Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with James Kroshus President of Treasure Valley Retirement Shield Discussing Long Term Care & Estate Planning

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

James has devoted his life to assisting, clients, friends, and family by protecting their assets through insurance and estate planning. James has been in the world of finance and insurance since 1979. As James matured right along with his clients, James became painfully aware of the need that comes at the other end of rainbow, when remaining assets are passed to the next generation. His focus expanded beyond just protection and accumulation to the distribution of wealth after the passing of loved one. With over 45 years of experience James has nearly seen it all.Learn More: [e-mail] or call 775-233-2203Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-james-kroshus-president-of-treasure-valley-retirement-shield-discussing-long-term-care-estate-planning

Welcome to Influential Entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have back with this James Crocious, who's the president of Treasure Valley Retirement Shield, and we'll be talking about estate planning. James, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me. Hey, I really enjoy your perspectives on things, and I think that it is really powerful to be able to clearly articulate complicated subjects.

And I know that estate planning can be a very complicated subject, and it needs to be addressed well ahead of the time where things are needed. So let's kind of dive right into estate planning. How can proper estate planning shield loved ones from outside? outside threats. Great question, because there is a legal system out there that's hoping you don't have your affairs in order. Yeah. Because that's when they actually really can take advantage.

Actually, if you don't have your affairs in order, what you've actually done is made an attorney, a beneficiary, and they get paid first. Yeah. I've been through so many probates where the attorney, I was an executor on a number of estates because the people didn't do a trust. And in every case, I had to write the attorney out of check before I wrote the beneficiaries a check. If you don't, just one more thing on the bucket list, we have to take care of it. and so we put our affairs in order and we throw the attorneys of bone i don't do trust i'm not an attorney but i use attorneys to do my trust so we throw the attorneys a bone while

you're alive so they don't come after two arms and a leg when you're gone if you don't have your affairs in order you're actually letting an attorney probate your state we want you to pay the write out the check to the attorney while you're still alive. Because if you wait until you're gone, you're going to sign a blank check on your estate and he gets to fill it out. You know, and that's a great point and it brings up kind of a cliche in the industry. And I know that any attorney would probably publicly deny it. But in probate, they drag on. They're known to drag on long, long, long time. And the attorneys tend to just kind of kick the can down the road a little bit and charge a little fee here. And it's just the longer it draws out, the more they are paid. And to your point, they get paid first. So they're going to milk it as long as they can. And that's just the way things are. So how can you avoid that and get more of your money quicker, faster with less strings? Maybe doing some proper state planning. That's a really big point. Well, it used to be that attorneys charged by the hour, but now they charge by the syllable.

That's even worse. And, you know, I just had a family member go through a probate. And his aunt had left him about $500,000 in stuff, you know, real estate and stuff. And she paid a huge price to an attorney to do a trust, something like in the neighborhood of $14,000. Because she was single and she was older, the attorney said, now Betty, we'll just call her Betty. Let me keep these documents for you so that when you're gone, I can help your heirs. Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Yeah.

She passed away. the attorney called my relative and said, come on in. We need to talk about probating the estate. Well, what the attorney did not do is he didn't fund the trust. In other words, he didn't transfer assets to the trust. And so, do you know what he charged my relative? After charging this woman, something like $14,000 for a trust,

he didn't fund it. He charged my relative $70,000 to probate. one piece of property. Well, we make sure one of the most important aspects of putting together an estate plan is to make sure you transfer the assets to the trust or guess what? You're going to have a probate anyway. Your trust has no teeth unless it owns assets. You know, it's like buying a brand new, sparkly dream car and lit it's sit in your garage and never driving it. You know, you set up a trust because you hear it's a great thing.

