Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Terry Wheeler Founder & CEO of WE Alliance Wealth Advisors Discussing The Estate Planning Blind Spot

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

WE Alliance Wealth Advisors if founded on the belief that an integrated Family Office style approach to wealth planning is the best way to protect and maximize the wealth client families work so hard to accumulate. Combine powerful proactive tax strategies, a powerful system of investing called Defined Outcome Investing, and a Family Centered approach to estate planning to deliver uncommon results while reducing risk for each client family. Founder Terry Wheeler’s book “Laugh When the Market Crashes” is a must read book outlining this investment approach.The firm and its founder traces its roots back over 35 years with its origins beginning at Dean Witter Reynolds. In the 1990s the founder added a law degree focused on tax and estate planning advocacy. The integrated wealth, tax, and estate planning approach now truly sets them apart in a crowded financial planning space.Learn more: https://weriaadvisors.com/Buy the book at www.LaughWhenTheMarketCrashes.comAdvisor Coaching at www.StrategicWealthLegal.comAny opinions, projections, or forward-looking statements expressed herein are solely those of the author, may differ from the views or opinions expressed by WE Alliance Wealth Advisors, and are only for general informational purposes as of the date indicated.All investments involve risk; please consult with a financial advisor prior to investing.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-terry-wheeler-founder-ceo-of-we-alliance-wealth-advisors-discussing-the-estate-planning-blind-spot

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 us Terry Wheeler, who's the founder and CEO at We Alliance Wealth Advisors, and we'll be talking about the estate planning, black, spot. Terry, welcome back to the program. Hey, thank you for having us back, Mike. You're welcome. You know, in this series, we're talking about these blind spots. And it's like, you know, when you, when you poke some holes here in some of the traditional thinkings and go,

this is a misconception, this is a blind spot. And then here's what we can do to fix it. Boy, that can really shore up some foundations in a retirement plan. So estate planning, I think this is such a hot topic because there's a lot of people out there that are, you know, just running to get to retirement. And then when you teach them how to get through retirement, that's wonderful. And then the next level is now let's think about your legacy, your estate plan, your what you're going to pass to your heirs. So where do you start the conversation with the client when you start bringing this topic up to them?

Sure. So as we've talked about in the prior to blind spots, we really look at planning as you've got to create a good portfolio, add defense through a concept called defined outcome investing. and then you'll get more out of your retirement and you won't outlive your money if you do it right. So that's a key first step. Very closely tied in and integrated is the proactive tax planning. So you've got to keep more of what you make. And if you do that proactively, as we talked about in the last episode, you can create very large amounts of extra income.

So often quarter million, half million, even a million dollars over your lifetime by doing true tax planning that goes well beyond. am I simply going to do a Roth conversion or not? All this additional wealth, a lot of our clients were fortunate to work with families that love their kids and they want to take care of them also. So now we're looking at estate planning. And in estate planning, it's a combination of protection. What happens if you're still in your earning years and somebody passes away early? We've got to make sure there's wealth to protect the surviving spouse and the kids and everything

else. But because we work primarily with those in the sprint to retirement or retirement, they've already got their wealth. So how do we now create that in a way that will go to the next generation in a way that protects them, transfers your values, and gives them the best chance at success with this money that you've worked so hard to accumulate? And that goes through a process called Family-centered estate planning. And it's critical to a good plan. You know, I think that when people hear the word of state planning, they just go, oh, yeah, I've got a will. Oh, in fact, I'm really advanced.

I have a trust, and they don't really know what that means, but that's just scratching the surface. And sometimes that might not even be what they need at all or at least right now. Talk a little bit about where you start advising your clients in that realm. Yeah, sure. So it is important. We're in California. So having a trust is important to avoid the dreaded probate process, which is very slow, very expensive.

and it's very easy to avoid. So people tend to do a trust and they check the box. A couple key things. One, if your assets, your financial plan doesn't stay coordinated with your estate plan, you're still going through probate. So you end up having a probate administration and a trust administration. So keeping that coordination throughout the years is very important. Easy but very important to do.

