Tara (00:56):
Thank you so much for tuning in to episode 28 of the Art of Estate Planning Podcast, all about how do I break into offering testamentary trusts.
(01:08):
So this session we just wanted to talk about if you've been thinking that you want to start offering testamentary trust, you're drinking our Kool-Aid and following along with us, but turning the theory into practical is getting you a bit intimidated or overwhelmed, then this session is for you. So Carrie, I feel like testamentary trusts are a funny one because unless you had the dumb luck of studying and working under somebody who was doing testamentary trust as part of their regular practise, it's a really hard area to self learn. There's not a lot of textbooks or courses or anything really out there on how to do it, and you almost have to cobble together what you see people doing different wills that you've seen, and then this random combination of succession law, trust, law, tax law, asset protection from bankruptcy and family law principles to kind of get a grasp of how they work. Do you think that's fair, Carrie?
Carrie (02:25):
I mean, I'm one of those dumb luck people, Tara. So I kind of knew when I was studying that I wanted to do succession law. There was only a couple of areas law I was even interested in. Succession was my first elective, and then I got into working to a succession law firm. So I'm the dumb luck person. But I do think there's some similar feelings that, because I came to law a bit later in life and I do think there can be some similarities with the feelings of nervousness about when you are young and you come out of your first uni degree and you launch into professional services, just have this fearlessness, everything will be fine, everything will be great. When you do that later on, you're changing career paths. You come out of another degree like I did, you have the fear. Holy smokes, I know nothing. I'm so not equipped to do this. So I understand where that fear comes from. You're an intelligent person, you're able to do all these things, but actually how you apply that in practise is very different. So yes, I had the dumb luck, but I'm hoping that there's a few people here that might've had a similar experience that we can apply that now to say it doesn't mean you still can't do that.
Tara (03:35):
No. Well, I'm on a personal mission to firstly help every Australian afford quality estate planning advice and testamentary trust play a big part of that. And then also, I can't service every Australian. So my personal mission is to empower estate planning lawyers around the country to feel confident delivering and preparing testamentary trust wills. And I also have to acknowledge my immense privilege because I did get to work in a law firm where testamentary trusts were a key part of our estate planning offering. I would say 90% of the wills that we did were testamentary trust wills. And I was a graduate lawyer at a law firm in Brisbane called McCullough Robertson, which it was the biggest law firm in Queensland and had a huge private client department compared to some of the other top tier firms who didn't do a lot of private client work.
(04:37):
We had two or three separate divisions of teams who did estate planning and each team had 10 plus people in it. So we are talking over 30 estate planning lawyers that I got to train under and be part of a team with. And so looking back, that is just the most immense privilege and crazy thing. And so what I sort of took for granted and my journey with this is I used to start sharing in my social media like use a testamentary trust. They're great. I don't understand why clients are choosing to do a basic will or lawyers are not recommending testamentary trust. And then the feedback I was getting is like, sounds great, but how do I do this? I worked in a firm that did a range of practise areas and most of our wills were not testamentary trust wills. So how do I feel confident breaking into it?
(05:36):
And I completely understand that because if I was to go off and do, look Carrie, to be frank, even a state administration or litigation, I have no idea. I have never practised in those areas because we had a whole other department who did a state administration and I was in the upfront planning team. So even for me to go off and do something like that, I'm like, I'm out of my depth. I don't feel confident. Yes, I can try and self-study, but how do I know what I'm not doing or not doing? I completely understand people's hesitation to not dive headfirst with total confidence into an area where they only have been on the periphery of.
Carrie (06:26):
Yeah, I think when we talk about the division between the areas of law, I think yes, you should really be finding something you're good at and sticking with it. But I do also know personally what it feels like to feel that you need to make a change for whatever reason. So I was practising for those that dunno, I was a children's dentist for about 11 years before I started practising in law and I really enjoyed it. I think I was good at it. I always got the good feedback, but I just knew that something needed to change. Now luckily, as I said, I could go into a law degree and then I have the dumb luck so to speak, of getting into a succession law firm. But I think that what we're saying is if you're sitting there and going, I want to do estate planning, that's okay to make a change if it's not been your specialty, we're here to help you. We understand. I mean, we think it's the best area of law there is. So we want you to come and join said, drink the Kool-Aid, Tara, join the Estate Planning Guild and offer your best services. So I think that there's a point at which yes, you should stick in your lane-ish a bit, but your lane can change.
