Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY EP.188 | feat. Anthony Marrone from Marrone Law Firm

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Estate Planning, Elder Law, and Long-Term Care in Central New York with Anthony Marone | Good News York Host Noah Chrysler interviews Anthony Marone, owner and founder of the Marone Law Firm, about estate planning, elder law, and navigating aging-related issues in Central New York. Marone explains why estate planning is often avoided, why adults with kids or assets need a will to control distribution and guardianship, and contrasts streamlined outcomes with a proper plan versus the costly, uncertain “intestate” process in New York. He shares tools developed during COVID, including an eight-question online will builder (thewillbuilder.com) paired with attorney customization, and discusses competing with document commodities by offering expertise. Marone also describes his growing work helping families secure nursing-home care, address the local care shortage, and plan for Medicaid eligibility amid long-term care costs nearing $18,000/month, including trusts and other strategies. He attributes his firm’s success to plain communication, empathy, community commitment, and a strong internal culture. 00:00 Culture Comes First 00:25 Meet Anthony Marone 01:00 Why Estate Planning Matters 02:32 The Eight Question Will 05:42 When You Skip A Will 08:28 Anthony’s Path To Law 11:43 Nursing Home Care Crisis 13:34 Medicaid And Asset Protection 17:31 Business Growth Playbook 22:19 How To Reach The Firm 22:41 Show Wrap And Sponsor Thanks

We take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. We have our company wine tour this week. So I'm trying to do things like that to build an internal culture of people who will care about others like their family who want to do good work in this community, not just show up for a job, but like do good work that is meaningful and has an impact. And that's our North Star and that's that's work for me for, geez, 11 years now. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Good News York. My name is Noah Chrysler.

Today I am sitting with Anthony Moroni. Anthony. Welcome to the show. Oh, are you? Not too bad. Go ahead and introduce yourself. I'm Anthony Morone. I'm the owner and founder of the Moran Law firm. We do estate planning, elder law, anything that relates to aging. We try to be your one-stop shop to help with all things related to aging. It's a difficult issue. Maybe we can have some fun talking about it today, but I know a lot of people don't love talking about it. And I'm a lawyer by day,

dad by night and happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Welcome to the show. How many kids you got? Three, three boys. Three boys. Wonderful. Cool. Why do you think people don't like talking about a day planning. You know, it kind of brings into question dying and getting older, which is something that we don't talk a lot about or think a lot about or want to think a lot about in this country. So we try to kind of make it approachable for people, keep it as lighthearted as possible. But for a lot of folks that come to see me, they're dealing with the hardest thing in their lives right now, either facing, getting older or loved ones getting older, or maybe they have a parent or grandparent moving into a nursing home because we do a lot of help with that transition. So it's difficult stuff to talk about

not the most fun you'll ever have in an hour session. And I think a lot of people are, you know, maybe intimidated by lawyers and kind of we have a reputation. And so we try to do a lot of work to kind of demystify that and make it approachable for people. Yeah. Anthony, you're the vibes that you give off are not that like, you know, that like lawyer that's going to like lie to me and like steal all my money. Like it seems like your vibes are very different than that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Cool. I always say that, you know, what has made me the lawyer that I am today was first being a husband and then being a father.

And so I bring that with me every day. I don't think you could do this kind of work, which is really intimate and deals with family details without being a person with a family background, whether it's good or bad. You know, a lot of people, I come from a crazy Italian family. So we've got a lot of crazy stories in the hopper. But, you know, building a strong relationship with my wife and then being a dad to three boys has kind of helped me bring that. energy and bring that empathy to every meeting that I have with somebody. Wonderful. Wonderful. Why should people consider estate planning? Why should they get an estate plan? You know, I think it's essential if you're an adult and you have kids or you have any

assets like a house. It is the only way that you have some control after you're no longer here about who's going to get your stuff, what it's going to look like, who's going to be in charge. So if you want to have any say, you know, getting a simple estate plan done is essential. It's pretty easy. We've, during COVID, we kind of, when we were forced to stay home, our team built an online tool to kind of help people go through with eight easy questions just in plain English. They answer those questions. Then we have one or two meetings and get it done pretty quickly and easily. So we tried to kind of make it very simple. And so that was one good thing that came out of the pandemic was we were able to use automation

and use AI really before AI was prevalent and kind of automate a lot of that and make it simpler for people. Cool. Wonderful. Where can people find that tool? So that's at the willbuilder.com. That was kind of the tool we came up with during COVID. Or they can go to our website, the Moran Lawfirm.com, and launch off from there. Beautiful. Very cool. Wonderful. And in just eight questions,

I can basically generate like a decent. Your entire estate plan. Wow. How nice. And then the way we do it is I have folks answer those questions. They don't necessarily know that they're building their estate plan. They're just answering eight questions on a questionnaire. And then we'll sit with them. It generates the documents for me.