But regular updates are key. So we have a three-step process to be. estate planning. So you work with a counseling-oriented attorney to get it done and have a counseling-oriented financial planner that is typically driving the process. Then you have regular updates. Then you have very low-cost administration if somebody has a disability or passes away. So when you're talking about the counseling side, trust goes so far beyond how do we just avoid probate that if all you did is you created a trust to avoid probate, maybe do some basic estate tax planning, and you check the box, you're missing the boat on what a trust can do.

So we want to protect each other, meaning the couple that we're planning for as well as the next generations from what we call creditors and predators. So in the last episode, we talked about one of the biggest predators, which is the IRS. So in estate planning, people have over a $15 million exemption each. So unless your wealth is over $30 million, you don't even have. an estate tax issue, but you probably have capital gains tax issues and you almost certainly have income tax issues. So how do we keep more of that wealth you built in that IRA or 401K? And we have strategies there that are coordinated with your estate plan where you might be able to defer the taxes not only for your joint lifetime, but maybe even over the entire lifetime

of your kids and great grandkids. So tax planning is key. But, you know, you know, you. Even beyond that, we have protections we want to build in at each layer for your family. And so sometimes we as humans think, oh, I've got this issue. I'm going to go search online, Google, AI. Here's the solution. Check, check, do it done. When you hear the word trust and all of these things, you've got to pump the brakes because you cannot just go out and go, oh, I heard that this kind of trust is best.

So I'm going to go set that up. There are many kinds of trust. We could spend three hours just talking about this one topic. alone, you know, living trust, revocable, irrevocable, many others, I'm sure. Let's just pick one and say, what are some of the issues and problems that could come up if someone already has a valid revocable trust? What does that look like for someone? Yeah, so we usually tell clients, and we teach a lot on this subject, and I tell clients in the workshops that we teach, I say there's a couple of magical two-word phrases that attorneys know

because they have these little boxes on their on their desks and these nice screens so they have these things called a computer and they all know what search and replace is and what cut and paste is now i would submit that most of the estate planning that is out there is fill in the blank truss and they're garbage they will help you avoid probate but they avoid everything else too so i was teaching this once and and we had a big room and i'm talking about what planning is So let's go through a couple of the protections. So first of all, what happens at the first death is everything typically will go to the spouse. And very often with no protections. So if that spouse gets remarried and they're married for another 10, 15 years, they may trust that spouse, the new spouse, and send it to them. Well, if you're a blended family, that spouse has kids of her own or his own. We always let the husbands pass away first in our examples. So his new wife gets the money.

Another 10 years go by, especially if he married a younger wife for the second marriage, and the money goes to her kids. So the couple that we planned for, if they wouldn't be our clients, but if they didn't plan, that money that you just disinherited your kids. So we build in something we call remarriage or bloodline protection. So it could say everything we built together for the spouse, but it's locked in to go to the kids. And that cannot be changed. or we could say, you know what, we realize, let's say you're in your 50s and you're doing this, we realize Survivor might have a 20, 30 year marriage. We want them to be able to take care of a new spouse, but we're going to do it using a irrevocable trust is how you would do this,

that maybe lets them live in the house rent free, maybe gives them $5,000 a month of income, but then that money, they do not have the ability to redirect to their children. It goes back to your children. So remarriage and bloodline protection is critical. And no offense to us men, but we are the problem. 80% of the men remarry and they trust their new spouse too much and don't build in protections. And kids get disinherited all the time. And you might think, oh, it won't happen to me until it does.

Yeah. It's happened in our family. And it wasn't a bad story, really. But my grandfather and grandmother were married for, um, 55 years when my grandmother passed away. My grandfather was remarried within two years to a wonderful woman named Helen. And it wasn't a bad story, but it didn't work. They worked with the biggest firm in Stockton to do their plan years before I was involved.

