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Welcome on this Saturday, August 8, 2026.
We're in the cat bird seat during the noon hour.
On a beautiful Saturday, this is Iowa Law Talk on KXEL with Messers, Nicholas Cratelli, J.D.
Esquire, and Joseph Piper, J.D.
Esquire.
We're going to talk about the law again today.
And boy, does it work into many manifold facets.
We talk about U.S.
Supreme Court decisions, Iowa Supreme and Appellate Court and District Court decisions.
We talk about legislation.
We talk about issues of the day that are pertinent to anything legal related with two of the great wise denizens, these great white-haired gents, these wise men.
Nick Cratelli out of Des Moines, a Drake bulldog in terms of his JD alumnus status.
Nick, the first American attorney, ladies and gentlemen, in 150 years to earn
the honored designation of being an active English barrister.
Ergo, Nick has offices in Des Moines, New York City and London.
And Joseph Piper, magnificent debtor, creditor, attorney in agriculture.
He just loves ag.
He has ag and business legal strategies and uncommon law from there in my beloved home area of Hiawatha, Marion and Sea Rapids.
Joe, like me, is a Hawkeye, Iowa Hawkeye Law alumnus.
I'm simply your Bob Barker moderator here today, your John McLaughlin intermediary.
We're going to focus on the takes that Joe and Nick have as we are into our second quarter of broadcasting excellence, such that a few program notes.
This is KXEL, which is America's original broadcasting
of a 50,000 watt 1540 am there is no other fm band 100.5 out of cedar rapids you can always listen live to kxl just get to your browser and type in listen live kxl and the podcast go to any podcast group like soundcloud or several others or just go to your browser and type in kxl.com you can pull the podcast down from their site or just type in iowa law talk
and you will find the episodes just put in Iowa Law Talk with KXEL.
We have an email address because we really want to get inquiries and feedback from you folks and the great Jeff Stein, news director at KXEL, has reserved with his great auspices with the folks at NRG Media.
This site
this email address rather, it'll be very easy for you to remember.
Simply Iowa Law Talk at KXEL.com.
How's that for pitching right across home plate Joe Piper?
Sounds great.
I could have picked a better email address myself.
Well, I think Critelli kind of picked it, didn't she, Nicholas?
Basically, what we want, we just like some feedback from the listeners out there, all three of
them.
Absolutely.
Well, you know, John, I brought this up to my my law partner wife and I said, you understand people actually tune in and listen to this thing.
And it goes for an hour and so forth.
She says, well, like, what are you getting?
Three or four people?
I says, no, I think maybe there's probably 10 or 20 or so.
She says, well, that violates the Constitution.
I go, what do you mean?
She says, well, there's the the eighth amendment that violates the eighth amendment, the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, having listened to you.
Thanks a lot.
That's why you had hyper on top of that now.
It's double jeopardy.
I mean, it's this and it's not good
Well, the force multiplier that you have to remember is you're not on some 5,000 watt rural radio station You are on a 50,000 watt clear channel that has a strong signal undiminished by nighttime repositioning with literally no 1540 a.m.
competitor, so you are
you are a beacon into 21 states and for canadian provinces just on the am signal at the at the noon hour
so that's all that's all john that's all you're talking
to here i
know you're a hand radio operator i talk all over the world to tell you're a
ham all right
you're a ham and i've been doing that since i was like 12 all right anyhow so
I've got some questions for the panel today.
So as you know, maybe some of you don't know, during August, usually the courts take a recess.
They don't hand down decisions, both on the federal arena as well as the state.
So we don't have any new cases per se to report on.
But I've got some new cases that I want to discuss with you guys.
And I thought, well, maybe this might be a good opportunity to kind of educate our listeners as to some of the problems that we see in our office that, frankly, folks would like to avoid.
So there's three things I'd like to just get our panel here to discuss.
And I'm cases and issues that I'm seeing in our office.
And we're just one small law firm.
We're seeing cases.
John and Joe involving LLCs and corporate disputes.
And we can't help but look at these and go, how could this have been avoided?
People are, you know, they're forming LLCs, they're going to lawyers, getting the corporation set up, et cetera.
But still we end up in disputes.
So always I look retrospectively and said, you know, how could this have been avoided?
Secondly, I'm running into issues regarding trusts.
revocable and irrevocable trusts.
How these work.
And why is there contention and contests after people, you know, go to lawyers, spend good money to get these things worked on.
So, John, I'd like to kind of focus you on that when we get to that.
So I want to talk about the corporate issues first because it touches on both Joe's area of specialty, which is financial services and legal business strategies and mine, which is litigation.
When the LLC
statute got passed way back in the 70s.
It made it a lot easier for people to get the forms, file it, file with the Secretary of State, and voila, you are a limited liability company.
As compared to, say, a corporation which is a little different, which requires more formality.