And then I can sit and customize them with the client, depending on their specific needs or wishes or goals. Beautiful. So you not only get the automated thing, but like you get to sit with an attorney and you get to be like, hey, this is exactly what I want to happen. And then you make it like turnkey, I would expect. Yeah, we try to. You know, one of the things is there is competition, the marketplace, right, with legal

Zoom and AI now kind of in the forefront of everybody's mind. So we're competing against those commodities. So what I have to offer is my expertise sitting with me to kind of guide you through it. Anybody can generate a document or download a document from the internet. But knowing how all the provisions work together and where something may come back to bite somebody, given a particular situation is I think how, you know, kind of broader picture how lawyers can differentiate themselves in the age of AI. For sure. For sure. Especially when, I mean, I don't know.

If I have real assets and I and I am, you know, estate planning, like I don't want, you know, AI to write my, like, I want a human being who has done this for years to like determine and work with the courts to make sure that my family gets my stuff properly. One of the most important things, even if you don't have a lot of money, right? Because it's not people here estate planning and they think they've got to be super wealthy. One of the things I like to tell people or teach people is when you have little kids, the only way you have any say what happens with them if you pass away before they're adults is in your will. So that's the only place a parent has any control over who will take the kids, who would become guardian if both parents pass away, unfortunately. And it does happen. I mean, you hate that it's not the rule. It's the exception, but that's the only place you have any say.

So for people with young kids, it's even if you have no money, right? You've got a mortgage. You just bought a house. You got car loans, right? He's doing loans. The money part's not the important part. It's what would happen to my kids who would take care of them. Yeah.

Okay. Paint for me two pictures, right? Paint for me a picture where somebody has an estate plan and everything works out the way you want it to. And then paint for me the other picture of like, uh-oh, somebody dies without an estate plan. What happens? in the state of New York. Yeah, sure.

So when you die without a will, it's called intestacy without a will. It's like from the old Latin. And it could be the Wild West. I mean, that's where lawyers like me make a lot of money is when people who die without a will or maybe did a will on their own and messed it up, didn't do it with all the specifications because there's a certain way it has to be signed and notarized and witnessed. So it can be very expensive and time consuming on that front and uncertainty. Right.

The law will say if you die without a will, here. who get your stuff and it may not be who you want. You know, if you have kids and a spouse and you don't have a will, the law says your spouse gets 50%, the kids get the other 50%. And that may not be what most people want. You know, in my experience, most people want everything to go to their spouse first and then when both spouses are gone, they want it to go to the kids. So the law is a little different than probably what I would consider the default. If you have no kids, it gets even messier. Goes to your parents first, then siblings, and then out from there on the family tree. So not having a will, which is, you know, we're talking.

a few hundred bucks to do a will. You know, our plan, a comprehensive estate planning package is less than two grand. And we try to give payment plans, credit cards to make it easier and approachable for people. We do a Black Friday sale that cuts the price basically in half on Black Friday to try to get more people to do this. Less than one third of people have a will in this country. Really? I didn't know that. So you're leaving it a lot to chance.

And you're leaving it a lot in the hands of people like me who do this work after the fact to fight about it. it. And I don't get any joy, you know, I don't derive any joy in fighting about somebody's estate when they haven't signed a will, but it can be really messy. For sure. Cool. So that was kind of the negative picture if they die without a will. What's the positive picture? If I have a good estate plan, what happens? You know, I always say, like, people don't come and pay me money when it goes great and everything's fixed and they don't need me. You know what I mean? So we do the planning up front. And the idea is, with your will, after you pass away, the person that you pick to be in charge of your estate gets a certificate from the court that we help them get. They can access your money,

pay all your bills, and then transfer all your money after a few months to whoever you wanted it to go to. And that's it. So, you know, it's pretty streamlined and straightforward when you have a good plan and order. And like I say, people don't come and want to pay their lawyer to be like, hey, you did a great job. This went so good. Let me tell you how easy it was. So we don't even hear, you know, I only hear the bad stuff. When it goes well, it's like you don't, you don't hear about it from the client until after it's done and then it's done. Yeah. So clean and easy. Just having a plan in place makes it a lot better. Cool. For sure. Anthony, tell me about you. Tell me about your story. Did you always want to become a lawyer? Did you always want to become a