And there's a lot of choices and what kind of trust and who knows, you know, what the best choice is there, but the right attorney will guide you. But then you didn't punch the ball over the goal line. You didn't fund the trust so that your assets are protected. And look at now, 70,000 is just ludicrous. But whatever the amount is to probate one property or a very small amount, it should have been avoided. So that's a huge thing. And that sure is an outside threat. Are there any other outside threats regarding? estate plenty that you've seen? Well, sometimes it's not just outside threats. Again, if we work with an educated advisor, one who really cares about you, then they're going to make sure that all of these things are taken care of. As a matter of fact, as I started helping my clients because as I got older, I saw people die. And then I saw the problems created with just a will.

So I created a corporation to assist people. I used attorneys, but I wanted to kind of be the guy that was holding the reins because I noticed that some attorneys, almost all attorneys that I worked with, and I worked with over 20, would structure the documents in a way that created more work for themselves later. For example, when I was young and first started this, the attorney said, put everything in the trust, even bank accounts, personal bank accounts. Well, we did that until I had a client who had a stroke. And her son said, hey, I can't access the account. I can't access her money. And I have to pay her bills.

So I called the attorney. He said, well, that's right. We have to hire some doctors to say she's not competent. We have to go before the courts, get a guardianship or a conservatorship. Then he can pay her bills. And he says, oh, by the way, that's going to cost about $10,000 and it has to be renewed every 12 months. And then all of a sudden it dawned on me. That's why you don't put personal accounts in the trust because you can't access them if they're in the trust until a death.

So after that, I learned through that sad experience that you have to measure these things and make sure it's in the client's best interest so that how to solve that problem is you just have a child on as a signer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Things like that that maybe attorneys won't tell you. Yeah, I just think that it is sometimes we have to learn by mistakes, whether it's ours or other peoples and hopefully someone listening to that example right there can go, ooh, that's a good point. Let me tuck that away and make sure that I'm taking care of. So some of those outside

threats are just powerful and really, really critical to take advantage of and of learning and addressing. What about threats that are closer to home? I think, you know, you mentioned that one right there. Are there other ones that we should be aware of? Well, let me just tell you a story. There is. I had two sisters come into my office and they were it was a dark day for them their mother had passed away a couple of years earlier and their

81 year old father married a 40 year old woman who had children and then a year later after they got married this 40 year old woman died of a heart attack

but somehow she finangled this 81-year-old man and he transferred the family home and a half a million dollars in securities to this woman. So what did the, what happened? He disinherited his own family. As a matter of fact, her children called my two clients and said, we're going to let your father live in our house until he dies. Then we're going to sell it. This was the house. These two girls were raised in. How could proper planning prevent that?

Well, proper planning would, who is going to be the successor trustee? Now, it's okay for that dad to be the successor trustee, but one of those daughters needed to be a co-trustee with the dad so that that couldn't happen. Because I believe there are people, scavengers and wolves, that actually, you know, date from the obituary section and and just really take advantage of of the elderly and there was nothing that they could do because his signature transferred all of those assets to a new woman who died and left them all to her children what a dark dark day that was for those women And I was so sad for them.

You know, you hear those stories and you think, oh, that would never happen to me until it does. And you hear the ones about, oh, someone got a phone call and it was from the grandson of we need money, go to the ATM. You hear those stories. But it happens. And dating from the obituary sounds funny to say, but I'll bet it happens. And we see the results of what it happens. And it feels like almost like you've been disinherited when that went about. So what were some of those ripple effects from the extended family when that happened?

Well, they, can you imagine the darkness? No, yeah. Here, the family home and a half a million dollars of investments went to someone that wasn't even related. You can't get worse than that. You know, I'm telling you, one of the greatest aspects of the retirement shield is to shield your family from predators after you're gone. Let me just tell you, I saw these things happening with my family, or not with my family, but with my clients, but I was never motivated until it happened to us. My mother had a, you know, a modest estate, and she had a will, but she wouldn't

do a trust. At the end result was I had siblings who didn't speak to each other over 10, years for over 10 years because two emotions surface almost simultaneously after mom and dad are gone and they're both green grief and greed they come at the same times it's strange when when that happens because mom and dad are the glue that hold the family together it's like the kids are to use another analogy the kids are the spokes in the will and the parents are the the hub of the will when the hub is gone the spoke scatter and sometimes never recover the trust is a document of affection it's a replacement hub while the family grieve yeah it's something it's something you know it's something you leave behind to fill the void so that your children

