arduous and stressful task, especially if you are not organized and do not have some financial background.

Yeah. I've been through it a number of times and I mean, I'm pretty organized, but you're absolutely right. It's a task that requires extreme organization. Now I've read stats at an enormous number of Canadians don't have up-to-date wills or even have wills. Can you talk about how important is it that you do have them and that they are up to date, including wills and powers of attorney, Mark?

I think that, as you guys know that maybe your listeners don't know, I write a blog called the Blunt Bean Counter. And one of the blogs I wrote was on people not having a will. And the last time I looked there was about a, I think it was a 2016 survey by someone called Legal Wills that noted, I think 62% of Canadians didn't have wills and 12% were outdated, which is just an astronomical number. In my client base because I have a lot of corporate clients and high net worth people, I don't see that number as that high, but I still see a really surprising number [felt 00:03:56] Wills and definitely dated wills, which I would assume you guys in your practice do something of similar nature too.

Does that data include who doesn't have wills? What demographic don't have wills? Is there any difference between different segments of the population?

I think it was the younger segment were not preparing wills. I mean, that makes sort of common sense if you think about it. You don't have as many assets. You're infallible when you're young, you never think about potentially dying at that age.

So when you're talking about preparing an estate and getting people's affairs in order and stuff like that, how much messier can it be if someone dies intestate without a will?

It's a nightmare. When you sit down with a lawyer, you spend a lot of time trying to make sure your wishes are put into that will, and suddenly if you die intestate, now I'm not a lawyer so I can't give you all the actual details, but you're then under a provincial act that determines how your will is allocated. So your will may have been, for example, my spouse has a really great job, so I'm not really leaving him or her that much money, but I want to leave a whole bunch to charity. Well, that's going to go out the window because it's going to fall under the provincial rules. So to not have a will, I think, is just a nightmare and I've actually had clients or, well, someone wanted to be a client, I just declined it because it's such a mess that the father died without a will then the mother, despite seeing the mess because of the father's wall, didn't have a will, so we had two estates with no wills. I just said, "I can't deal with this."

Unreal. So you say it's important to articulate the wishes. How important is it to also articulate the assets in the will?

When you get back to being your first question about an executor, I think one of the most important things A, is to tell them, because surprise doesn't work for executors, it only works for birthday parties, and you need to give them a list or I've created something called an estate organizer, where you put down everything you have and you leave into your safety deposit box or somewhere in a secure site, but not letting people know what you have, it's crazy. They can miss things. And it just becomes a nightmare.

You mentioned an estate organizer. Is that a tool that people can access online?

If they go actually to my blog, The Blunt Bean Counter, if you go to January 2019, I had two blogs, one on the estate organizer and one how to use it. And if you go to those blogs, you can just download it from there.

Okay. That's super cool. Do you have any good stories about people not documenting assets?

Once they have a will, they typically at least have enough in there to sort of be able to find it and if they have an accountant, I have the returns. I think it becomes more for, I can't think of an exact situation where they didn't have it. I think it comes a bit where there's sort of art and jewelry that especially is not documented. From a legal and tax point of view, you really have to deal with this, but a lot of families don't want to deal with that. And they sort of just leave it out of the will. And that becomes a potentially a huge issue for probate and tax.

Can you talk about the probate? So if you do have a bunch of jewelry and other valuable things like perhaps artwork, tell me what's the best way to draft up something so it's clear to the executive where those assets are to go and what assets like that, if any, would hit probate.

So I'm not a probate specialist. I think they all hit it. Really when you sit down with an estate lawyer, who's doing their job, basically you provide a list of those assets because it then becomes important. People don't want to put them down because of the tax, but they then put the executor at risk because probate is incorrect and they're liable for it. And then the whole estate becomes liable for the tax because there's no deem dispositions of those assets on the tax return. And then the other thing is the family squabbling where you could have somebody saying, "Oh, well, you had an A. Y. Jackson. I want that one." And it's not listed to anybody and the other picture is from a child at school. And so who gets the A. Y. Jackson? So it can create family squabbles, too.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Something that we see a lot in our capacity is one spouse in a couple of will really take the lead on financial stuff. They'll take the lead in meetings with us. They'll take the lead on tracking spending, or investments or whatever. What kind of impact can that have? Or have you seen if that financially literate spouse dies and the other spouse is financially illiterate?