And their trust was a fill in the blank trust. And everything went to my grandfather. He took care of Helen because that's who he was. he was definitely very much a very amazing guy, but he took care of her, but he had bad legal counsel. Helen lived a good 10, 15 years beyond him, and she had lost her husband, too. And she made his life great the last 10 years. We loved Helen. She was a wonderful lady.

But then it all went to her daughters. It wasn't a large estate, but it all went to her daughters. And my grandmother would have rolled over in her grave that I didn't go to her three daughters. You know, that's a plan. story like literally happened in my family with my grandfather and passed away and married and great. But then when, when, you know, he died, then tiny little family heirloom things didn't even pass on to us. So it's like, it wasn't devastating, but it's like it can happen. And, and this is something that I feel like a lot of times people just don't, you know, plan for.

As an example, for with an example with me, um, years and year, we got four kids and now they're all grown and married. And back when they were small, we had a basic will. And we updated a couple years ago and we're going through our lockbox throwing out old documents. And we saw the first will. And we're like, man, good thing we updated it because even when the kids were in their 20s, if something happened to my wife and I, then they would be going to, you know,

my wife's parents as a guardian. It's like, ha, ha, they're not going to do that in their 20s. But the point is we don't keep up with things and things change and laws change. And if you don't understand what should be done and what you just mentioned there with that bloodline planning and family-centered approach, that's huge because so many of those variables. How about this? Let's trickle down this domino effect.

What happens if a child's inheritance to the child's inheritance if that child divorces? So now you've got some more splintering, right? Yeah. So let's go through the first protections to back up to guardianship. And I'm just guessing because we haven't even talked about your estate plan. But if you think back to when you had your first child and the first time you went, to dinner and you had a babysitter. You left them instructions, probably up on the on the refrigerator, if you have magnets,

you might have put it on the refrigerator saying, here's my cell number, here's where we have the medicine, here's, here's their doctor's information. You left all kinds of stuff for this person that's going to be watching your prize son or daughter and you're only going to dinner down the street for a few hours. Right. Then imagine you're going away for a weekend. Those instructions are getting longer and here's who lives close. Here's who you need to contact.

Now imagine you're going away for a week or a month. Longer instructions. Now imagine you're going away forever. Most people do guardianship planning by saying, here's who gets my kids when I die. Good luck. Yep. No instructions. So proper guardianship planning, you have a lot of detail in there.

The easy things are the money. Yep. You don't want a guardian to spend the inheritance under the guise of taking care of your child. So you want to protect from overspending and you want to protect from underspending because they end up affecting their retirement, raising your child because most of us choose really good guardians. So we need to protect them from themselves. And then values, whether it's education, private schools, public schools, your faith, your approach to life. You may work ethic is something that you embrace or investing in real estate or entrepreneurship. entrepreneurial, all that can be built into your guardianship planning.

Now they're adults, one of the single biggest thing here in California, divorce rate is over 50%. As soon as you commingle your assets, an inheritance is separate property, but when you co-mingle, it's presumed to be community. So we build in divorce protection for the surviving spouse and for the kids. So 100% of it can be protected, and it's a spectrum, zero protection, which would be just give it to them outright, versus top of the line, which most people don't do because it's more burdensome, where you could actually require pre-numptial or post-numptial agreements. But you can have invisible divorce protection that's stronger than a pre-numptial agreement. And it's easy to do. You just have to get the planning in. The key there is the legal part is easy. This is all family planning. And you need the attorney to

actually stop talking and learn about you and your goals. And once they do that, they can create a powerful plan that protects you. So a couple other protections. So we talked about remarriage and bloodline. We talked about divorce protection. The other one that we often build in is what we call yellow school bus protection. And what this is is imagine the surviving spouse. So again, the husband passed away first.

She's out on a rainy day. And she's got a little bit of water on the bottom of her feet from getting into the car. And she's approaching a four-way intersection. She's not playing with the radio. she hasn't been drinking, she hasn't done anything wrong. But as she reaches for that break, her foot slips and hits that gas pedal. She goes into the intersection right as a yellow school bus is coming across, and she hits that school bus, and it tips over into the creek.