can lean on uh you know uh think about this your children have never taking a breath without you. Emotions run really high during those stressful times and imagine having to go through the cumbersome legal system to probate the estate. Imagine having to deal with all

the stress of having to settle a confusing estate on the heels of all the grief. It's unbearable. It's something that we should never put that on our children. So what happens with the trust, mom,

and dad are still there. They're still guiding the children through the settlement process. It truly is a document of affection and shields the children as if you were still there. That's, it's important. And like we've said before, people would nod their heads and say, yeah, what you just said, I fully agree with. But you need to make sure you're taking care of that well ahead of the time that you need it, because guess what happens? What happens is if you don't take care of it and then you think, oh, let me go put something like this together.

You're under duress. Maybe there's not enough time to do it the right way. So make plans. Secondly, I know that we're not speaking as attorneys and we're talking about the word trust, but there are many types of trusts, revocable, irrevocable, living and probably 10 other variations. But the point is you need to get with someone a financial, uh, um, professional like yourself and a legal professional to put together the right plan with the right trust because there is never a cookie cutter solution for every single person out there.

Yeah, you're right. And, you know, there are irrevocable trusts and we don't usually recommend them in a rare, rare case. And that's because you basically have to trust a trustee that isn't related to you. You give somebody else total control over your estate, maybe that's not. I've seen some really bad stuff happen when we, you know, revocable living trust fits 99% of the people that we deal with. We turn them over to somebody else if it's not going to be that kind of trust.

You know, I think that I love how you said it's like a gift of love, because when you You put the right plan in place, your heirs, your family, your legacy is taking care of. Another aspect of that is putting together the right estate plan to minimize taxes. And we don't have time to get into a five-hour discussion on that. But I know that you would agree with the fact that putting certain guardrails in place regarding trust and passing your assets onto heirs as much as possible to make sure that you're doing that in a tax-affirm. matter. Well, let me just, let me add this. You know what buyer's blues is? Kind of like buyer's remorse. Yeah, buyer's blues, buyer's remorse, you know, you buy a car or something. You know you shouldn't have done. Yeah, yeah. I've had that experience a few times. And it's, you know,

there's a restraining voice sometimes that we feel when we're making a bad decision. That, man, I shouldn't do this, but I really want to. And when our passion for something, overpowers a reason, we usually make a wrong decision. Well, when it comes to estate planning, I've never had a person come and say, Jim, man, I wish I wouldn't have done that. Man, I wish I wouldn't have paid that money so that I could protect my family.

I've never heard a person, and I've been involved in well over a thousand revocable living trust. I've never had somebody ever get buyer's remorse. Because when it feels right, it is right and in all of my life I've never felt guilty about doing the right thing and in all of my life I've never felt good when I did the wrong thing

so we're selling I sell peace of mind not just yours but mine also it is so gratifying when I see somebody after the fact they come up to me Hey, Jim, man, I trust worked just like you said it would. I said, I told you. Yeah. The smartest decision they'd ever made.

Yeah, I wasn't kidding with you. Well, this has been really. One of the thought, you know, is, you know, none of us get out of this life alive. We all have to die to do it. Now, I heard there was one person that got out of this life alive. He had to die to do it. And guess what? For the rest of us, there's no coming back and having a redo.

If we mess it up, we mess it up for our kids. And people say, why should I care? I'm dead? Because you love somebody. And people who love people plan. If you don't love anybody, don't plan. It's okay. Give it to the attorneys.

But when you love someone, you plan. Well, if someone listening to this has some loved ones that they would like to make sure they're taking care of. and want to look at their estate plan, what's the best way they can reach out and connect with you, Jim? Well, they can reach out to me at TVRShield.com standing for Treasure Valley RetirementShield.com. TBRShield.com or 775-233-2203. They can shoot me a text or just call me direct. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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