Yeah. And I've so I have the same experience. I mean, I think it's a little bit more older school with my clients that are older, but even younger couples, it's really strange but there seems to be, as you say, one spouse seems to take control typically and the other ones don't. And so if the spouse that died was the literate one and the illiterate one is still there, you come down to them, not understanding how to deal with the assets. I've had spouses don't even know how to go to the bank or pay online or even write checks. And let's say the spouse was more of a do it yourself investor. They have nobody to assist them with how to deal with the investments. Obviously they can hire somebody like you, but they're struggling for a long time. They have no idea about renewing mortgages and how to do insurance. So it's a huge issue.

And I've talked about where I've seen these situations to try and increase that spouse's financial literacy and so that organizer, for example, sit down and we'll walk through that organizer with your spouse. So they know what assets you have if they really aren't aware of it. Introduce them to people like you. So it's a lot easier if someone passes away and they talk to you to come call you and deal with you, rather than somebody you've never talked to at that time. So you have to know the financial advisor, the insurance agent, the accountant, lawyer. Have your spouse, if they don't really do this stuff, pay some bills. When you get your reports from investments, go over them with them. Discuss daily financial events. So you start to at least give them a little bit of a financial literacy.

Yeah. That's something that we've actually seen quite a few times where an older couple, and you're right. I think this is an issue that's more specific to the older couples as a generalization, but we've had, on several occasions, couples like that come in for the exact reason that you just described where they've identified this as an issue, and they want to start that relationship now before anybody's health starts to fail.

I've seen the exact same thing.

We've also seen lately quite a bit of the older clients come in with their adult children to get them involved in the whole process. I assume you've seen the same thing.

Yes. And I'm a huge proponent of involving your children. Now, obviously every family dynamic is a little different, but to the extent you get along with your children and your children sort of get along with themselves, I'm a very big proponent of involving them in the process.

How important do you think it is to have that open dialogue between parents and adult children about financial matters? Because I think in a lot of cases, parents will maybe be nervous to talk about it or uncomfortable talking about it with the kids. Maybe the kids are uncomfortable. How important do you think that dialogue is?

I think this is sort of a, again, I'm older than you guys, but I think it's more, hopefully a little bit older than my generation. I think my generation is a little bit better, but old-school was, don't talk about money. But back to, like you had asked before, what repercussions, well, there's, for example, you have a cottage and you don't want to talk about the cottage because you're just going to leave it in your will. But you think your daughter, Sally, is the one who loves the cottage, but Sally really hates it. She's just been coming up to the cottage because you want her to come and you're leaving her the cottage and she doesn't want it. I totally understand people don't have to necessarily talk about the quantum of their dollars or everything they have, but you can frame enough discussions in generalities or just in general assets to make sure that people understand what you have and who's going to get it and who should get it and who wants it, things like that.

So as people start to prepare their estate plan and they have assets in a variety of different places and different institutions and perhaps some share certificates in a safety deposit box, can you talk about the kind of advice you'd give to these people as to how they should arrange these different investments as they prepare this? So someone's sitting down to do an estate plan and they're going to have accounts, perhaps a number of different institutions. Can you talk about how people should simplify or should they simplify their investment holdings as part of this process?

Like probably you guys, again getting back in general, there's sort of one more sophisticated person in a marriage or whatever dealing with their assets. And when I sit down with them, sometimes they just consciously or just come to me and say, "You know what? My estate is really complicated for my spouse and children. They're not as sophisticated as I am," or they've seen a messy estate. They know it's a mess. So they say, "Okay, let's try and sort of simplify this." And it comes down to sort of a couple ways we sort of can do this sort of as a no-cost way or a tax cost way. And so by that, I mean for no cost is exactly, as you said, I have numerous clients and I'm sure you've had numerous come to you that suddenly come to you and give you five investment statements. They're using every possible investment advisor under the sun.

And that makes no sense. So one of the ways to simplify is if you have two, three or four investment advisors, let's make that one or two at most and simplify that. So you don't have to deal with that. It's no cost to doing that. That simplifies things. A lot of my clients have multiple corporations maybe because we know we're getting to that point where we want to simplify things, we amalgamate dissolve, consolidate, or do some things where there's not necessarily tax consequence. I tell clients to open a joint account with a child because God forbid they die that they have at least some money in there to pay the funeral expenses and ongoing expenses for the next couple months. And they don't have to go begging to the bank to get them, to give them the money because the bank will, a lot of times, not allow any money to come out other than maybe for a funeral.

