Welcome to another episode of the balanced growth Show. I'm your host, Dr Travis Parry, today we have Mr. Michael Zwick. Michael as an attorney turned private investigator who specializes in finding missing heirs and inheritance assets. He's the co founder of assets International, which has united airs worldwide with over $200 million Michael, welcome to the show, my friend.

Thank you. Travis, great to be here.

Yes. How did you get into this business? Like catch us up. Tell us your story. Why were you fascinated in finding missing assets that you know your clients had? Yeah, catch us up on all this.

So very briefly I will. I'll try make as brief as possible. I was practicing law. I started a big firm, fortunately got laid off, started my own practice, and I was a one man operation for a few years, and a friend and I started a little side business, uniting people with money coming to them from government treasuries. He'd experienced, but his wife had been a nurse, and one of her patients had left her some money, but it was she wasn't able to, you know, she hadn't kept in touch with the guys, so it took a few years for the attorney to track her down. That guy was like, Hey, this guy be common situation. So we started a little side business, and that side business grew to the point that made a full time thing, and I closed my law practice and doing what I do

Travis Parry 1:26
now, wow. Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention, right? As they say. So, it sounds like you really took a took a hold of those reins and ran with it. Well, that's fantastic. Tell us, you know, what is this common? Is this a problem that, obviously, you see, but is this common for people to just, hey, I misplaced my inheritance? Like, talk to us about this. Like, why? Why is this such an issue? How did this even come about that your client had this problem?

Speaker 1 1:59
So in the case of my my partner and his wife, you know, she been a nurse, and she was a home health care agency. She worked the report and the she had a patient that took a liking to her and said he wanted to leave her, give her a gift. And she said, Well, you know, I'm not allowed to accept gifts. That's part of the policy. And he said, Okay, fine. And unbeknownst to her, he put her into his will, and meanwhile, that, you know, they had married and moved to another state. So, so when he passed away, it took a while for the attorney to find her, but you know, there's, there's money sitting out there all over the place. So, you know, we get calls from attorneys, from probate attorneys and trust administrators who cause say they're handling a state and they can't find the errors. Or sometimes they don't even know who the errors are. They'll call us and say, you know, I the core point to me to handle this estate. I don't know. You know who the person was I, you know, I didn't, certainly didn't know his or her family. So can you find them for me?

Wow, wow. So, I mean, this is like Magnum PI estate planning edition is, you know that, what's the visualization going on in my head? But so this must happen enough that, you know, attorneys are, you know, they're worried about this or calling you what happens on the other side? What happens if they don't find these people. What happens to this money? Does it sit in a in a holding trust at this does the state keep it in their you know, jurisdiction? Tell me what happens if they don't connect.

So the law varies from state to state. In some states, the there's just a turnover to the state, what's called unclaimed property division, which something we also deal with, which are assets that are sitting there for a certain period of time, whether it's a bank account or stock or insurance policy or something like that, and it gets turned over to the state, including this type of money, but all all other assets, all told, the states are sitting on about $100 billion of unclaimed property and then in other states, the money goes to the county to hold. In some states, the the the executors are supposed to hold on to it, but there's no public reporting, so there's no real transparency as what happens to it. So it really, really varies from state to state. And some states, if a certain period of time passes and the missing errors don't show up, then the money can be distributed to the errors who are known.

Gotcha, gotcha. So there's a holding and obviously $100 billion that that's kind of average per state. No,

that's to the total. So there's Okay, is this pretty strong correlation between the population of state and how much ongoing properties so not surprisingly, New York, California, Texas, Florida are at the kind of top list, and the bottom list are places like Wyoming and Montana, Mississippi.

And, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. Okay, that makes more sense. But then they're sitting on. That money, and they're accruing the interest, and, wow, there's all sorts of issues there. I can see, I've never even thought about this, you know, I I've seen in and I've used, you know, website to find unclaimed property before, but it's been something like a rebate, or, you know, whatever kind of small, small things that I'm sure other people have experienced. But this is, this is quite, quite crazy that others may have. You know, 10s of 1000s, millions of dollars out there that are unclaimed. So is, tell us a little bit about your process. Then, like, what do you do to, let's say, an attorney calls you and says, Alright, Michael, this is where we're at. How do you go about trying to locate these individuals? What's your framework for trying to solve this problem?