Law professors like to say that LLCs are creatures of contract.
and corporations are creatures of statute.
But in reality, it doesn't make a lot of difference because what I'm seeing in here are people that have got the corporate form.
or they've got the LLC form, but they don't follow the formalities.
They come in and I'll say, where's your organizing agreement or your organizational meetings or your bylaws?
Well, we don't have those.
Well, how did you get this thing started?
Well, we downloaded the form from the Secretary of State's office, paid our $50 and voila, we are on LLC.
You know, there's no board, there's no officers, there's none of the corporate formalities.
And, of course, what brings them into our office, litigation, as a result of this, is that, you know, now the disputes arise, and I look at the corporate structure, and none of this stuff has been followed, all of which might have been avoided.
The dispute might have been avoided if they followed it.
Joe, are you seeing that in the bankruptcy and financial services world?
Yes, it's all too common that we'll have people that have set up their LLCs or LLPs.
And once they set it up, maybe they have an operating agreement.
Maybe they don't.
And an operating agreement's basically a contract that says how you're going to run the company.
And if you don't have an operating agreement, or you have one and you ignore it, then you're headed
It's sort of like heading into a tunnel on a train and you see the light.
And when you're headed down that tunnel, the question is, is the light a train or is it sunlight?
If you're not following the corporate formalities and you're not following the operating agreement, it's a training and you're headed for a train wreck.
So it's very common that people haven't ever looked at it, that you don't hold an annual meeting.
they do virtually nothing other than we set it up and here we go and that's
in law there's this three word term called pierce the veil if you do not observe those corporate formalities it allows the court to pierce the veil
Yeah,
John, I think there's another aspect to that.
By piercing the veil, folks, we mean that corporate entities, including LLCs, give the owner certain protection because the law looks at these LLCs and these corporations as separate legal people.
They don't breathe, but they're legal people.
But there's a flip side to that.
If you follow the formalities, what I've seen
is the chances of your business being a success go up okay when you don't follow it they certainly don't go up they go down i'll give you an example uh get a board of directors or a board of advisor you got your little LLC put together go find three or four people that that you have trust in and make them your advisory board they don't have to have an ownership interest in it but they're just this they're going to advise you basically
What happens here is when you have to make decisions, get their input.
It's called due diligence.
You know, three heads are better than one.
Get the benefit of that.
Secondly, record.
Make minutes of these meetings.
So in other words, leave tracks, folks.
When you come in here and you say, well, this is what occurred.
And I say, can you approve it?
And you say, well, it happened.
I said, yeah, but you haven't made proof.
Just.
Can they make a note?
I mean, just a date.
Go to a restaurant and do the minutes over dinner or something.
We met today and we discussed these things, and this is what it was decided.
Very good.
I mean, it's no big formality here.
But again, why don't they do it?
Thirdly, get an engagement or employment agreement.
It's your LLC.
On the other hand, the law looks at it as a separate entity.
I'll give you an example, Joe, in the farming community.
Let's say a farmer's out there and he's farming in the corporate form, an LLC, even a C-corp, and he gets injured.
Comes in, I have to file a lawsuit to try to get compensation for him.
Of course, one of the main elements of compensation is loss of wages, loss of earnings.
Well, he doesn't have any loss of earnings.
Now, his corporation may have shown a decline
an income that year because the guy's been in the hospital but that's the corporate loss that's not his if they just would get an employment agreement okay then i can say see this is he didn't get his paycheck for these months it's a lot easier to prove that's an open issue in the law that we're running into joe what what's your thoughts on it
yeah i've seen that happen and we've had people that uh
the company got hurt they would say not the individual well my net my net income is down well uh the company's net income went down that meant yours did but you didn't have wages so how do you do you don't get workers calm at that point and you could argue you could
You can sign up if you have a small company.
You can say you want to become a worker's cop too.
Something else to think about in there.
You know, just look at this thing and run it like a business.
You work for the business.
That type of thing.
It works a lot easier that way.
At least that's been my experience with this, but I'm not seeing people doing that.
In fact, they try to do it on the cheap.
They'll go do all this themselves or they'll go to a
a non-legal advisor to get things done.
And then I gotta unravel it when it comes in in a court contest, okay?
If they just get there before the court contest, like go to Joe or whatever, it's always where you guys have put this stuff together, you can insulate yourself from a lot of these problems.
It's just, it's uncomfortable to see what could have been done to avoid it, okay?
Or to make your position stronger and they don't do it.
Another issue.
They'll get two people.
We see this.
I got three of these cases where two people get together.
They're buddies.
They're partners.
It's 50-50 on everything.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, all's great now.
Or even a married situation until the divorce.
And now what happens?
Everything's 50-50.
Guess what?
Your corporation or your company can't take any action because you can't have a majority.