Severe disabilities and deaths occur. Now, every time I tell this story now, I cringe a little bit because I've been telling this for 25 years, and I've seen it happen twice in real-life events now. not with my clients, but on the news where this bus is in a creek and people get severely disabled or died. Now, neither of them were school buses. They were just normal buses. But the key here is the litigation that would occur isn't going to be 10,000, 20,000, 30,000. It's going to be $2,000, $2.5 million per person.

And our policies for auto are typically $3,000 to $500,000. So we tell people, go out and buy that umbrella, policy. that's your first layer of protection. But in this example, we typically can protect 80 to 100% of the surviving spouses' assets from a yellow school bus accident. So you still want your insurance to take care of those families you hurt, but you're not going to go bankrupt. And we can protect it for the kids also. Love it. So you can give great contingencies.

I mean, there's those things that, you know, you don't know until you know. And it's a blind spot. And it might not happen, but if it does. And it's not like, hey, one day a meteor might fall on your house. That's pretty unlikely. But like to your point, you've seen that scenario, that yellow school bus scenario happen in the news. It can happen.

And then if it happens, it's devastating. If you're prepared and it doesn't happen, then wonderful. So walk me through your three-step approach and estate planning. Yeah, I want to hit one more protection, though. Okay. Because this one isn't the meteor. So the things that happen all the time are. divorce protection is needed.

So we talked about that one. The one that we also very commonly need is what we call values promotion and protecting the child or the beneficiary from themselves. So we know that statistically they will spend your inheritance in less than three years, which sounds crazy. But we've all heard about it with the sports stars. They get rich too quick. And then they've got their entourage and they blow it.

A lot of times the people inheriting the money, they're going to start the business. it's going to turn your million and a half into 20 million and they lose it. So you need to build in family planning to the way you give it to the kids. And it can be designed to where maybe in their 20s, you're not giving them broad access. Maybe you're doing an earned income match or something like that. Maybe while they're going to school, you're paying for tuition and books. When they get out, maybe you're helping them with a down payment for a home, but they're not getting the bigger money. And then you phase in access.

We'll often build in a concept called a family bank where maybe that is something. something that they're going to have a situation where they can borrow money out to do real estate or to start a business if they apply to a group that you've created that approve the plan. So this is a huge area but constructing some family planning, which is just family planning. It's not legal. It's very, very important. And a well-trained financial advisor that knows these issues can ferret out most of those issues before you ever get to the attorney. So it doesn't have to bring the cost up very high. They just have to know the issues to talk about. out because your planner typically gets to know you better than your attorney does.

Now, in our case, we are that we are all in one. So we get to know our clients very well. But a lot of times you do have to bring in other professionals. If your financial planner is well trained on this, they can be the quarterback and really help make this easy for you. Perfect. So to your three step or to the process that you alluded to, we do that three step approach, which good estate planning attorneys around the country will do different variations. And then some of them are just pitching trust. and they really don't do good planning.

So the three steps is you've got to work with a counseling-oriented group of planners. So whether that's just the attorney or the financial advisor that's bringing in somebody to draft the documents, somebody's got to be very counseling-oriented to help walk you through all of these issues. And then laws change, tax laws change, estate planning laws change. So you've got to update on a regular basis. In our practice, we do a meeting once a year to update everybody. Some years there's nothing. Some years we have amendments pre-done.

for everybody. And then the third step is really the payoff. And that is if you've done this well, the cost of doing administration on a disability, meaning mental incapacity or somebody passing away should be minimized, should be clean, should be easy. But a trust is not a magic book that sprouts arms and legs and administers your estate. A trust administration is nothing more than a private probate. You have to go through a very similar process. But a lot of this, you can do. yourself and if you build this right you can even cut out a lot of steps if there's no conflict in the family and you can do a very cheap administration so putting some work in up front actually reduces the cost in many cases by tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars so and it's

very seamless so it's important to do that that three-step approach or some variation of that to keep things updated perfect well let's wrap up uh terry with an example can you think of a time when a maybe a married couple came in and said, oh, we're good to go. We have a trust. And you're like, let me just examine that. Let me give you some guidance and clarity. Yeah. So when we teach about 60% of the room, he already has trust and we'll offer a review. And most of them overwhelmingly are a version of if I die, it goes to my wife. If my wife passes away, it goes to the kids. And that's a very, very common trust. And if you look at a legal book, that's the trust that you can just fill in the blanks. That's what my grandfather had.

