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Listen to: Assortment of topics

This week on Hull on Estates and Succession planning, Ian discusses an assortment of topics.

Topics include:

• The High Road by Terry Fallis
• 2010 Canadian (International) Conference Of Elder Law
•  The Articulate Advocate by Brian K. Johnson and Marsha Hunter
• The use of personal and life coaching to manage work and life balance

If you have any comments, send us an email at hullandhull@gmail.com or leave a comment on our blog.

Ian M. Hull – Click here for more information on Ian Hull.

Assortment of Topics – Hull on Estate and Succession Planning #216

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Hull & Hull LLP

Welcome to Hull on Estate and Succession Planning, a series of podcasts hosted by Ian Hull and Suzana Popovic-Montag.  The podcast you’re listening to will provide information and insights into estate planning in Canada.  From the offices of Hull & Hull in Toronto, here are Ian and Suzana.

Ian Hull: Hi and welcome to Hull on Estates and Succession Planning.  Well welcome back to our semi regular podcasts.  We’ve missed a couple of sessions because of life’s running around, but we’re back, I’m back any way on a solo basis.  Suzana is still involved in a lengthy trial.

So what I wanted to talk about was what I what call a potpourri of issues and recap a little bit about what’s been going on recently.  One of the most exciting things that’s going on is that our great friend and fellow podcaster and blogger Terry Fallis has his book on Canada Reads, the CBC Canada Reads competition and is in the top ten of the Canada Reads competition for the CBC and that his new book “The High Road” which is a great book and it’s on… actually it’s available on the web.  It’s available on Amazon and all of those other sources.  But we’re really excited for Terry.  The book is a tremendous follow-up from his first book, and it’s called “The High Road” by Terry Fallis.  So we’re excited about that.

The second thing is I’ve just come back last week from … too far back.  I went to speak with Kim Whaley of  Whaley Estate Litigation at the World Conference or the World Study Group for the Canadian Conference on Elder Law.  And it was a fascinating seminar session three day conference, was at the first day, the Thursday, and enjoyed speaking at that conference about recent developments in Power of Attorney litigation.  The conference was on for three days.  I went to the famous “Red Shoe Dinner” or not dinner, reception that Laura Watts, the organizer, who did a phenomenal job.  The organizer of the conference, Laura Watts put on the first opening reception and then we had a great time at the final closing dinner with some excellent speakers. 

But the conference itself was, as I say, it was fantastic in many levels.  One of the speakers that we were treated to was Professor Doug Surtees and Doug Surtees is … and I’ll spell that S-u-r-t-e-e-s in case I’m mispronouncing his name, but he was with the College of Law at University of Saskatchewan.  And he gave us some really empirical data reference points as to what is going on in the growing area of elder law and the growing needs that are coming out of it. 

One of the sources of the data is a study that he’s been in charge of and effectively been pulling together in terms of his research.  But I did my own research just to see what the current state of affairs with the transfer of wealth and how we’re dealing with our aging population is.  Just some interesting stats we’re about… there’s an article called  “Inheriting Money is Stressful, but These Steps can Help” and it came in the Investor…Globe Investor, Tuesday, October 5^th 2010 in the Toronto Globe and Mail.  And it was an article about how families and how investors should deal with inheriting wealth and what they should or shouldn’t do when the wealth comes in.  The author speaks about the recommendations that the experts are talking about, is easy things like, obviously pay off all your debts.  Any debts you‘ve got, use your inherited wealth to get rid of your debt load and then move on to the investment step.  The article itself was, you know, I guess helpful and a bit anecdotal.  But some of the statistics in this article were very interesting.  The Globe article estimates that the estimated value of Canadian inheritances in 2010 will be about 70 billion dollars.  So he says over the five year period, ten year period we’re at about 550 billion dollars over the last ten year period with regard to inherited wealth.  And where we’re going the projection is about 4.3 trillion dollars will be held by asset managers by 2014 with the number of Canadian baby boomers born between 1946 – 1964 right now at about 9.4 million dollars…I’m sorry, 9.4 million people. 

So you can see with our aging population, we’re going to have about 1/5^th of Canadians by 2021 that are going to be over the age of 65.  And what has that done?  Well that has spawned obviously all sorts of efforts in the financial community to assess and address the new aging population. But this world study group program was phenomenal.  And, as I say, we spoke, myself and Kim Whaley co-presented … financial abuse and neglect in the Power of Attorney and we talked about some of the recent case law developments.  And there were really tremendous seminars.  There was another seminar in the afternoon of the first day.  It was called “Moving towards an International Lens of Elder Rights Issues.  And Dr. Jane Barrett, the Secretary General of the International Federation of Aging and Laura Watts talked about where we are going and what kind of projections that they had in their mind in terms of elder law and elder issues themselves.  So from that standpoint, any way, we we’re very lucky to hear some of the great speakers and again Laura Watts puts on a tremendous annual conference.   I’m told that this year it was in Toronto.  I’m told that next year it’s going to be back in Vancouver.

In any event, the last…. and keeping on with my potpourri, I want to talk about as well today is the book, an interesting book that was brought to my attention and it’s called “The Articulate Advocate”.  And for those of us who podcast and present and watch and read about these issues all the time and that is, how do we better perform in that sense or how do we better present better word for it.  Brian Johnson and Marsha Hunters’ book called “The Articulate Advocate” was a book that was recommended to me and I’ve taken a look through it and read through most of the book by now actually. But it is…what was really interesting was the way that they talk about how to present and the sort of techniques to consider.  The part one aspect of the book was fascinating to me and it wasn’t about just articulating and trying to engage your audience the whole first part. . third of the book talks about the body and how we are to control our body.  And we all have in our swaying or our hand movements and so on and there’s a whole section on understanding adrenalin and how our body reacts to adrenalin and how we can deal with it in presentations. 

So any way I thought that was a really interesting book and one that I highly recommend in terms of where and when we are presenting our…whatever pitch we’re making, whether it’s on a podcast or it’s in the context of our own day-to-day business of presenting our pitches at the office or in schools and so forth.  So I highly recommend that, “The Articulate Advocate”.

Coming back then to some of the other...dealing with my potpourri issues coming back to that is we…I was lucky enough to do some personal coaching and some coaching within our firm and why I say that is that Joanna Mackie of Rhythms of Change is the company that’s been helping us with that personal life coaching to our firm and our team.  And it’s all about how to manage both your life and work balance and some of the coaching you can take from that in a business environment.  And one of the interesting things that came out of that is we’ve all learned to manage and develop better feedback models within our own firms and so on.  But it’s also being picked up on the main stream and again in the report on business …the actual section, the Report on Business in the Globe and Mail on October 13, 2010 had a really interesting article talking about the use of mentors and life coaches when hiring and firing and when managing your firm.  So again, I just sort of…that was something that we’ve been really focusing on in our firm.  We’re always trying to, sort of, innovate and decide what aspects of our firm we can enhance and to make stronger and one of them is using life coaches.  And professional coaching is well talked about in lots of sources but just an interesting article came out in the recent Globe and Mail article on Wednesday, October 13, 2010.

Any way that wraps up my potpourri of discussion points and I really appreciate you joining us today and we’ll look forward to hopefully our next podcast with Suzana as well.  Thanks very much.

You have been listening to Hull on Estate and Succession Planning by Ian

Hull and Suzana Popovic-Montag.  The podcast that you have been listening

to has been provided as an information service.  It is a summary of current

issues in estates and estate planning.  It is not legal advice and you are reminded to always speak with a legal professional regarding your specific circumstance.

To listen to other Hull & Hull podcasts, or leave any questions or comments, please visit our website at hullestatemediation.com.