So don't ever do the 50-50.
It's a guaranteed situation for gridlock, which means that you're going to end up in court with a court-ordered custodian or receiver because the corporation can't take any action.
Okay,
so the
third party in there or please come up with some kind of a system in your bylaws If you don't want to give up part of your ownership that a third party neutral will make a decision Joe, what do you advise on that you put these things together?
I just take them apart.
What do you see?
I don't put them together, but I I see it come in and I've advised people when they're looking to getting into businesses I always want to try to break her mechanism in there
that everybody agrees to now.
When you're going into a business with your friend or somebody else, your business partner, everything's fine.
We're looking out.
Everything's going to be great.
We're going to make a lot of money.
That's all fine.
However, you've got to think about sometimes it's not always going to be sunny days.
You're going to have dark clouds like we've got today out there.
And if you've got dark clouds out there, you've got to be thinking about that.
And let's agree on what we're going to do.
On the days when things aren't going so well, how are we going to break a tie if we have a tie?
Are we going to have a buyout provision in the agreement that says, hey, if we're at loggerheads on something and we have buy-sell agreements, I set a price, you can take me up on it or you'll sell it.
you call them uh what was that one russian roulette one uh nick we talked about
russian roulette or the texas shootout buy sell these are great folks with what it is is say joe and i are 50 50 partners and uh i we have this this texas shootout russian roulette buy sell which is okay joe i'm going to buy all of your shares for uh two thousand dollars i give it to you you have the right
to stick it back to me saying, no, I'm going to buy your shares for $2,000.
Now, when I first saw this thing, I thought, what is this?
It's like two paragraphs.
No, no, excuse me.
It's one big paragraph.
I thought, I've never seen anything like this.
It's ridiculous.
But the more I get involved with it, Joe, the more I saw the wisdom in it.
It was
like, it guarantees that if I'm going to make that first offer, it better be reasonable.
Okay, or don't make it because you might end up having to eat it yourself versus the buy-sell agreement and restrictive exchange I saw that was 32 pages long.
I looked at this thing.
I can't understand this.
I stuck it into AI, say summarize this thing for me, you know, and I had a hard time dealing with it.
So I've seen the wisdom of the Russian real Latin.
I'll drive lawyers up the wall because it's too simple.
But I see some wisdom in it.
What's your view on that, Joe?
I think we've talked
about
that.
I love it because it's put up for shut up at that point.
We're going to put it, you know, if I'm going to try, I'm going to buy you out for 2,000 bucks.
I've been willing to sell for the price that I'm offering you.
And now if I do it, then the question is, if I put up 2,000 bucks as you suggested there, how long do you have to accept or reject?
Those would be other questions that you'd be thinking about in there.
And what if you don't accept it?
Do you have to sell it to me for that price?
So, I mean, these are things you got to think about.
And normally, the one that we saw had 60-day clock on it.
The other thing is how it's to be paid.
So, I said, I'm going to buy all of your shares for $2,000, okay?
Payable, you know, six bucks a year.
You follow me, some ridiculous like that.
So, build in there, cash.
because terms of payment become important but once again what we're dealing with here folks is we're looking at forward thinking okay everything is hunky-dory now we all get along kumbaya etc but let's assume that we don't how are we going to end this so that we're all treated fairly the time to determine what that process is at the very beginning not when you're in a fight and you have to have some court make the decision
But people aren't thinking that way, and we have to unravel it, and it's all could be avoided.
So now, when we talk about that and say that a court has to get involved, or some third party has to get involved, that usually costs a lot of money.
It's not fast, and we're ending up with less than an optimal result.
Anytime that I'm going to court when I could have made a deal, I'm trading certainty for uncertainty, and the judge
may side with me, he or she may side against me, and I'm sitting there wishing that I could have made the deal, and if I made the deal up front, I would have avoided a lot of legal fees, I'd have avoided a lot of consternation, and I'd have much more certainty and much more control in the outcome.
When I throw it to the lawyers and throw it to the judge, I'm losing control.
Now,
I've been accused of being a control freak.
I think you may have had that word.
Well, I
was just funny.
You should bring that up, Joe.
I was just thinking about a case I had in front of a receiver who was an absolute control freak.
He wouldn't listen to anything.
Nice guy, but I mean, just good.
And then you turn, then all of a sudden you turned to me and said, Nick, I don't understand this.
It was you.
You gave control freaks a bad reputation, Joe.
And we made a deal.
And we made a deal.
But I think what we all learned from these cases is that avoid these litigation issues if you can, just simply by engaging in forward thinking at the beginning.
Please follow the corporate format.
Have the meetings.
Become the officer or the director.
Make meetings minutes.
Think about it.
It's pretty simple stuff and it's not expensive.
But lots of prevention is worth a pound of cure down the road.