state planning lawyer? Did you find it along the way? Let's hear about it. I think every little boy dreams of becoming an estate and elder law attorney when they grow up, right? That's like the number one thing on some things. You know, I'll say we had in fifth grade, I went to city schools here in the city Syracuse and we had an assistant district attorney come in multiple times and kind of teach us about that part of the law and my mom recently found like drawings I did showing that I was going to go to law school that I drew in fifth grade. Wow, that's cool. And I can't say it was always the thing I wanted to do in college. I was a, I had a column for the newspaper out in Buffalo. Cool. And the newspaper industry started to shift dramatically around that time in the early 2000s and everything was going

online. Newspapers were starting to kind of draw back. And so I decided to go. the law school, what they now call KJD, which is straight from kindergarten all the way through law school with no real life job in between. But yeah, went to college in Buffalo, met my wife, moved back here, went to S.U. for law school, local boy. Nice. Yeah, love, love the area, committed to the area. You know, we put our office in downtown on purpose because I believe deeply, even though they're going to start tearing down the highway about a block from where we are. Yeah. Very soon. You know what? You can have it. We got it. We got it. for a long time. It's been a nightmare for two months. Yeah. You can have it. Good luck. It is.

We're embracing ourselves. It's kind of like I live in DeWitt. So the way I would come into work has already been messy. Yeah. At that 41. But, you know, I'm committed to the area. I believe in the community grid. I believe in this community. I think we're on the precipice of doing really great things and big things here. So it's been important to me to have the business, especially being in the city. I've just been really happy with how it's gone. You know, downtown's gone through a lot. even in the time we've been down here since 2017 with the pandemic hitting and kind of the shift in the in the demographics downtown and people not coming back to work or not coming back to the office but you know we're committed for the long haul so yeah wonderful um is there anything

that if you could put one statement in the minds of central new yorkers about estate planning oh yeah what would you put in the minds of every central new yorker the best time to plan to is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So just because you have not done it, just because you didn't do any planning and it's been, you know, now you're 30, now you're 40, now you're 50, 60, 70, it's never too late. You know, get your planning in place. A lot of what we also do in addition to planning is helping people as they transition as they're older in their 70s and 80s into nursing homes into long-term care. And we see the effects of not having a plan on those folks more dramatically. So, you know, doing it now, getting your loved ones,

to do it now. If you have older parents asking them if they've done their basic planning, it's just so vital to kind of having the last phase of life be successful and not painful and feeling like kicking yourself because you didn't do what you could have done pretty easily years ago. I work with a lot of folks that are transitioning into nursing homes and really kind of beating themselves up over not having done some simple simple things five, ten years before they moved. Can you tell me more about that? So how much of your job is, you know, working with, you know, finding care for people and that sort of thing. Is that something that you do? I'd say it's half. Really? Okay. Cool. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Dramatically. So really since

2016, 2017, we've kind of moved into that space a lot more. We still do all the basic estate planning, but that part of my business has grown dramatically because it is very difficult to find good care, especially here in central New York. We don't have a ton of high quality, highly rated nursing homes, assisted living facilities. We have a few good ones, but if you compare us to a big city like Rochester, we actually have about a third of the nursing home beds that the city of Rochester has, and it's not three times our size. So we're really in kind of a care desert here. So I've kind of grown into that space, and it's so expensive to pay for long-term care. The average cost of nursing homes in central New York is approaching $18,000 a month. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, quarter million dollars a

year, which a lot of people just don't have, or if they have it, they might have a year or two saved up. That's it. Right. So we're trying to help, you know, grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, you know, protect what they've got so they can keep it, not go broke in the nursing home, but also find good nursing home care. I just gave an interview last week to the Post Standard about some of the problems we've had in these facilities here in Syracuse, really bad situations that people are being left in and the state not really stepping in to do anything about it. So we've got, you know, we've got a real crisis on our hands. The baby boomer generation is aging into needing that kind of care. so we're going to have so many people that need that help and just not enough quality places for

them to go. It's going to be a real. I mean, it is a real issue already, but it's going to continue to get worse. So there's been a call for people like us to kind of step in and help, you know, find the care, get the good care, and then figure out a way to pay for it for the family too. For sure. If somebody can't afford $18,000 a month, I mean, like, what happens at that point? Yeah. Yeah. So there's a social insurance program called Medicaid, which you may have, have heard about like a lot of people have health insurance through Medicaid, they'll step in and help pay for long-term care for people in nursing homes. You have to have below a certain amount of assets to qualify. So part, the big part of what we do is help people enroll in that. It's a difficult