But then there's sort of the tax side where there is some cost to doing it. One thing I see a lot of is a lot of clients that were born outside of Canada or have invested outside of Canada and they have assets in the country that were, they understand how it works or they speak the language of that country and their kids have no clue. So we talk about, "Well, maybe it's a good time to sell those assets now while you can get the best value for, or not necessarily the best value. At least you'll get good value for now because no one's in a rush to sell it because someone has died. You understand the language you understand the way things work in that country. So maybe we sell those assets, which create obviously a tax liability early, but it simplifies the estate."

Same thing with a lot of people who have, let's say, real estate and or partnerships or joint ventures and the partners or the ventures have agreed that if one of them dies, they definitely don't want to deal with the kids and they're going to sell everything. And so just deal with some of these things now. Now, obviously anytime you sell an asset early, you're prepaying the tax, but I've had a lot of clients that say, "You know what, I'm going to pay the tax and five, 10, 15, 20 years anyways. Let me just simplify things for my family and not have to deal with that."

Just anecdotally, have you seen that have a pretty positive impact on people from a psychological perspective when they do that simplification?

Yes. I think they're always worried about how everybody's going to handle these things. I mean, it's a two edged sword. These people typically are entrepreneurs and investors that want to get the best return for their money. And they're saying, "Well, I simplify things now, I may be giving up some upside to my investment," but especially ones I've ever been through dealing with estate, realize what a nightmare it's going to be for their family. And so some of them do decide to sell early just to simplify.

That's really interesting. I think you're a little bit unique Mark in that you are, based on reading your blog anyway, you've got great knowledge and tax and estate planning and wealth advisory, you call your practice, but you've also got really good financial knowledge. How do you think people should think about that trade-off between the financial asset that they own versus, and there obviously there's tax implication, and then also the simplification?

I think you almost have to say, what do you think the potential return on that investment is that you're giving up versus a simplification. If the return is potentially massive, then I say, "You know what, let's plan for it now. Let's make sure one of your executors can deal with that. And we're going to bring in somebody to help with that asset." If it's not, in a lot of these cases, the upside may not be that huge. So personally, I think it's better to simplify and just make things easier for your family, because I've just been through, as I'm sure you guys have been, where somebody dies. It's just the family's grieving. Their life's upside down. And to have to deal with all these things are really hard. So if you can make their life simpler at that point and not give up too much upside on the investment than I say, simplify.

So you mentioned one of the benefits or one of the ideas you can do to avoid probate is to make your investment account joint with the next generation. And can you talk about any tax impact or tax slip impact that has on the two parties going forward?

Again, this is a little bit more of a lawyer thing, but there's technically the issue is I've seen lots of people say, "Okay, I'm going to suddenly make my bank account joint so I don't have probate." And technically you're gifting half of that account, or especially when you're doing it with kids, a lot of people say, "Well, I'm going to put my principal residence in my children's name." Well, there's huge implications to that. You've now lost half your principal residence exemption if you've given half of it to your children. If you gifted them chairs of Bell Canada and Manulife, you have a deem disposition on those transfers to them. So you have to be really careful and get tax advice and maybe sometimes legal advice on what you're doing, because just making something joint, there's a legal ownership and a sort of non-legal ownership and then if you've technically given up the legal ownership, you've got a disposition. So it's really, there's a lot of tax consequences. So long story short, if you're considering doing something joint tax and legal advice before you do it.

Can you talk a little bit more about other than the tax implications, there are obviously other implications in terms of giving up legal ownership. Do you advise people to plan around those as well, or think about those as well before making an asset joint?

You're 100% right and it's a really good point. So let's just say for a cottage, a lot of people's cottages have gone up in value and there's always an issue. Do they transfer it now to stop the gain or do they just say, "We'll deal with it when I die"? But sometimes it causes it to become such a huge capital gain and the rest of the family doesn't have enough money that they're forced to sell the cottage. So people want to deal with it now so they can keep the cottage in the family. But if I transfer the cottage to my children and I first of all have a deem disposition, as we talked about, which causes tax, but now you have to start thinking about, "Okay, if I transfer it to them, it's their cottage." So you have to make sure that you have a proper legal document that gives you the right of use of that cottage, because you don't want your kids to get in a fight with you one day and kick you out of your cottage.