Because one thing's for sure, when it gets into litigation, whether it's receivership or custodianship, et cetera, those are drawn out and they're expensive.
So that's my pitch on LLCs and corporations.
Absolutely important to follow the corporate formalities.
John.
You may have some questions.
or follow up ideas or input or comments or queries.
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Back to you guys, Nick.
Okay, now John, I want to turn to you.
I'm airing all my complaints today, folks.
All
right, let's go for it.
Sorry about that.
So here's a situation that just, you look at it and you go, why?
Why are we doing this?
You end up with the estate.
We'll pick on estates and trusts here, where mom and dad are in love with their children because their children are just wonderful, and they place one of their children
as either the executor or the trustee to manage the estate and the assets for the other children.
Because, you know, and what occurs, at least the ones that I see, okay, is that all of a sudden it goes bad.
One of the beneficiaries is not happy with the way the brother or the sister who's the executor or the trustee is managing the matter and they want them removed and the lawsuit starts.
And you go, why did you do that?
you know, just get a corporate or a bank as a fiduciary.
And they
don't want to do it, John, because it costs money.
Well, it's a
fraction of what they would have to pay, okay, what they got to pay us to defend it.
Why don't they have corporate fiduciaries?
I talked to my colleagues at the estate and trust bar, they go, well, that's not what they want.
They believe that their children are good and so forth.
Yeah, but we know that a high percentage of these cases end up in litigation.
you know, at least get a neutral, get a friend that's a neutral, but when you pit one, you elevate one sibling over another, and then you run into the issue is that, well, you got to explain what a fiduciary duty is to that sibling that's elevated as the trustee or the executor, as to what their duty is to the others.
And John, you've been in that position.
Explain to our audience what the fiduciary standard is of that elevated brother or sister as a fiduciary.
Well, you have to do what's in the best interest of the beneficiary.
Not them
personally, but the opponent.
Correct.
Correct.
And Nick, you're so right because here's the bottom line on these situations here.
I've always said,
In all seriousness, if you don't like a son or daughter, make them the trustee or the executor of your will.
Because this is a thankless job.
There's always these interesting conflicts.
And the other thing is, why don't people bring in a corporate future?
Because they're cheap.
No one ever wants to pay their lawyer, Nick.
You know, it's funny.
They'll pay a surgeon.
They'll pay their drywaller.
Everyone always tries to
do it on the cheap but as you know I've been in countless situations as an agent for a company that's a corporate fiduciary and only they have the objectivity really and are devoid of the conflicts to assert that fiduciary position comes from the latin fides
faithful.
You have to be faithful that for years we've had standards at common law of sole interest of the client, sole interest of the investor.
No possibility of self-dealing or double-dealing.
These are very, very important.
And Nick, where this really gets sticky is you often have beneficiaries that have different competing
interest, but they're still all in that beneficiary pool, that beneficiary universe.
You may have the surviving spouse who needs income because she's still alive.
She wants that investment portfolio or the farm itself run to generate income.
The kids say not so fast.
We want to build appreciation.
We want to build capital.
We want to build the asset base.
They're not
P&L income statement oriented.
They're a balance sheet Oriented and they have competing interests against the widow who might be the second wife of their dad who was no longer around with their mother and so you have these building emotional Vituperative rivalries that are almost always in existence in these cases and so Nick it is it is a conundrum
I have seen the ones who have gone the best where you have a corporate fiduciary that is the referee, an objective referee that works under the auspices of the court.
You know, a court will make incremental decisions on such things as sales of land, sales of grain, things like that.
And it really takes out a lot of the conflicts.
But you're absolutely correct.
Even with corporate fiduciaries, we've seen siblings
suing each other.
And Nick, oftentimes the litigation goes beyond rationality.
These issues are so emotional that you see irrational decisions being made based on grudges, based on long simmering rivalries, based on resentments against parents that could go back to childhood.
And Nick, you've done a lot of mediation.
Joe, you've worked with a lot of these families.
It really is vexing.
It really complicates things enormously to where, you know, Nick, I served in the legislature when we were having some urban unrest.
I never felt unsafe at the State Capitol building, despite being surrounded sometimes by hundreds of people coming at me with vituperative bromides.
I always felt the most in danger with a haranguing, arguing farm family at the family farmhouse.
at a big table where tempers flare it i've been at uh estate auctions where they've had to arrest one of the brothers wanting to fight the other brother so you know joe there's something about land it brings out land is so prime evil it's like vivian lee in gone with the wind she's clawing at the dirt at the end i'll always have terror i'll never go poor i'll never starve again you know money is one thing land even exacerbates it joe would you
agree
Absolutely.
When I deal with farmers in financial distress, the hardest thing to get a farmer to do is to sell a farm.
The second hardest thing to get a farmer to do is to give up the lease of a farm.
