Money Matters Episode 6 - Legal Lessons for Life w/ guest Melanie Bragg

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Chris Hensley is a registered representative of Cambridge Investment Research Inc, a broker dealer member of FINRA cippic. Investment Advisor representative Cambridge Investment Research advisors Inc, a registered investment advisor, Cambridge and Houston First Financial Group are not affiliated.

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Houston Midtown chapter of the Society for financial awareness presents money matters with your host, Christopher Hensley.

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Good morning you're listening to KPFT Houston. This is Chris Hensley, and you're listening to money matters. We have a great show for you that it's about 10 o'clock on Friday morning. I have a lot of really good information for you today. We have a guest with us author, Attorney Melanie Branagh, who will be joining us right after the break. Our topic for today is going to be illegal lessons for life. So we're going to hit some areas kind of where you would say best principles, things that you can do to look out for yourself and your family as well. And for first time listeners, we will start by talking a little bit about sofa who we are what we do. So stay tuned. Stay with us keep listening because we got a great show for you today. Go ahead and get started with telling you about sofa who we are sofa is a nonprofit 501 C three educational speakers bureau in our mission is to fight financial illiteracy. And we do that by going out to different organizations, different companies, different groups, professional associations, religious organizations, anywhere people already congregate, and provide financial education seminars as well as health and wellness workshops. So how do we do that? Typically sofa. These seminars, these workshops are held kind of in a brown bag lunch and learn type seminar. So we'll go out to your work. And we'll put on a tie, talk. And these talks can really go from anywhere. They're their themes are financial, financially related or health and wellness related. But we could talk about investments, we could talk about budgeting, we could talk about credit, we could talk about stress in the workplace.

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Who attends these talks? Well, this this could be anybody at a place of employment, anybody at a professional organization who needs a speaker or needs somebody to come in and talk?

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Why would the companies or organizations want to work with this? Well, there's there's a couple of different reasons there. The first reason I would say is because it's motivational. It gets the employees up and out of their seats out of the cubicles. And you really get to learn and talk about things that are really important to us on a day to day basis. Another reason that people work with sofa or invites sofa out as a guest to their company, is that it helps those companies fulfill something called 404 C, and 404. C is it's a Department of Labor Law really that requires any company or organization that has an ERISA sponsored retirement program to provide a financial education piece. And so a lot of times you'll see those same companies have the 401 K company or the 403 V company come out and fulfill that need but when that happens, typically that's just a meeting where they're teaching you how to log on to the website and how to access the 401k What you don't see is a lot of education. And that's what sofa does that's what we fulfill that need. And if you think about it, none of us really had a class in high school that taught us how to

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budget how to that even balance a checkbook something as simple as saving towards a car or prom. We never had that kind of class and so sofa comes out and they fulfill our we fulfill that need. All of these talks are pro bono, they are volunteers that go out and talk so there's no charge for that. And then that leads me right into kind of transitions into in our topic for today, which is the legal lessons for life as a as a financial advisor, I go out and I'll talk on most of the finance part

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And we do have a talk available called legal lessons for life. And I, this would be an attorney who would actually come out to the company, if you if you want us to talk on legal lessons of life we've had, we'd have an attorney come out if you want us to talk on taxes, that would be a CPA, if it's first time homebuyer that's going to be a realtor. But this talk, it's not one that I get, but I'm gonna go kind of hit the highlights on it to let you know what we would talk about. And then there's two topics that when I do my getting Fiscally Fit talk, that I go over with, with people, and they're very just kind of a high level or a high level approach to it. And we have Melanie Who's an attorney who we're gonna get we're gonna go even more in depth when we when we talk with her after the break. So the the talk legal lessons for life.