You're right. 100%. There's so many issues that you have to be really careful with when you transfer and a lot of families just work on trust, "Well, I'm going to transfer these shares to you." And even if they understand the deem disposition, it's really, "Well, those other half are my shares or my cash and you'll give it to me if I need it." That doesn't necessarily always happen.

Something that we've grappled with a ton just on this idea of giving an inheritance before death, when parents don't do that and then an adult child doesn't legally own the asset, what are your thoughts on the adult child using the expected inheritance in their own financial planning? Because it can have big implications. If an adult child is expecting a million dollar inheritance, they might save less and spend more. How do you tell people to think about that?

It's such a controversial issue. When I write about it, I get comments from the parents, "It's disgusting. My kids are planning on me dying." And some of the kids, "I love my parents, not their money. Inheritance should be a windfall, not a plan, blah, blah, blah, blah." There's so many different opinions on that, but I guess being practical and blunt, I think it's sort of nonsensical to totally ignore this. So I look at this as sort of a known inheritance and a presumed inheritance. So by that, I mean, going back to what we discussed, parent has actually been one of those parents that discussed with you that you are going to inherit this amount. And so you know you're getting in an inheritance. And if that parent is in very good shape financially, whatever they have is going to cover off way more than the inheritance.

I think it's nonsensical not to consider some portion of that to be inherited even if you discount it down because you're in the will. You've been told you're in the will. Anything can always happen. You can get kicked out of the well, but to be honest, I've never seen it. In the cases I've seen where parents have talked to their children about being in the will, they've all received what they thought they were going to get or even more. So I know people say never plan for it, but I think if it's known and you know the quantum pretty much, and you know the age of your parents, I think you should plan on at least some of it. The other one is I like to call is presumed is maybe your parents haven't talked to you about it, but you see your parents live a meager lifestyle. They live on their security and their pension.

And they have a cottage that they bought for 50,000, that's now worth a million and a half and they have a house they bought for 200, that's worth 2 million. At the end of the day, you're getting something. In those presumed you're not a hundred percent sure that it's there, so I'm not sure if you should really deal with that. But again, the reality is you're probably getting something there. So I'm in the camp that I think it's nonsensical to pretend you're not getting it when you know you're getting it, but you got to be very careful in how you think about it.

I think in this situation that you just described where you know there's something there, but you haven't talked to your parents about it so you don't really know if you're getting it, we've seen that quite a few times. And it's really tricky because someone goes and does a financial plan with us or with whoever. And they realize, "Geez, I am going to get this inheritance. It's going to materially change my expected outcome," but then they don't want to go talk to their parents and say, "Hey, am I getting the cottage? Or am I getting whatever?"

We come back to what we talked about before. In my opinion, the parent probably should at least give the child some knowledge of, again, you don't have to quantum and exact things, but I think they should discuss this with the child. And look, I've told children, "This is your call and it's a personal issue, but maybe just talk generalities with your parents of what's happening. So do my planning, but you don't have to tell me, but if you're willing to tell me it would really help." I think people are way too uptight about talking about money. And again, I'm not saying you have to give exact details of what you're worth and everything you own, but you can talk around it enough that it can help the people. And I have lots of clients through talk in actual dollars to their children and what they're getting and involve their children in everything. And I understand that's not for everybody, but I think we have way too big heads [inaudible 00:22:37] about money.

Yeah, I totally agree. The openness is huge on both sides.

And especially huge if you, like you said, if someone decides to kick one of their kids out of the will, you end up with some sort of unequal distribution of the estate. And we've seen that before examples, like, let's say I've got two kids and Ben's doing very well. He doesn't need as much as Cameron. He needs more, but they haven't talked about it with the kids. So have you seen in your days as a professional unequal distributions like that, and what sort of impact happens downstream?