In the first instance, I'll never own it again.
In the second instance, I'll never farm it again because, you know, land generally transpires about once a generation and it may go from father to son or father to daughter and
or may end up going in an auction or some other sale, but it's, you know, it stays in the family and leases go the same way.
The Supreme Court in, it was February, addressed the issue of the so-called no contest or interim clauses.
Now, what that is, folks, is in a will or a trust, you say, I'm going to leave my farm to Joe.
But if Joe contests the will, he gets nothing.
In other words, it places a penalty for people who wish to file a will contest, a way of cutting them out.
And normally what you will see is I leave to my son, John, $25,000 if he contests this will without cause, he forfeits that request.
And it's always been kind of an open question in Iowa as to whether or not those would be enforced.
I think the Supreme Court
In February, a decision that handed down certainly signals that they will be.
At least that's how I read the decisions.
That's in line with what other states have done.
uh what's your view on that guys have you seen those
i've seen them and candidly i think it makes a lot of sense to put something like that in it really makes you think long and hard before you're gonna start a will contest and you know it's uh mom and dad are saying this is it i don't want any dang fighting over this thing so here it is take it you get what i told you you get and that's all there is and if you you want to fight over it
Fox in your house should get nothing.
I think it's a good idea.
And the litigious nature of our society has been exacerbated with the recent developments in the area of elder abuse, senior abuse.
Part of the reason you're seeing the threshold for voluminous new cases of contesting wills and trusts is because now
whether in good faith or not, you can assert that someone potentially 60 years of age or older is almost per se vulnerable if you can attach enough anecdotal evidence and some testimony of some siblings.
And thus you've got classic cases, I've seen countless times, of multiple children and they're divided three against two, four against three, two against one.
dad and mom are fine their cognition is perfect and dad and mom have been out to lunch and they need to be in a home and you will have this chasm this bifurcation even among the family why dad was perfectly capable of signing that document he had his wits about him dad was out to lunch someone must have been guiding his pen in his hand from the hospital bed when he did that and uh there's a fascinating case of late
uh of a will contest involving a man who uh his first wife pre-deceased him and he was now a senior all of his children helped him run this very successful business he had a lady friend for many years and uh on his deathbed the day he died he married her and of course that changed all of the you know what uh the the money flow
And the kids literally were contesting whether the marriage was valid.
And so this is where we are.
So Nick, part of the reason why these are being brought in more than ever in these documents is because as we age and longevity expands, we still have this situation though of loss of cognition, at least to certain gradations at some point.
And it really becomes a point where certain kin
sometimes with bad faith can really stir things up, make a mess of things by merely asserting that, well, dad was not capable of signing.
Here's what the sad part about this is.
Oftentimes, the ones that make the complaint are the ones that live geographically far away that aren't engaged in the day-to-day care of the parents.
But it's ironic.
So they go after the parents.
And of course, usually the child that's attendant to them in the hometown still is
you know, the foe of these other siblings.
Well, in fairness, the attendant of the parent probably knows the parent's health condition better, has been more dutiful, and yet here's what happens.
This is where this whole thing, I'll crystallize this for you guys.
So let's say you've got a daughter living in the hometown with dad, who's the surviving parent.
He's having cognitive issues and physical issues.
She's helping
clean the house, go over, look in on them, help pay the bills, things like that, because dad can no longer do it.
The other siblings are all, they got their families, their careers, they're far, far away.
So what happens if dad, in order to facilitate bill paying, puts the daughter on the joint checking account, makes it a joint checking account, so that the daughter can pay the bills without going to throw this all draconian conservatorship, et cetera, whatnot.
Well, even in total innocence,
that disrupts an estate plan.
If the dad was going to divide up, let's say a third and a third and a third to three kids, if he's taken 100,000 of 500,000 and put in the joint checking account, that dutiful child at home, if you know, follow their own, is going to get that first 100,000 because that's going to go out as a payable on demand account, leaving 400,000 left to go a third, a third and a third.
So already,
The estate plan is not a third, a third, and a third.
That child living in the hometown that's been dutiful to dad is going to earn 100,000 more than any of the siblings.
And they're resentful because, hey, we were each supposed to get a third.
He's getting more.
You see the conundrum here.
It's just set up precipitously unless you do excruciatingly good front end planning.
But most people don't know that people on death accounts are going to take that right out of the denominator.
in your your factor of division of wealth through probate in the state.
Well John, the problem is they're doing their long-range planning with precision.
I'll give you that, but they're doing it in secret.
So practically how this works out is the first time that the siblings are aware that they aren't getting anything.
is after dad or mom dies and they go into the lawyer's office and the will is read, and by the way, you know, John, I leave you all my love, but I'm not leaving you a dime, okay?
And then they go nuts because they're actually convinced that mom wanted to leave you everything, but it's my rotten brother here that convinced her otherwise.