So a typical scenario would be we've had couples even earlier this week. We had this exact thing. We reviewed it and that was their trust. They were a blended family. So kids from prior relationships that they got married. They were like the Brady bunch. They had six kids. So it wasn't three girls and three boys, but they had six kids total. And their trust just gave it to the spouse and then gave it to the kids outright. We talked to them about remarriage protection. You could see the wife screaming in her chair because she's envisioning her passing away and her husband getting remarried and it all going ultimately, potentially to that new spouse and not even to any of their six kids. So in their case, we built in remarriage protection that would take care of all

six kids and locked in. So even the surviving spouse couldn't disinherit the other's kids. And the enforcement mechanism is these kids were vested. at the first death. So the children could literally remove mom or dad if they were doing things to give away the assets because we took away that also. So they had liberal access to their money. All of their needs were taken care of easily. But they couldn't give it to a new spouse anymore any longer.

And we locked it in for all six kids in the splendid family. And then some of these kids, one of them was an attorney that had been sued many times. They had no asset protection for this guy. another was a builder, which liability lasts for 10 years. Builders have a lot of liability. So when we talked about yellow school bus protection, it doesn't happen. It's easy to give. So we build it for everybody, but it doesn't happen often.

But for those two, it does happen a lot. So we built in that protection. And then there was a drug addict child. So we had to build a very detailed protective trust for that person. So they had all the issues. So suffice it to say that there's not a cookie cutter solution for every single person. No, no.

And then to add instill to injury, they had a very large IRA. There was zero tax planning. They were just going to pay the big tax bill and lose 40 to 50% of that. And we showed them how to build it through for these kids to create, in their case, it was going to be another seven figures of additional wealth that they could split up between these kids. So it was easy to add tremendous value. And it's fun when you do this because clients come away.

feeling taken care of because they have been taken care of properly. And they feel wonderful that they are taking care of their family. And it's a gift to their family to have things buttoned up tax-wise, estate planning-wise, and it goes well beyond just a few shuffling a few documents around. So this has been super enlightening. Can I bring up one last thing, Mike, because you just heard of memory. one of the things that is so fun to do with with kind of higher net worth cases once you get get their portfolio proper defense built in get their tax planning to where they're you know they've got a lot of extra money they never knew they had is some of our clients get to the stage of life where instead of waiting until they die for all this to happen they will do gifting strategies for the kids see what they do so they can see the mistakes help guide them while they're still alive they will do trips where they bring all the kids and grandkids.

In other words, estate and wealth planning doesn't all have to be about after you die. You can do some things during your life that can really add value and teach the kids and grandkids certain things. And it's really fun to be a part of that when that's one of the client's goals. That's awesome. Well, I'll tell you, if that sounds interesting to anyone listening to this, what's the best way that they can learn more and reach out and connect with you? Sure.

So for integrated planning, you can reach us in two ways. The legal side is, is www. Strategic Wealthlegal.com. And then our financial planning, our CFP, tax planning, everything that we do there is www. We are aadvisors.com. And it'll be in the show notes below. So you can click down and just click on the links.

And we've got resources and things that we have at each of those sites that we can help you. And if nothing else, if you have a planner, go over there, learn about it and get your attorney up to speed to build in some of these protections. But if we can help and we're a good resource, we'd love to help you. Perfect. Terry, thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Yeah, thanks for having us, Mike, and have a great day.

You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. com.