Tara (07:33):
Absolutely. Totally. And I mean that's part of what we do at the Art of Estate planning, right? We package up resources and try to consolidate our knowledge, but also the knowledge of all of our members so that there's a shortcut and you don't have to learn the hard way because let's face it, with testamentary trusts, especially not estate planning generally, but with testamentary trusts, there's one textbook on the topic and textbooks get out of date pretty fast. And just by their nature they are really theoretical and a bit less practical compared to if you want to upskill on super or tax. We've got the master tax guide, the master super guide, all of the big Lexus Nexus and CCH, they all have really good research tools and databases on the rules and the cases in those areas of law. But if you are trying to find cases and theories around testamentary trust, it's so hard.
(08:43):
You've sort of got to maybe look at Jacob's Law of Trust and bring in some of the succession loose leaves and yeah, there's nothing like a single port call for you to reference until now. Drum roll. No. Well, but in on seriousness, what we did want to talk about to do this is that we've tried to fix that problem, which is we created what we are calling the testamentary trust, the Essential Guide for Australian Lawyers, which is an online course for Australian lawyers. And it's really meant to consolidate all of that information about testamentary trusts. So I actually can't believe it's 2025, and we're talking about this because the art of estate planning has been going for six years now, and I can't even understand why we haven't done this earlier, but we had to go on a journey to get here. And part of that journey was listening to feedback from our members.
(09:50):
We've got over 500 law firms around the country who use our testamentary trust precedents, and we've been hearing feedback from them like, this is great and this is the most practical way to start offering testamentary trust, but I still feel like there could be some knowledge gaps or I'm just not a hundred percent confident, or especially if you are upskilling from another area of law, it's just completely overwhelming to dive straight into using a precedent and thinking, I don't know why this is in here or what this clauses mean. So we decided we actually had to go back to first principles and create a foundations course on testamentary trust. So that's what we've been working on over the holidays, and I am absolutely thrilled to be able to let everyone know that it's available now to join. So what it is, it's an online course. It's self-paced.
(10:49):
We've got about 10 hours of videos that you watch in your own time. You get lifetime access, so you can keep coming back to it as long as you like. You can watch them all as quickly as you like or pace yourself and have one video a week or just cherry pick the topics that you want to watch. But it's really designed to set out your core foundation of principles like we start from the very beginning of what is a trust and trust me, pardon the pun, this is not your equity lecture from uni. We are applying it into the real world so that you actually understand what a trust is and how it works in the modern age. Then we are comparing, okay, how is a testamentary trust different to other types of trusts? You say testamentary trusts offer excellent asset protection and tax flexibility, but how exactly, what are the principles there?
(11:51):
What happens when a beneficiary of a trust has a bankruptcy procedure against them? What happens when a trustee has, what about the appointor? How about when a beneficiary or a trustee goes through a relationship breakdown? What happens from the family law perspective? I love talking about the tax flexibility of testamentary trust. So we break out how do these tax concessions work? Everyone's heard $20,000 tax-free income per minor, but how exactly does that work? Which sections of the legislation support that and how do you read that and apply it to a testamentary trust? There is no stone unturned in relation to the fundamental theory. We talk about how Saunders and Vaultier applies to the trusts or rather doesn't apply and why that helps minor beneficiaries from blowing through their inheritance and just the general philosophy of testamentary trust their long-term wealth accumulation vehicles. And historically people might've set them up for minors just to close them down once they turn 21 or 25, but how can they actually be used as an ongoing vehicle for a family's wealth to make that inheritance go much further?
(13:12):
So that's just one section and then we dive into all of the practical. When you are reading through the deed, where's the income distribution clause? How can you get the money out of the trust? How can you get capital out of the trust? What happens when the trust ends? What happens with foreign persons? What happens with superannuation in the trust? We just go through everything, the strategy on how many trusts, when do we set up a trust? Do we provide for a surviving spouse or not? Do we put all the beneficiaries into a single trust or do we set up a trust per beneficiary? And then what are the common planning strategies using testamentary trust for the typical client demographics that come across your desk?
(14:04):
Okay. How would it differ if you've got a couple with minor children versus an older couple with adult children? What are you going to do differently in your strategy? Which drafting options in the precedents do you use? We go into everything practical in this course. We also talk about marketing, how to sell value to clients, what happens when clients get overwhelmed by the document, how to explain it in a meeting. Everything. It's just anything. If you are ever feeling out of your depth with testamentary trust, this course is designed to give you comfort in a reference point.