It's funny you say downstream because I look at that as sort of vertical and horizontal, vertical being the parents leaving money and having decisions that affect their children, but they don't deal with the horizontal apart where it's the children that are going to have to live with themselves after. And as everybody knows, everybody's family has their own little sibling rivalries, past jealousies and relationships that don't always work good. So I think the parents really have to think about that. And look, if you have a black sheep child, there's some different, you have some issues, but if everybody sort of gets along in the family, I think the parents should at least potentially talk to the children about that. I think if you have a couple children, a couple of children that are very successful and one that's not, it's not that that one that's not has just been lazy and done nothing, but they've worked really hard and they just haven't been successful, I don't see a huge problem in the parent leaving them a little bit more.

But I think the parent should probably talk to the other two children, saying "I love you just as much as your other siblings, but I'm doing this because as you know, they haven't done as well as you have. And it's no slight on you, but realistically you don't really need the money that badly and they do." Something like that.

I really liked that framework for thinking about it where the parents have to think vertically, meaning the money going from the parents down to the kids. But they also have to think horizontally meaning how the money is going to affect the kids that are all on that same next level. That's a really good visual to think about that.

Yeah, and the other thing is even how you leave it, you really have to think about that too, because what I've seen for sure is parents, let's say, even if they're being equal, let's say we got a business worth a million and a half, $2 million of GICs and they leave the business with a million to one child and a million dollars in GICs to each other child. So if we're sitting here right now, we'd say, "Wow, that's great. They've totally equally given everybody the same thing and everybody's equal," but I've seen where that business, the child takes over the business really made it ramp up and it's worth 12 million. And now they've got a business worth 12 million. Then the two siblings have a million dollars in GICs, and there's huge issues and jealousy there.

I've seen the flip side where the children who got the business either screwed up the business or the business just sort of hit hard times and went down. Now they got something worth nothing and the other two each have a million dollars. So even sometimes we can do things equal. You got to really think about how you're doing it and the potential ramifications of how you split it.

We talked at the onset about what's involved with being an executor and we basically left it. It's a big task. Now you can hire an executor. So when do you think there's a case where hiring a corporate executor can make sense?

I think where there's no financial acumen within the family, there's no desire for any of them to be an executor or you don't think they'd be strong executors, where the family is a little dysfunctional and you know there's going to be infighting, by having a corporate executor, you get sort of this objective unemotional approach without all the family theatrics. They have knowledge of what they're doing, makes life easier for the beneficiaries. The ease of administration is easy. Cases like that, I think it makes some sense. Corporate executors have a fairly stiff rate, can be negotiated, but there is some cost to doing it where sometimes if you do it within the family, there's basically no cost.

You wrote a couple of really good posts on the relationship between money and success. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about that relationship?

In my opinion, money and success are not necessarily one and the same, but with that being said, I think I have to acknowledge there's also a thread that closely connects success and money in many circumstances such that the distinction is blurred. When I've written on this, I've sort of broken it into sort of five categories, being family, career, health, spiritualism, and sort of the impact on society. Do you want me to go into those?

If you can touch on it, it'd be great.

When it comes to family, clearly through love, affection, and getting along is a success, not money. Nonetheless, we probably all know families that are torn apart because they don't have money. And often when they have too much money, they're torn apart. So although I don't think money is success when you're dealing with a family, it somehow seeps into family fabric often where there's issues because of that. From a career perspective, I think if we're probably honest with ourselves, our career success often leads to money and thus it's one aspect where people equate money and success. For some people, yeah, the job may be the key and they love their job, but money's secondary. But I think for majority of people, that's not necessarily the case. And if me and you were chatting and we're having a drink, we're talking about someone half the time, the first topic we start talking about is their job.

And how much do you think they make? Tom's a lawyer. He must be successful. So I think in the case of career, money and success is really tied together and successful people seem to make money and attract money. So I think there is that sort of intertwining. I looked at it from a health perspective. I think you'd be surprised for many your health may be not as good as it could be because of the stress, but you can also have a lot of stress because you don't have enough money for a health perspective. You can argue money can actually buy you health to some extent, because you can go to the US or somewhere in the world. If you have a lot of money and try and hopefully save yourself that maybe an average person can't. But in my blog, I have a quote and it was by Bob Marley on his deathbed. He told his son Ziggy that money can't buy you life. And I thought that was sort of a great quote.