What we're seeing, John, is not only the will contest, we're seeing clawbacks, which is they're going back through the checking accounts,
and assets that mom had for the last five years that transferred to other people saying that she wasn't competent to do it and that money ought to be clawed back.
So we're not fighting just a will contest, we're fighting transactions, multiple transactions that occur.
like
gasoline bought by the child helping the parent well were those all trips to take mom to the hospital and doctor or are they padding this with gasoline to go to the movies and stuff go to
restaurants in one case for example all of these receipts are showing up out of perimetals dad didn't gamble so it had to be you know it's seriously this stuff happens folks oh i know you're right nick
you're right
so i'm looking at it going all right how do we avoid this
Can we build into the trust in the estate?
Number one, if you're going to plan this out, then the time to call the family together is right now before you're dead and explain why you're doing what you're doing.
Okay, a lot of people don't like doing that because they're afraid that, you know, that the child that gets cut out of what they thought they should get is never going to allow them to see the grandchildren again.
Well, clue number one, if they're of that mentality anyway, you've got a will contest coming.
Number two, build in some protection.
Okay, you can put in a trust and I think you can put in a will that before anyone can file a will contest or contest any part that they must first engage in mediation.
Okay, contractional based mediation.
I know you can do it on a trust because that's a matter of contract.
Okay, you can probably also build in an arbitration clause in it.
Now, this is all really, really creative thinking here.
Okay, none of us been tested, but we're at a point, folks, we got to start thinking outside the box to protect these people.
Nick, I'll add another layer to this for you.
You know, when I first campaigned for office,
what was amazing to me.
So I went door to door.
I had 35,000 constituents basically.
I covered door to door.
Nick,
it was also selling stuff.
I had Watkins products sold well.
Well, you know, what was interesting was, yes, I would hear about taxes from some folks.
I would hear about foreign policy occasionally from some folks.
I would hear a lot about ag from certain folks.
I hear about education from certain folks.
But Joe and Nick
What amazed me is Deb and I knocked on doors and went into living rooms and talked to people.
Without exception, every single household brought up what can be put under the umbrella of a mental health issue involving a family member.
And Nick, I will tell you this.
It is important when people do this estate planning to make a provision for a child that would not be able
to maybe be prudent enough if dad and mom are gone, to remember to make payments to the IRS, to the mortgage company, to whatever, and a special needs trust or a carve-out.
Yes, you may go a third, a third, a third, a fourth, a fourth, a fourth, and a fourth, but you need that corporate fiduciary to be steward of that allocation so that they are charged with paying the bills
increasing the principal and generating a safe return so that their child doesn't someday end up living under an interstate overpass, drug-addled, and starving without clothing.
This is a critically important issue, and Nick, it comes down to people like you and Joe in your roles.
Families are loath to talk about this.
This is why it's so important to find a trusted counsel in the law that the confidentiality is so beautifully preserved by my colleagues.
It's just sacrosanct, okay?
But it's important, and I think to address the mental health issues, I mean, in Iowa, we've closed down our public mental health facilities to a large extent.
And what I saw sadly and tragically are mentally ill people in my area of the state would either be in the ER
for a weekend or in a jail for the weekend.
That was no way to handle the situation.
Part of the issue is these people falling through the gaps when dad and mom are gone, the brothers and sisters live elsewhere, and like the prodigal son, they may squander through the money because of addictive or depressive personalities.
How do we improve that in Iowa?
That to me is just a burgeoning issue.
Along with the elder senior abuse at that end, also what I call the kids,
who just do no fault of their own can't help themselves.
There's got to be, again, that fiduciary relationship where you've got an impartial, competent intermediary.
Because remember, you want a trust officer who's not just fair in meeting out the money.
They can't squander the inheritance.
They've got to grow that safely under the Uniform Prudent Investor Act.
They have to do due diligence of responsible asset allocation using modern portfolio theory.
That is the law.
John, that's so important to talk about.
You're talking about mental health and other things because I'm guardian and conservative for my youngest brother who had a very difficult childbirth and has had difficulty his whole life.
He's been institutionalized since he was four.
So every year I'm with him at least once a month, sometimes two or three times a month, but I've got to file reports.
The conservative reports are
a pain in the back end, and unfortunately their one size fits all and doesn't fit anybody very well.
That's part of what government does so well is designs that one size fits all and doesn't fit anybody.
But the standards and what I have to do make all the difference in the world.
I have to keep receipts.
I have to be able to document what the money's been spent on.
And then it's important from that financial standpoint, but
As a guardian, I have other duties in addition to the financial.
Conservationships are financial.
The guardianship is, what about the person?
Where are you living?
How are you doing things?
How do I help him make sure that he doesn't spend money on things that aren't safe for him?