process to get on. You have to provide five years worth of all your bank statements and tax returns and they're looking to make sure people haven't given money away to qualify for that program. That is the bulk of what we're doing is helping people enroll in that to pay for it. Got it. So essentially like, if you don't want all of your four, to go away that you've amassed over your entire life. Essentially, I'm assuming logically that if you plan at least five years ahead before you might need long-term care and you move your assets to either maybe a trust by a trust. Got it. So if you open a trust, which is essentially just like it's not a person, but it's an entity that you can move assets into. Like a piece of paper that we

create. Yeah. Got it. And if you do that five years before you need long-term care, then you might be able to qualify for Medicaid. Yeah, look at you. Interesting. You're on. It's like you've done this before. Yeah, so I mean, most of our clients, you know, it's not the super wealthy people that have to worry about this. All of my clients, I would say, are middle class. You know, they've saved a couple hundred thousand bucks in the retirement account. They've got their house. Maybe they paid off their house. That's their biggest asset.

So you don't have to be, it's honestly the middle class people who get squeezed the most by this care. Because if you have millions of dollars, well, then pay an 18 grand a month, it'll hurt, but it's not going to change your wealth. You know what I mean? But if you've got maybe a house that's worth a couple hundred. hundred thousand bucks in Camillas, a couple hundred thousand saved up in a 401k that you worked all your life for and a little bit of money in the bank. Yeah, it's going to, it's going to hurt. Yeah, for sure. That 18,000 will go quick. So those are the folks that are our kind of main clientele that we're trying to help kind of work through how we protect with a trust and there's

some other strategies to give them some protection and peace and mind. Cool. I'm kind of a nerd and I want to know about the other strategies. What are the other strategies? So if you've not done the trust, right? So for the people that kind of kicking themselves for not doing, doing any planning. And like I've got a client today, the mom's already in a nursing home. So they kind can't do the trust now. It's too late because you got to do that five years before. Like you said, we can still save half their money, half of their money that's outside of a retirement account using what's called a gift and promissory note strategy. So basically think of like a loaf of bread. I can cut the loaf of bread in half, give half the loaf to the kids. That's what's protected.

And then we slice up that remaining half of a loaf and we use that to pay the nursing home every month. Cool. Yeah, so it gets messy, gets complicated. We're throwing a lot of numbers at people who maybe don't want a lot of math. So it takes a lot of time through that, especially, you know, it's helpful if people have younger kids or, you know, kids that are in their 50s or 60s to help navigate that. But a lot of my clients don't or the family's not around. So then we're trying to bring in outside help to kind of also work with them through those transitions. It's a, it's a difficult thing. The way I think that we approach and pay for long-term care, in this country is broken. Like this is silly that it exists in this way, in my opinion. There's probably a bunch of ways to fix it, but there's just no political motivation, I think, to fix it right now. Certainly, you know, allowing Medicare to pay for most of it would probably help

if the government could figure out a way to do that, but they can't. So, you know, I'm just a technician. I always tell people, I did not draw this map. I just know how to navigate it. So like the rules are dumb. we agree. But like let me help you kind of work your way around here so that you're not going totally broke in this phase. Right. Especially, you know, with somebody who's done it a hundred times, right? Like, or thousands of times, I would imagine. Like at this point,

probably. Yeah. I mean, that's incredible. I'll tell you. Yeah, it's been probably more than a thousand, I would say. Wow. Um, no, that's incredible. Well, cool. Um, Anthony, I got another question for you. So, so eventually I'm going to start a show here called, uh, called why it works, right? That's going to be my new show that I'm going to launch soon. And so, you know, I want to talk to business owners very similar to yourself, right? And so I'm trying to figure out how to facilitate those those conversations and and kind of figure out the questions to ask that like get people to, you know, reveal those things and talk about them in an easy way. I guess if you had to take a high level perspective on like why your business has been so successful here in the central

New York area, why do you think it's been so successful? Oh, good question. And I love that idea because I'm a big proponent of like, I want to know how things work. Like I love inside baseball. Like I just want to know the nitty, gritty boring stuff. Like I find it very interesting. Yeah. I think what's worked well for me is identifying a group of people that we can service, you know, middle class families and talking to them plainly and simply.

