#RichLifeLawyer Podcast 001:Welcome to the Show!

Funny thing about this podcast episode – I actually created it on April 8, 2016. But, I had to backdate it to make it (hopefully) show up first in the podcast feed.

These podcast episodes may or may not have a lot of content to them. I’d love to have each episode transcribed, but that might just be too much work for my people to handle.

I want to give you the best, though, so we’re going to try to make it happen.

Enough chit chat. Let’s get into the show!

Hey everybody welcome to episode 1 of The Rich Life Lawyer Podcast. I’m your host, Christopher Small. You do not know me yet and that’s okay. You will soon, that’s what this episode’s all about. An introduction to you about me, about my firm maybe, about what this whole podcast thing is gonna be about. So you can see if you wanna stick around and listen. First thing’s first though, I want to, I don’t know if I wanna apologize or explain the lack of the intro music and the intro voice over but I don’t have one yet and I would rather take action and start to get this information out than wait it out forever to get a snazzy intro.

So, maybe I’ll give one of those someday, I’ve done them for my other podcasts before but we don’t have one yet. So, we’re just gonna move forward. That’s how we roll here. What should we talk about first. Maybe we should talk about what the show’s about, that way, if you’re not interested you can just turn it off. You don’t even have to learn about me. This show The Rich Life Lawyer Show is all about helping you live your richest life. That includes money, that includes having a great family, if that’s what you want. It includes reaching your highest potential, reaching your dreams, succeeding in everything in that really entails. That’s what the show is all about.

Now, because I am an estate planning attorney, we’re gonna talk a lot about wealth building, we’re gonna talk a lot about estate planning strategies, and we’re gonna talk a lot about how to avoid estate taxes, we’re gonna talk about things like that. But before you flip the switch to turn this off, my goal here really is to make this stuff interesting and helpful and actionable. I want you to be able to get, to finish one of these episodes and really understand the concepts behind the things that are going on. I also want to talk about the idea of creating a great family. My tagline for my firm is ‘We Help People Get Rich And Live Forever’ and what that means really to me is, my goal is ready to leave my family better than it was when I was here.

That means both from a financial standpoint and from a generational standpoint, a legacy standpoint. I think that families can and should continue to grow and a big part of that is the elder people in the family taking the time to pass down not just stories but morals and philosophies and values. Things like that. So, this podcast is also gonna be about that and ways that that can be done and just sort of reminding you and bringing this stuff to the forefront so that you can implement some of it into your daily life and hopefully live a rich life. That’s what this is all about. The other thing too is before you hit the button, hopefully you haven’t hit the off button yet. My idea of estate planning is that it should be aspirational and not anxiety inducing. What I mean by that is, when we do estate planning, we’re thinking about what will happen if we die. I’m not gonna say pass, I’m not gonna say a lot of stuff, we’re all gonna die. We all are gonna die and we know that. We don’t know when but it’s gonna happen but thinking about estate planning and putting together your own estate portfolio shouldn’t be a sad time, in my opinion.

It should really be an aspirational time. It’s an opportunity for you to really think about how am I going to continue to live a legacy and live on and help my family and do all these things that I wanna do after I’m gone. That’s what estate planning means for me and that’s how I try to frame up for my clients because that’s what I think it really is about. It’s not really about dying. It’s not about the act of death. It’s about how to continue to live on with your family once you died. As of right now, 2016, we’re all still gonna die. So, we might as well think about it, might as well plan it, might as well talk about it.

These are conversations and ideas that will make a big difference in the way that you’re family deals with everything that happens with your life and with your death. So, that’s what we’re gonna talk about here. It’s gonna be fun, I’m gonna try to make it exciting as exciting as I can. I’m not gonna make it dry. I don’t if you can tell already but I’m not your typical estate planning attorney. I’m not some guy that likes to sit in the office and dig into estate planning books although I do that a lot cause I need to know what’s going on but I enjoy the process and the education that comes from hanging out with my clients and learning about what’s important to them and helping them reach their goals.

That’s what this is all about for me. Okay, and that’s a perfect sort of segue into me. Into who I am and I how I got into estate planning. I actually kind of, an interesting story maybe, maybe not. We’ll go all the way back. I am, was born and raised in Junction City, Kansas. Small town of about 30,000 people, I went to the University of Kansas for my undergraduate degree, go Jayhawks. I also went to the University of Kansas for law school. I met my wife while I was in undergrad and after law school, I took and passed the Kansas bar exam, worked at Kansas for several years, and then my wife took a job in Seattle, that’s where I am now. I made a deal with her, we can move to Seattle if I can open my own firm.

We moved out here in 2008. I opened my firm in 2009 after passing the Washington State bar exam and my firm was originally DUI defense, traffic tickets, personal injury, those kinds of things basically if you could get in trouble in a car, we were there to help. I also before this actually, really fell in love with business, in marketing, in leadership, management, all of these things. I think that’s why I really am drawn toward the aspirational aspect of estate planning is because I always sought my business as a way to really create something from nothing to build something that I could pass on or I really would work for my family even if I wasn’t able to do that anymore. So that’s where all that started.

Fast forward to 2013, it’s when I really got into my head for the first that I should open, start an estate planning practice, that’s when I had my first kid, Blakely, she was born in 2013. Have another kid, Jackson, was born in 20.. Okay so, Blakely was born in 2012, Blakely, don’t listen to this part. Jackson was born in 2014, and I may have a new kid about to be born here in a couple of weeks. But it was really the arrival of my daughter and sort of that whole fatherhood thing that really got me thinking about estate planning and I really wanted to make sure that her needs are taken care of, anything whatever happened to me or to happen to my wife and I together in particular.