And so that's something that a lot of people don't talk about.
And it's important that it be talked about.
I'm going to flip back to what Nick was talking about a couple minutes ago.
Help people up front.
So one of the things that I've talked to many groups about is, fair isn't necessarily equal.
So let's say you've got four kids and we're going to, we want one of the four to have the farm and he's going
to
have to buy out the other three.
Unless you've funded that with life insurance or something else where there's a lot of other cash, spare cash around, you've destined or doomed the one that gets the farm to fail because he cannot borrow enough to pay off the other three and cash flow that far.
That's one of the, my pet peeves here is when people say it's got to be equal right down the middle or divided by four.
If the desire of the parents is to keep terra firma,
in the family.
Then they need to make provision for that and they need to tell the other children, I love y'all, but our desire is that it's gonna stay in the farm.
We're not gonna say out of a 640 acre farm, everybody gets 160 of it.
I want it all one place.
And if that's what you want, you can do that in a number of different ways.
But it's better if you explain it to them up front.
This is what I want and why I'm just gonna be this way.
Remember, it's theirs until they decide that they're passing it on.
And you know, Jill, that's such a great point.
And what I would add to that is, you know, Nick so eloquently described last week about how sometimes you pass legislation without knowing all of the unintended consequences.
And then you have to tweak or refine.
It was very laudatory that during this explosion of elder abuse and senior abuse,
that particularly some of the academics in the state said, we really need to ramp up the reporting on these guardianship's conservatorships to blunt this abuse and to make sure these people are taken care of properly.
A noble goal and both at a strategic and tactical level.
However, the conundrum always comes into play for people who are not affluent and not middle class.
Let's say they've got 150,000, they're depending on Social Security Disability or Medicare and Medicaid.
150,000, you know, the court will normally grant the equivalent of a 1% fee to a conservator, which would be on 150,000 of investments or whatever, savings checking, whatever the value of the house.
That's only a $1,500 fee per year.
I can tell you that that would barely cost
cover the costs of the financial advisor investing the assets or selling the assets.
And based on the proliferation of the paperwork requirements under that new act, there were literally trust departments that would not take conservatorships under half a million dollars because they would lose money on the time it took to do all the paperwork, therefore defeating to an extent a purpose
of where people weren't even getting conservators and guardians because they didn't have the money to do so.
Now, my institution, kind of like the legal institutions, said we owe some pro bono civic duties to help the poor.
But again, it just illustrates that you probably need like with the IRS a long form and a short form.
And I think we're building some streamlining into the Iowa
code here to achieve that.
But this is the beauty of legislation.
It's always a work in progress.
It has to be because unintended consequences are always out there.
Well, you know, John, the ultimate in estate planning is to spend your last dime right before you take your last breath.
It's only for all
actuaries like Jack Nicholson and about Schmidt.
We would know that.
But now, Nick, you have quite an innovative idea yourself on how to pull off this retirement thing without dying a pawper.
You have an ingenious plan on how to do that.
Do you care to share that with the
audience?
What I'm going to share with the audience is something much more important than that, John.
It's this, folks.
Put some thought into your
will, who you're going to leave money to and what the effect of it is.
We don't need another wealthy trust fund baby, okay?
Go look at a movie, 2006 movie by James Garner.
It's called The Ultimate Gift.
The Ultimate Gift.
Now what this movie's about is the guy by the name of
Red Stevens was an oil billionaire, and he had made tons and tons of money.
His children were unbelievably wealthy.
And of course, they were just waiting for him to die.
And when he died, they called in and they found out that he left everything not to them, but he left it to a grandson, provided that the grandson could pass a series of 12 tests.
Okay, he worked with his lawyer, worked it up.
You passed the 12 tests, then you're worthy to have my fortune.
Think about the terms I just said, then you're worthy to have my fortune.
And the tests were just, I won't be a spoiler here.
Go watch the movie.
Since I watched that, I keep looking at my family and thinking, all right, which ones of you are worthy of my fortune, whatever's going to be left of it?
I'm not going to exist to put money in your pocket.
We're going to exist to help other people.
Are you worthy of that?
Have you proven you can do that?
If I give you my fortune, what are you going to do with it?
Put some thoughts to this.
And go look at that movie, The Ultimate Gift, 2006 movie with starring James Garner.
Joe, have you seen this?
I've not seen that movie, but I think I'm going to.
Yeah.
Folks, watch it.
Nick, if I could, that's very well said.
I'm gonna talk about another ultimate gift that you can do for your children.
I mean, this is an all sobriety.
And that is, I've seen this over and over and over again.
We have horridors and we have organized horridors, but I have seen situations where there is so much stuff.
It literally is deleterious to the health of the surviving children to spend a year.
cleaning out, cataloging, throwing out, trying to sell all the stuff that dad and mom have had crammed into every crevice of a three-story house and basement.