And I always say like with our staff, I want to treat these people like they're our family. Some of them you love, you know, think of your own family, right? You got the one crazy uncle. I got two. Italian family, you know, but I want to get to the point with a lot of these clients where we see them as family members because we want to help them through a difficult phase. So for me, that is what's worked, just like carrying that into every meeting because they're not always easy. You know, think about in life. You're going to confront difficult people. I try to teach my kids

this all the time. I've got a 15-year-old. He struggles with his teacher. It's got one teacher driving him crazy. And so we're trying to teach him. Like, you will have bosses like this. You'll have coworkers like this. You'll have friends like this, right? You'll have clients like this, a lot of them. And you've got to kind of approach it all with just assume that everybody is doing the best that they can. If you carry that with you and you bring that to every meeting, to every court appearance, every, you know, podcast interview, assume that everybody's doing the best that they can. It kind of makes the world a little bit easier to navigate.

And so I try to kind of bring that energy, come with that to each client meeting. And, you know, we've tried to be really thoughtful. I've always tried to be really thoughtful in terms of getting myself out there from a marketing perspective. You know, we've been on Facebook since day one. You know, we're still on Facebook even though it's brutal from an organic marketing perspective now, especially for a service business like ours. Yeah, your reach gets sliced in that. I mean, we had 10,000 followers quick.

And the reach is brutal if you're not willing to pay to play. And I've always just kind of believed in word of mouth advertising as being our strongest asset. So we try to rely heavily on that. But we're trying to do, you know, fun things. I remember being on Snapchat in 2015 and creating Moran law firm, like, I don't even know what they were called. The filters. Yeah. Filter.

Yeah. Filter. Yeah. Cool. Back in 2016, I wrote a book. You're doing a state planning Snapchat filters? That's amazing. That's awesome.

What were they? Was it like a grave? It was just like goofy. Like we would do. So back in the day, we had like the Mets, they were the chiefs built like a party deck. Yeah. We had the first. And I like knew the GM.

So we had the first party on the party deck. And we did like a graphic for that night. We would have a kind of a client appreciation. night for a few years every year there. Danny used to work there. That's right. Yeah. Do you know Danny from there?

I know of him from you. Oh, wonderful. Beautiful. Very cool. Very cool. So we tried to do things like that. Got so big. People started showing up.

There weren't our clients and weren't related to clients because they heard there was a free party. So we had to shut that down. But we try to keep it light. You know, like the work we do is heavy. Yeah. And so we don't, we take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. We have our company wine tour this week. So I'm trying to do things like that to build an internal culture of people who will care about others like their family who want to do good work in this community, not just show up for a job, but like do good work that is meaningful and has an impact.

And that's our North Star. And that's work for me for, geez, 11 years now. I love that. So to boil it down, you mentioned communicating with one, one, you have a target market of central New York families who are middle class, right? And you try to approach and communicate with them as like an every man, right? Because that's who you are, right? Is like, is one of those. Coach.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, it made me think of that quote, you know, don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, right? Like when you have somebody difficult, right? Don't assume that they are, they're trying their best they can. Right.

They're just doing their best. So I think dealing with difficult situations, that having that as like a paradigm that you use in the back of your mind to deal with that. And then the third thing was just like creating a good culture with your team and making sure that like even though the work is heavy and kind of dark sometimes like you're still creating a fun positive environment. That's right. Beautiful. That's it. That's a secret.

I hope. It's worth so far. Beautiful. Anthony, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. How can people learn more about your services and potentially use your, your will creator one more time? Sure. Head to the Moronlawfirm.com.

That's the easiest place to find us. If you want to jump right into building your will, you can go to the will. Builder.com. That's the best place to find me. We're all over social media. Send us a message, send us an email, give us a call. Beautiful. Guys, thank you so much for watching. This has been Good News York. This is a production put on by ClickStream Studios here in the old Spaghetti warehouse location. Guys, we just moved in here to celebrate our move in. We are doing free digital marketing plans for central New York businesses. If you are posting social media and you feel like your strategy just isn't there, you don't know what to post, you don't know when to post,

you don't know who to post it for. We would love to help you for free. You can go to call. com.com. You sit down with me for about 30 minutes. I learn everything I can about your business. I help you create a social media strategy and you can use that on your own

or if you want to, you can use it with us. Guys, also thank you so much to our sponsor, Ads on the Go, get Ads on the Go.com. And thank you guys for watching. And thank you for Danny behind the camera. Camerman extraordinaire. Have a great day, guys. Bye-bye.