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It talks about making legal plans, putting in into place legal documents, talks about disability or being incapacitated and conservatorship something called the Advanced Health Care Directive, which I think Melanie's going to talk about as well. And then it just we talked about, do you need a will? What is probate? And what can you do to make plans for your family and for your children, talks about leaving gifts to children and setting up Guardian ships for children? Estate distributions for children? How do you do that? What things do you have to do to get to put those things in place, and

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also touches just a little bit on estate taxes, and living trusts concept. Now as a financial adviser, since I am not an attorney, I don't like to talk about this stuff that much when I'm out doing my talks. And so I just barely skimmed the surface on it. And but there are two things that I'm really passionate about when it comes to

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when it comes to putting a plan in place as an financial advisor, I work with clients to help them put a financial plan in place. And the two main things that I get on to them about is getting a will in place and and also doing a beneficiary designation check and getting a will in place. Usually I'll share this with them that in the state of Texas, if you have children, and you don't have a will in place, let's say something happened to both of you and your spouse or your significant other, you would hope or maybe you wouldn't depending on how your family works, that you would hope a family member would kind of step up and raise their hand and say, you know, I would like to step in and take custody of the children. However, if you had not taken the time to put something in writing, then ultimately that choice will be left up to a court. And so that's one of the reasons that we would make sure that people take the time to get these documents in place. And when I do financial plans, I have kind of a giant task list that I make people

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remind them to do those types of things. So that's one of the things that we talked about. The other thing that I talked about is beneficiary designation checks. And I usually will share a story with them about one of my clients. One of my clients is a human resource managers, human resource manager at a local city government. And she shared a story with me about an employee who had been recently divorced. And he came to her and said that he wanted to update his retirement plan his life insurance to reflect his new family. And so she gave him the forms and told him what he needed to do to get that taken care of. And then he ended up filling them out. And he left them on the kitchen table. And it turns out that the guy, he was a firefighter, he was very healthy. And everybody was surprised when he had a heart attack. And so he ended up having a heart attack and he ended up passing away. But so where does that leave us with the with a life insurance with a retirement plan when it comes time to settle those up? Who gets that money? Is it wife number one, or wife number two,

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most likely, it's going to be wife number one, and maybe they'll go to court and maybe they'll try to make a case for it. But I would really hate to be involved with that. So that's another example really, of taking the time to put those documents in place to get you really lined up not only for yourself, but for your family to be lined up to be more Fiscally Fit or financially sound. And with that, we're gonna go ahead and take a break for a moment and we will come back and join our guest

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You?

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Up?

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And we are back and we have Melanie Bragg with us local author, attorney, Melanie. Now Melanie, I know you but I want to take some time here to share a little bit of your bio with the listeners so they can know a little bit about your background here

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says that

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Melanie now you're a lawyer at Bragg law firm, which is your own firm, the attorneys specialize in probate and estate work. You're an author in both fiction and nonfiction. And you serve as the chair of the book publications board of the American Bar Association, the solo small, firm and general practice division which has over 35,000 members and oversees 40 authors and produces about 10 to 12 books a year. So that's a lie. That's a lie. And Melanie, you've also been active as a public servant in the in the Bar Association at local state national levels, as well as being active here in the Houston Community and variety of different areas. In you also won the first woman or you were the first woman, president of the Houston Young Lawyers Association, and just been involved with really a ton of different community activities through the year. Make note, if you're driving, if you're listening to us to contact Melanie, I'm gonna go ahead and give her email address out because I know she's got some free information that she's going to offer t as well. So her email address is Melanie at Melanie bragg.com.

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Again, it's Melanie at Melanie Bragg dot communists, B R A GG. And it really I see I know that you've been an active probate lawyer and written

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spoken on different importance of drafting your wills and advanced directives, like we just mentioned, do you have any thoughts for our listeners on how this can help them provide for their families and really save? Save them money? Yes, Chris, thank you so much for having me here today. It's just such an honor to be on the show. Since the patient self determination Act came out in 1990. I have written and spoken on the subject of advanced directors and the need for people to get their affairs in order. And for so many years. I've tried to find a way to talk about this to people. No one really wants to talk about it. It's usually when an emergency happens, but just like you so eloquently pointed out a minute ago about the firemen those type things happen to young people

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But diving accidents, motorcycle accidents, you just never know. So if you're a millennium person and what is it, they call them the millennial millennials. Yeah.