The farm buildings, the sheds, it's incredible.
And you think these are just one-offs that you can see on the Cable News show hoarders.
It's more prevalent than you would ever believe.
And you know what, and I know Joe's gonna tee off on this, but I'll tell you guys, no one wants that stuff.
That stuff that you think is so valuable, the kids never want it.
They don't fight over that stuff.
It always ends up on 50 tables on a lawn in a farm auction.
It goes for a nickel.
That stuff that you think is priceless, it's only priceless to you.
And
what they're trying to do is they're trying to look at that stuff and that reminds them of mom and dad.
Okay, better you should spend time with mom and dad than their stuff after their death.
Absolutely, Nick, that's so true.
And the ironic thing about it is that if the parents would clear that out ahead of time.
Instead of making their 70 year old kids, then figure out, well, what do we keep?
What do we throw out?
I think the greatest gift a parent can give is to get rid of their stuff.
And Joe, when Deb and I downsized here to what I call our grandmother's bungalow, we got rid of about 80% of our life.
And you know what?
There's still more stuff I'm gonna throw out because I've been traumatized in other family situations by having to deal with stuff that's just too much.
And then to get the person who has the stuff to agree to part with it and go box by box is just brutal.
Joe, am I wrong?
No, you're not.
And unfortunately, this early this year, I had to spend about four months helping an uncle.
who had not cleaned the house since his wife had died 23 years before.
And there was an accumulation not only of stuff, junk and food and everything else that had to be cleaned out.
We got it cleaned up and I basically put it to him.
I said, hey, either you get ready to move to another place and I'll help you get that done.
or I'm going to call the Department of Human Services and they'll condemn the place and you'll be out your ear in a few days.
And we went through that having done it.
I'm going to do my best to not leave that for my children because I have far too much stuff to.
Joe is true as a trust officer.
We've had to send in people with hazmat suits to collect cash that had rodent fecal matter on it.
It's bad.
It's bad stuff.
Hey, we got about three minutes left.
It's time for final arguments on KXEL Iowa Law Talk.
Remember, email us.
Tell you what you want to know about the show, Iowa Law Talk at kxel.com.
We'll be back next week, same time, same channel.
But our lawyers are entering final arguments just like
Perry Mason here, guys.
We start today with Joe Piper, your first up today,
Joe.
Okay, thank you very much.
We're talking about a number of things today.
First off, if you're going to have a corporation or an LLC, run it like a business.
Run it, keep meeting notes, follow the annual protocol, have minutes of it, and record them.
Don't be afraid to call your local lawyer to help you set the thing up.
Going to all of these things online, you're losing the benefit of having a lawyer's insight and setting it up.
They're going to ask you a few questions.
What do you want to do?
And how do they think you want to set it up?
But they're not going to ask you the probing questions that a good lawyer is going to be asking.
They'll tell us that AI is guiding it all.
It's the old GI-GO, garbage in, garbage out.
If you don't put in the right stuff, if you give it poor information, you're going to get a poor result.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing, tell your heirs what you want ahead of time.
And one of the things we haven't talked about at all is, wouldn't be a bad idea if you pre-plan your funeral and have a pre-funded.
That takes a lot of stress off, and it makes it an awful lot easier for the
your children and relatives, then all of a sudden, oh geez, John just died, now what do we do?
If you've got it all planned, you've given them a very big gift that will make it an awful lot simpler for them.
Joe, that's well said.
I had to tell Father, ignore my wife, there will be no guitars, no cremation, and no sprinkling my ashes over Memorial Stadium in Lincoln.
I'm a Hawkeye after all.
Nick Cratelli, final arguments
from Mr.
Cratelli.
We've got about a minute left.
In my will, I put a provision in there, John, that my funeral is to start exactly six minutes late.
I have never been on time in my life for anything other than court, and I'll be darned if I'm going to be on time for my funeral.
So there
you go.
Nick, that's brilliant.
I had a Jesuit friend who was just crestfallen.
that his good friend, whose funeral he presided over, refused to allow him to deliver any sort of eulogy during the Mass.
So at the conclusion of the funeral, Father had published his eulogy in a multi-page, nice-bound format, distributed it to every congregant as they left the church.
So, guys, spread the word.
to all of your friends about the great messers Critelli and Piper every noon hour on KXEL on Saturday afternoons.
And let's hear from you.
Iowa Law Talk at kxel.com.
On behalf of Nick Critelli and Joe Piper, this is John Jacobson for all of us in the great KXEL land.
Be safe, be smart, be good, be strong.
God bless Iowa and God bless our nation here still celebrating our 250th anniversary, a nation, one nation under God and divisible with liberty and justice for all, thanks to some very devoted legal professionals.
And we appreciate you tuning in today.
Bye-bye.