Because I think that the people that will raise your kids have a profound effect on the outcome of their lives and so, really started to thinking about it. Getting into it, and getting more interested in it. Also because I was in business, I began to get interested in the numbers of things. So, tax planning and wealth building and creation and the way that you can use certain vehicles to and compound interest to really rock it. Your wealth up relatively quickly. So, started to sort of digging around and looking around about that, didn’t do anything about it in 2013. And then in 2015, I finally decided it was time to make the move.

I sold my law firm to my business partner, and I opened CMS Law Firm. Which where I am now, you can check it out if you want. CMSlawfirm.com, it is an estate planning law firm. That’s all we do and we are good at it and I think part of it, part of what makes us good is that, we have a real focus on client experience, on client service, on employee experience, and employee service. You know I want this to be a fun place to work. I want our clients to enjoy coming to the office and speaking with us or working with us and I really wanna make sure that client’s goals are met.

I’ve read a lot about the client experience when it comes to estate planning attorneys, I think the number one complaint for people is that, the attorneys don’t actually listen to what they want. Sort of just having idea for a plan, of the newest vehicle that they wanna try to use and they try to fit the client’s situation into this new plan that they wanna try to implement rather that really listen to the client and giving them what’s best for them. So, that is a little about me, and I have done this podcast in the past. I love doing these, it’s really a fun way to sort of talk to you and connect with you and that’s what’s gonna be, oh! So, the show, let’s talk about the show.

What can you expect from the show. First of all, it’s really gonna be two shows, so it’s a bi-weekly show, it’s gonna be this podcast which is The Rich Life Lawyer podcast and there’s also going to be The Rich Life Lawyer Show which is a Youtube video show that I do. I’m gonna, just put on both here on the podcast so if you hear Rich Life Lawyer Show, then that’s video episode. If you hear Rich Life Lawyer podcast, that’s an audio episode. This one hopefully is going to come out first, I’m gonna do my best to make this one show up first. So that everybody know what’s going on.

We’re gonna talk about everything related to estate planning which means like I said, wealth building, family, legacy, leadership, taxes, wills, trusts, all that stuff. I’m gonna make it exciting. You are going to want to listen to this stuff because every time, you’re gonna learn something that’s gonna be able to help you and your family succeed. That’s the goal. I will have occasional guests, actually don’t have any plans for any guest on right now but I’m sure I will have them on from time to time because I love talking to people and learning about their experiences and their expertise and their thoughts and ideas.

So we’ll probably have those people on and then I’ll also try to give you a little bit of motivation. A little bit of aspiration. Plant within you the idea that you can get rich, first of all. You can build wealth and you can do it relatively simply and relatively easily. You can also build wealth as part of your estate to really pass it on to your family for not that much money. Expend it and you know the idea that you can really create a legacy and pass down your values and your morals and your stories to your family and make your family better because that’s what I would want to do.

That’s my goal to kind of why I’m doing this podcast too. I’m creating right now things that my family can look back on later and say ‘Wow! That’s who this guy was. That’s who dad was or grandpa or great grandpa.’ Think come back and listen this and go like ‘Okay, he’s a joker.’ ‘This sucker on here on this podcast saying these things.’ But they’re gonna know who I am. They’re going to be able to hear my voice. They’re going to be able to see me on video and so we’re gonna talk about some stuff like that too.

So, if you ever have questions, I would love to answer them on the show, you can email me chris@cmslawfirm.com maybe just put like Rich Life Lawyer podcast in the subject line or something like that so I don’t miss it and I will do my best to answer them. So, this podcast, the plan is I believe to release it every Monday and then I’ll release the video episode on Wednesdays. That’s it. If you’re interested in getting on my newsletter too which will be sort of more of this type of information.

You can go to cmslawfirm.com/newsletter and sign up. It’s super easy. But there probably won’t be any way to listen to the show for the first couple of months that it’s out anyway but that’s okay. If you get here at any and you want to for just paying those ways, please do. Thank you for being here, oh, oh, one other thing you can do by the way, before we get going is you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes.

Just go to iTunes and search for Rich Life Lawyer. You should be able to find it and also leave me a review. If you like it, don’t like it, I don’t care. Leave me a review. This is a good way to help other people find this podcast. I think this information is going to be valuable, it’s going to be well taken in. So, I wanna get it in this many people’s hands as I can. And you are a perfect vehicle for that. So, that’s it for today and I will talk to you soon. I don’t have a catch phrase to get out of here. So I don’t what to say but maybe I’ll just say signing off. See ya later.

Cheers,

Christopher Small

P.S. Do you have kids? Have you completed guardianship paperwork? Have you done it correctly? Click here to find out what happens if you don’t do anything: Are you okay with a judge choosing the guardians of your children?

P.P.S. Do you own a business? Do you have a plan so the business, and your family, can survive if something happens to you? If not, click here to learn how simple it is to protect your business and your family from tragedy: 5 Ways to Protect Your Business from Catastrophic Failure.

P.P.P.S. Do you have no kids and think you don’t need an estate plan? Single and think a will is only for married couples. You couldn’t be more wrong. Click here to learn more: 5 reasons estate planning is a must have even if you don’t have kids.

Christopher Small is a Kirkland estate planning attorney who helps people get rich and live forever. He is also the owner of CMS Law Firm LLC.