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Between 18 and 34. That's a bigger segment of our population than the baby boomers, which I was kind of shocked to hear that I was like, well, somebody beat us out now. But anyway, those kids need to do this as well as they start in their families. Even if you don't think you have enough for it, it is very, very important to do that. So I fashioned a little philosophy that is coming out in the article in July, that's going to be published in the GP solo magazine. And it's called, it's my three L. Strategy, secret strategy for why you need to get your documents done. And I have three L's I have love, levity, and legacy. The three reasons why you need to get this stuff done. You know, people say all the time, they say I love my family, Oh, I love my family. Well, if you really love your family, you need to get this stuff done, you need to take the time, you don't have it's not you're not going to be kickstarted into dying just because you have the documents. You there's nothing to be afraid of. When you when you do it, if you really love your family, you don't want your son and daughter fighting over what you would have wanted. You don't want. I've been called in as a lawyer through the years, the courts have called me in when family members can't agree on proposed treatment for for relatives. Yes, I've had situations where I've been the one walking in complete stranger, and have made the decisions for the family because they can't agree. And what they're doing is not really in the best interest of the patient. And so there's been times when that's happening, you don't want that to happen. So if you really love your family, go ahead, make your wishes known. And then levity. That's a sense of lightness, that's a sense of, of well, well being, once you do it, I guarantee you, you will feel so much better. You know those incompletes and messes like you Poland, your garage, and it's a complete mess. And you say oh my gosh, it's just hanging there, oh, I need to do that I need to do that. Once you get it done, you will have this

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wide open space in your heart and your spirit and your soul, knowing that you're taking care of your family knowing that they won't have to spend time worrying about these things. And it'll just make your life now so much better. And then the third prong of this is legacy, you know, you'll leave a really good legacy, a really, really good taste in people's mouth, about you as a person, you know, the last thing you want. I mean, you're you're gone. Maybe you don't care. But you don't want to walk it around going, Boy, I wish dad had done this for us. Why did he leave us in this situation? You know, because your family members when something happens to you, they are very distraught. They're very stressed. It's they can't, it's hard to make those decisions. And I'll take a couple of minutes to tell you a quick story about when this point was driven home to me. And I've spoken on it, I've done videos on it, I have a program called What you should know about living wills. But it didn't really hit home until last year, when my mother was very ill. And I had prepared her documents in 2006. And so I flew out to California when she was in the hospital. And there she was on the respirator clearly not liking being in that situation. And even though I knew how she felt, even though I had the documents, it's really a strange situation you're going through it, it's almost one of those things, you can't understand what it's like unless you're going through it. But I looked at those her initials over and over, kept looking back looking at her looking at her signature there. And I was so happy that we had filled those out. Because it was her choice and her decision. I didn't have to make that decision for her and then second guess myself. So it was really a godsend for me that I had them. And I just encourage you. If anybody wants to email me at Melanie, at Melanie bragg.com, I will send you the article about this the three l theory. And in that article, I go through the different types of advanced directives, the different pieces of it, whether you can revoke it, whether you can do it orally, what the requirements are, so that'll be very helpful to you to learn about that. So it's just a good thing to do for us. Awesome. Yeah, that definitely I would take advantage of that because it's it's it can be complex. I mean, I get questions from seminar participants on this stuff and I have to defer to the lawyers because this is it can be complex and then you made a point. Just that that I like to I guess hammer home, as when when when death happens. This is the last thing you want your family to have to worry about. Just spend it when they should be mourning and you don't want them to have to think about these these