Carrie (14:46):
I'll give you a bit of a breather there, Tara.
Tara (14:47):
Sorry, I'm obsessed with it as you can tell.
Carrie (14:49):
If you are listening and you are a law firm and you've got your own precedents and you're like, we love them and we're heavily invested, we don't want to buy new precedents. My understanding is, Tara, you can still use that training course as a general understanding. It is a separate purchase to the actual precedents. So you can kind of dip your toe in and do the training piece and then take that knowledge back to your existing precedents and you can stress test them and say, does this work in the context of what I now know and am I happy to keep using these or do I need to upgrade? So we're not telling people you have to do Tara's course and then you have to purchase the precedent. Yes, I think it's smart, but they are distinct things. You can learn a little bit and then purchase the precedent. I mean, one of our listeners I saw Tara has purchased the training course not for herself but for her team so that when a new staff member comes on, they've got someone new starting, they can get them listening to that and actually educate them so that when they go to actually use the precedents that they already have, the team member already has that background knowledge.
Tara (15:52):
Yeah, those are great points, Carrie. And actually one of the modules in the course is how to do a precedent audit on your testamentary trust wills. So obviously our art of estate planning testamentary trust wills comply with what I think is best practise. But yeah, I go through and say, these are the things that you really need in your precedent, and here's four easy ways to tell if your precedent is out of date or needs updating, or if you are looking at buying another provider's precedent, check that they have these things covered off or make that inquiry. So I mean, we try to have the complete solution here at the Art of Estate planning. Now we've got the course, which is the education. There's the optional purchase of the precedents. We've got our pricing toolkit, which tells you how to actually charge and communicate the value behind the precedents to support your pricing to clients.
(16:52):
And we have the TT Precedents Club membership where every week we'll hold your hand and answer any questions or give you feedback or draught clauses for you around testamentary trust. But you can be in all of those solutions or just one of them if you're just thinking, yeah, all these lawyers doing testamentary trust seem to have great lifestyles. They can go to all their children's events, they're always doing their mental health walks, and they're not stuck to deadlines that are out of their control. Maybe I want to get into testamentary trust. The course is a great way to go, okay, is this content for me? Is this an area that I enjoy studying? So you can just dip your toe in the water with it as well.
Carrie (17:43):
Yes. I think that the notion that it's only for a select group of people is what we're trying to dispel is that you don't have eat everything at the buffet that Tara offers, get the out of estate planning. You can pick one little piece and see if that's for you before you do go onto anything else.
Tara (17:59):
Yeah, look, honestly, I made it for our members using the precedents because we have the video FAQ library that comes with the precedence, which is great on isolated or discreet issues. It's like, oh, okay, so why do we include relationship breakdowns as a disqualification trigger for a trustee or a pointer being automatically removed? So if you are asking that question, you can go off and watch the video in the precedent FAQ portal. But if you're sort of going, I don't even really feel confident around trusts generally. Every time I heard it in my lecture or read those old books, I can't get out of how this 18th century England trust principles work in Australia in 2025. If you are sort of feeling like there's a disconnect there, then this course is meant to really solve that for you. Whereas the precedent FAQ doesn't go into that detail and it's all a bit like Higgledy Pty, and I'm sure you could watch all the videos and you'd have a really great base knowledge, but this is sort of like we're methodically starting with core principles, then we're applying that to how are you actually drafting these wills and guiding clients through strategy?
(19:22):
And if you need to customise the precedents, why are you customising them and how do you do that? So getting out of the textbook land into the really practical application.
Carrie (19:34):
And so Tara, I think if someone's listening and you kind of want to know what the journey would be through the art of estate planning, my thinking would be, and you correct me if I'm wrong, first step would be the essentials guide, and then there's a little sneak peek we can give you about what the precedents include and what the packages include. You can then go through that and then if you've done your basic training, you've got your precedents, but there's this client scenario or this specific drafting that would be then a TT Precedents Club hot seat question where we do support our users once a week in a sort of sit down group coaching format where you can bring your specific client questions or precedent questions, and then that way you've kind of got that long-term support. And then around that as well, there's a series of other different packages that Tara offers to support the other parts of your service offering.