And I don't want to get too deep here, but from a spirituality point of view, I think money means nothing. But I sort of noted in my blog. It's somewhat ironic that from spirituality, money means nothing, but it's sort of ironic that when you're looking to build the addition to the church, synagogue or mosque, the first line of attack are parishioners with money. Money just seems to seep in anywhere. And the last sort of impact on society. There's a lot of people will tell you that what really matters is giving of yourself and doing things for altruism and people that just give their money that's not the same, but on the other hand, without those people giving the money, you don't get the hospitals or whatever. So there's a little bit of success and money tied together there. So that's a sort of complex topic, obviously, and it seeps into each other, but that's my view.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting. And it's something that through a lot of your writing comes out. I mean, we've kind of talked about simplicity, but the types of ideas that you were talking about just now it comes out in a lot of that, not just the ones that you write specifically about success and money, but this kind of thinking comes out in a lot of your writing, which I find really interesting.

So how do you, Mark, then define success in your own life?

That's an awesome and deep question and for sure the hardest you actually posed today. I'm not sure I have a singular definition of success or my lack of it. I think it would be sort of built on sort of the components I just sort of discussed. For me, I think I have about four or five things I look at. I do go back to family. Been married 32 years, which I consider a success, brought up a couple of children that are educated, self-sufficient, good values. So that's success. One that's sort of unique to me, but really important, that my father died really young in his fifties. And that death impacted me in the sense that I always wanted to try and live my life to the fullest, not that I thought I was necessarily going to die in my early fifties, but it made me really realize that you never know what the heck's going to happen and that you should do as many things as you want.

And I actually created a bucket list long time ago, and I've done a lot of those things. I've gone on safari. I've gone golfing in Ireland and Pebble Beach because I'm a golfer. I wrote a book, which was one thing I wanted to do. I've done a lot of smaller ones. I wanted to go to Wrigley Field. I went there. I wanted to learn how to play guitar, which I attempted and failed, but at least tried, ended up with tennis elbow somehow. That one for me was really important. I go back to sort of careers, obviously important for success. Personally, I started off with a two partner firm with no clients and my partner's wife and my wife were both on maternity leave at that time and we had no money coming in from them. We had no clients and to grow a firm from that point was, in my mind, we consider that success.

And we leveraged that success where we merged to a larger firm and I became the managing partner and then grew that firm, which was somewhat of a success, of course, to BDO, where I am now. And I consider that part of my life sort of a success, then the other sort of thing for me, and I think maybe you guys would have something like this if you ever thought about it, which is a bit unique is I think success is also for me being able not to be jealous and envious of wealth. And why I say that and why you guys may be sympathetic to this one is that we see so much significant wealth around us with our clients and probably our contacts. One of the things I've always tried to be is happy with what I had and not be jealous of that and just consider myself lucky for what I do have.

Sometimes when you see the money thrown around by your clients and how much they have, it's sometimes hard, but I try to sort of say, "Okay, they've been lucky and worked for it and good for them, but I'm not going to be sort of jealous and envious of that." So that's sort of a weird one for me. I'm not sure if you sort of have the same feeling, but I've had that one. And personally, I think it's also important to sort of give back to society. I've been a Big Brother and Make-A-Wish granter and then some other charitable things. So that's what I consider sort of success. Then I've just been some other things I probably didn't have success. I'm very impatient and I wish I was more patient. I've tried for years to be more patient. I can't be.

And one of the other things is that, again, sort of you guys that we sort of see because we're in the financial business, sometimes I sort of really kick myself that I probably should have been a better successful investor, not necessarily in equities, but outside, seeing business opportunities or different things or whatever, but that's sort of where I probably haven't been overly successful, but I've probably gone on way more than you wanted. But to me, all those factors factor in, and I'm fairly happy that I've been somewhat successful.

No, those are really good insights from someone who's built a practice and sold it, but also someone who's spent a lot of time with wealthy families, which, like you described, it gives us a lot of time to think about a lot of those questions. And it kind of comes back to that relationship between how you define success and how that relates to money. Mark, this has been fantastic. It was great to talk about estate planning sort of from the professional perspective, but I think one of the most interesting estate planning tips that I took away from this was the idea of making a bucket list early on in life, as opposed to waiting until you're getting closer to being dead.

It's worth it anyways. It just at least gives you something to strive for.