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important topics kind of take it off their plate. And also, these advanced directives cover situations where someone's in a car wreck in, they're temporarily incapacitated or in a coma, or they have like Alzheimer's or, you know, any kind of situation that causes and causes them to be incapacity. So it's not just death, it covers lots of other situations too. Absolutely. I know people, what, because people don't like to think about those things. But it's once you do it, it's done. And maybe if your situation change, you might have to update it down the road. But it's one of those things when you do it, it's off your plate. Now, mentally, I wanted one of the reasons that I guess I invited you on the show is that as I was learning about you, I came across this story are one of the stories that stuck out to me of how you got started as an attorney. Could you share that story with us and tell us how it relates to your upcoming book, defining moments, insights into the lawyer soul? Oh, sure. Chris, it would be an honor to tell you about it. When I was a baby lawyer back in the late 80s. I know I'm aging myself here, but I'm still young in spirit. Okay. But anyway, I got called by court and they said, Hey, Melanie, you're going to be the temporary guardian for this man. He's over there in the Fifth Ward, and his son has his own drugs. And we don't know if he's healthy or safe. And the electricity might be cut out. And you know, we don't know if he has food. We don't know if he's even there. Or if he's alive. You need to go out there and check on him. So I ran by picked up my order went out there. It was very dark. It was very cold. It was raining. I was 1987. So I did have a cell phone. Yes, kids, we do have cell phones, way back when. But anyway, I called 911 and got a fire truck and a police car. There's lots of people there by the time I got there. And the officers came over to me and said, We knocked on the door. He's not there. And everybody was fixing to take off and, and leave. And I looked at that order. And I knew that I had to get in that house somehow. And I had no idea what I was doing. It's one of those fake it till you make it things that I looked at those guys. I said, Excuse me, sir, this, I am the guardian of this man. And we are not leaving this house until we make absolutely sure he is not in there. I have the authority to break in his house pursuant to this order. And they kind of looked at me like, What do we do here? Well, they broke in the house. And a few minutes later, they said Miss Brad come over here. And they had the flashlight, you know, way up high. And on the couch, there was this poor little man in the pitch black, dark, freezing cold, covered in feces and urine, bless his heart, and he was crying out about his son stealing his money and taking advantage of him. And they put him on a little gurney. And as they were wheeling him out. He came by me and I put my hand right over his heart. And I stood there and I said, Mr. Foreman, my name is Melanie Bragg. And I am your guardian. And in that moment, there was a weird kind of a supernatural transference of energy inside me, and what I said inside my head was, you know, all of those days of working your way through school, all of that time you spent studying, you know, this is what being a lawyer means that you can help people, you can really transform their lives. And it just you know, it was a it was something that I knew that what I'm doing is a calling moreso than just it's not just a profession, it's to help people. And that that that led me to write a book called defining moments, where I've interviewed lawyers about the defining moments in their lives. And this book will be coming out soon, it'll be published by the American Bar Association, flagship division. But there's a lot of lead lines that I've come up with in success principles that I'll be sharing with people. Okay, yes. And thank you for sharing that story. Because that when I heard that, that was a very

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moving to me.

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Now, one of one of the focuses of this show, as well as sofa is community activism and development. And in your book, you talk about ethics and leadership. Can you share with us your take on leadership? And when it comes to community development? Oh, sure. Sure. That'd be there's so many each each different person that I interviewed has just a different take. One of them I love is one hand extended, makes a difference. The gal who told me this story was Judy Perry Martinez, her brother when she was growing up in New Orleans. There was a Down Syndrome child in the neighborhood. And so they got together and started doing things and it became like a summer project for the kids. Well, that summer project for a neighbor down in New Orleans has now become the ark. Ark foundation for Down syndrome. It's a bit one of the biggest organizations. So just from a little thing of helping a neighbor has grown through all these years. I mean, that was like 3040 years ago, but