(20:23):
So things like cost agreement precinct, if you sit down, you start doing estate planning and going, oh wow, there's all these issues I didn't know. That's where the cost agreement comes in. There's powers of attorney and succession for trusts and companies, so looking at the structuring elements, and then there's superannuation nominations and superannuation training as well. So I think that you go from your bare essentials and then if you want to get your main precedents, you can buy your main precedents. There's ongoing support through the T two precedents club, and then there's other additional package support systems depending on what you are actually giving to your clients.
Tara (20:58):
Yeah, we've really just tried to take care of all of the paperwork for you so that you can focus on client delivery and putting your own personal stamp on the way that you want to do estate planning without having to get bogged down in messing around with your precedents and thinking about all those issues. We have done all of that for you and centralised all the learnings from our 500 member strong user base as well.
(21:30):
I do just want to say, Carrie, I love how you've sort of stepped out that flow of how to get started. It would be remiss of me not to mention that our TT precedents club members actually get 20% off the essential guide to test symmetry trust course. So if you are going to join the TT precedents club or you've got your eye on doing it, join that first because then you'll get 20% off the course. You get 10% off the precedents. So lock in those savings and the one month membership fee. You will earn that back and more with the discounts on the other products. And also, I think to start coming, you don't have to be delivering or practising in the area to be in the club if you've just got questions, whether they're technical or practical, how are people doing their safe custody? How are people, I mean, we love talking about binding wheels and printing what printer everyone's using.
Carrie (22:34):
We are real rages of a nighttime in a weekend.
Tara (22:37):
All that stuff. We always talk about that as well. It doesn't just have to be the technical. So it's a really supportive environment, especially if you are feeling like you are getting out of your comfort zone a little bit. I guess this episode is really, we're sort of rambling, but I just wanted to say do it. Go for it. We have your back. We have all the resources for you. We'll be cheering you on. You deserve to be playing in this space. It's okay to retrain and re-skill and reinvent ourself. Estate planning is a very warm, supportive community. No one will say, you don't deserve to be here. And in fact, we'll probably rejoice because the more people who are here to reinvent the face of estate planning, the better because Australians need our service and they need us to be accessible and relatable more than ever.
(23:36):
Okay, so I also wanted to say if you have gotten to the point where you've done the course and done the training, you've got your precedents or maybe you've got the precedents and you've been sitting on them and not doing anything about them because you are feeling bold and courageous when you bought them, and then reality sunk in and you just aren't sure. And then so you go and do the essentials course. The next step is just to start, just do it. And my tip for that is just start playing around with the precedents. Do your own estate plan update. Probably your estate plan could do with an update or just do a dummy plan for yourself, and then maybe get your close family members to be Guinea pigs. Get your staff. They can all get, if you've got team members, they all get a bonus estate plan. Any friend...
Carrie (24:33):
The Oprah Winfrey of your office, you get an estate plan and you've get an estate plan.
Tara (24:38):
Exactly. If you've got some good friends who will be able to provide you with some forgiving feedback and constructive feedback on what made sense to them, what didn't make sense, which parts of the process could they have spent more time on, that type of thing. I think just start. And then you have to actually learn a lot of this by practise as well. But remember with the TT Precedents Club, we are going to be there available for you every week. So you can ask as many questions or get feedback. We'll check your clauses for you, all of it. So yeah, the resources are there for you to just start. If you really do want to break into testamentary trust, you can do it. Go for it. I actually do have one more thing. So I've been sort of talking to law firm owners or principals, but if you are a employee of a law firm and you are thinking, yeah, I really need this.
(25:40):
It's not clicking for me with testamentary trusts, and we sort of do them a bit, but I'm just not totally confident with what I'm doing. We have a template letter on the page about the course that has it all written out, explaining what the course is, the benefits, the price, how the CPD works, all of that that you can send to your boss, and it asks your boss to buy it on behalf of the firm so that they pay for it for you so that you can do it. So if that helps with just asking, making the ask, then that is there for you to download and use. But yeah, I guess we just wanted this to be the final piece of the puzzle for our members and our community to really go back to basics. There's just nothing out there like this that really sets out all the key foundational principles plus all the practical guidance that you need.
(26:38):
So yeah, we're really pleased to be able to deliver this. The feedback we're getting so far is amazing. And honestly, the first few emails I got with feedback, I just started crying. I was like, oh. So it's exactly why I made it, and I'm so glad it's resonating. So yeah, hopefully that this can help you too. And yeah, we love testamentary trials. We're going to keep talking about them and sharing all our knowledge about them on here. But the Essential Guide, it really is the place to go if you're serious about getting started with testamentary trusts.