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Now it's grown into a big national organization that helps children not just Down syndrome, it helps all kinds of children with special disabilities. Wow, wow. Now, you're you have that novel coming out. The the, we're kind of switching gears here because we're just talking about the nonfiction stuff. But you also have the fiction novel coming out which is going to it's a little bit different because it's different than what you've what you've done in the past. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. No, I'm so excited about my upcoming debut fiction novel. It's at Crosstown Park. It's a social legal thriller with the spiritual twist. It's my own little genre that I got to invent here. But it's about a young female lawyer, Alex Stockton, who teamed up with an elderly black preacher in the Fifth Ward. And together, they teamed up to save a foster home. And so Alex is on the governor shortlist to be appointed to the new Juvenile Court bench. Her lifelong dream of becoming a judge is about to take plates. And but somehow she meets this Reverend and decides to take on his case pro bono, and the case threatens to ruin her future plans to be a judge. So she kind of gets in over her head. And you kind of hate to do this to your characters, but you could

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do all kinds of

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lots of peril. And in the long run, she finds her need for deeper meaning. So it is a crossover Christian book. It's a it's a mainstream fiction, a courtroom drama that also has that has Christian flair to it. Wow. Wow. And it's local. It's here in Houston. Yes. It's all about Houston. Yeah. Excellent, excellent. And the people that email me, I will also send them the first chapter of the book and then notify them of my book signings, because I'll be having lots of fun parties this fall? Absolutely. Well, I'll have to read that. So I'm going to email you at Melanie at Melanie bragg.com. And you will share with us the first chapter of the book. It's me l a n IE, a lot of people spell Melanie differently. So it's me La Nia B ra GG. But I would just love to share also a wheel questionnaire with your audience so that people can help. It's for free. I'm not asking for anything. It's just, you know, something that will help them get their thing together. I am doing a summer special on advanced directives. So people do want to call me I can I can help them out and just make make their life easier. And they can contact you through your email as well. Well, Millie, thanks for visiting with us today. And for listeners, again, who'd like to find out more about Melanie, you can contact her at her website, www Melanie bragg.com, as well as her email Melanie at Melanie brad.com. Mel, Melanie, do you have any parting thoughts you'd like to leave the listeners with today? Well, I just want to thank you so much for having the show. I know that you provide an amazing service to our community and just with what you're doing all that you give, and I just really appreciate you for that. And I appreciate the opportunity to share some things that are very important that people need to know and understand. So thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. Oh, absolutely. I know. We're just limited by time because there were many other things that I wanted to talk to you about as well as HIPAA, which I don't think everybody's excited about. But I was and I'd love to have you back on the show to talk about some of the you actually wrote a book about HIPAA HIPAA for the general practitioner and kind of the HIPAA queen, a little bit. It's not as boring as it seems. And there's a lot of myths and misunderstandings about it. It actually codifies the law that has long been, you know, standard, you know, doctor patient confidentiality and stuff. So, there's a lot of interesting things about HIPAA that we can talk about. Excellent. Well, we'll definitely have to get get a another show on that one. And just before we wrap up here, I wanted to share just a couple of things with with the listeners really like to give you kind of a calendar of events that we have coming up sofa will be on at the Texas crime prevention Association's statewide conference in June the first week of June, I'm sorry, in July, the first week of July. You can find out about that on our website, www. Sofa usa.org. We also have our white paper 360 degrees of financial literacy. If you're interested in learning more about financial literacy, go to the our website and download that is free. And then just to give you kind of a sneak peek of next week's guests, we are going to have the local nonprofit group Family Service Center and on they are going to be on June 28 to talk about their car loan program. We will also have the amount on July 3 to talk about a financial coaching program that they have as well as August 16 to talk about the United Way Thrive initiative. Now the car loan program I knew about Family Service Center and I knew the good things that they were doing out there in the community, but I didn't know much

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about the car loan program and it's a really neat concept. So for people who are trying to get back on track who have credit issues, they they will help provide funds for a car loan, but it comes with strings attached. So you will have to go through their financial coaching program. They want you to prove that you are getting back on track. And you can hear all about that next week by joining us at the same time 10 o'clock on Friday and with that, we will go ahead and transition back into the BBC. Thank you for listening

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