Ancient Chinese secret, no, yeah. So there is no one path for finding missing errors. It's definitely a combination of art and science and luck. Every case can be different, because we, you know, it's the starting point of, you know, where the errors, who the errors are, where they might be part of it depends on, are we looking for a specific error can't be found, or are we, are we having to flesh out a whole family tree on someone whose whole family is unknown? So in the case where it's unknown, like I'll give you an example, we got a call. We recently settled the case with a for a woman who was living in Philadelphia and didn't have a will, both of her daughters pre deceased. Her by after. By the time they died, she was already incapacitated, and she couldn't do well. The court appointed attorney to be her conservator and then the executor of her estate when she passed away. And this attorney called us, listen, I don't know anything about her. You know, she didn't, she said she didn't really family. I don't know who the heirs like. Can you find them. So we were there. We were starting from just scratch. So we started by getting her we needed to find out, like, who her parents were, so we could then branch out to find out who her aunts and uncles were, and then find out who her cousins were. So you know, we started by getting, for example, her death certificate and her birth certificate, because that had information, for example, like her parents names and and stuff like that. And then from there we there was more of a genealogy search that we had to do. But we've had other cases. We have one out of New Orleans where one man died, and his again, did not have a will, and his widow knew that. I'm not sure when she found out whether, before, after he died, but knew that he had a child from previous relationships some 40 years ago, but had no idea what the mother, the mother, that child's name was, nor the child's name. So there we are really sorry. So we were able to find his divorce records in New Orleans, and then from there, we were able to identify his ex, first ex wife, and then from there, we were able to dig in some databases that we utilize, and we're able to find the name and I and whereabouts of her, of the daughter who is getting half the estate.

Yeah, see, it's kind of all of the above. Do you ever use, like DNA records, or you have access to any of that? Have you? Have you had cases where that's been helpful, that

doesn't, I mean, I could see where eventually that would become a case where we would need to check that sometimes we are asked just to do the due diligence to determine who the heirs are, or to verify who heirs are. And we could see that coming the case. Usually, if someone presents themselves as an heir, like an uncle or a cousin or whatever, there should be documents that kind of will have a bouncing ball that will lead from that person to the deceased who's a state it is, birth certificates, death certificates, stuff like that. But we could easily see DNA coming into play, especially if someone claims that they're the child of the deceased. And DNA could definitely play a role. We have not encountered that situation where I could definitely see that coming

someday. Yeah, it's shank. I kind of into family history of family history nerd, and go to conferences and things and DNA has been just blowing up, but for different reasons, obviously, but kind of similar outcome of finding people right, obviously, dead people versus live people is a different story. But this is quite fascinating. You know, I know we could probably geek out of, like, the some, some really specific details on how this might all work. But I want to ask one question. Then I kind of want to pivot to kind of business in general for you. Like, how you know why this is so important for you, and what what success you've been having, but talk to us a little bit about what can be done to prevent. And even having to use, you know, a service like yours,

great question, I guess I actually do a seminar webinar on what five steps to avoid having to call me, and one of them is to be very, you know, specific in your you know, first, will have a will have an estate plan, which everybody should have in any case, but also the estate plan should identify who, you know, who are, who is the who are the beneficiaries of the estate. And if there's any chance of there being some vagueness, recommend being very specific about who people are. We once had a case where someone left $20,000 and just said to my former foster son, and has had his name, and this foster son had a relatively common name, we were able to we kind of just there, I think there are four people in the county that have that same name, and basically just kind of narrowed down. We went to the first one who, by his age, was probably the right guy, and then we went to him, and he he when we said, Were you with foster son of this person? He said, Yeah. So then we were, but then we had to dig up all these records to prove now, had he said, you know, to John Smith, my foster son whose date of birth is this or who lived at this address, things would have been a whole lot easier. So you know, having giving that specificity can really help. We also do, I should have mentioned earlier. We also do a lot of asset searches where the heirs are known but the assets are not. So I, excuse me, I'm a big proponent of having an asset inventory where you know, you list the assets that you have. It doesn't have to be the values, but someone who's going to be taking over your affairs after you, you know, leave this world should have that, that inventory of what the assets are. You know, if you have a brokerage account doesn't, you don't need to list the amount, or even the account number, just where, what institutions have your assets, so this way your, you know, your loved ones can find them later on. And they're not, you know, not struggling. It's, you know, frankly, when someone dies, the air is already have enough on their plate, emotionally and otherwise, and last thing they want to do is they're searching all over the place to find to find assets.

Yeah, great point. I mean, it works both ways, right? If you're searching for assets or searching for errors, just make it easier. You know, big proponent on, you know, just planning, planning in general, making sure that you have a will and a trust. You know, I've told this story on the podcast before and in my books, but my father passed away at 49 very, very unexpected death, and there was no will. There was no trust set up. There were no instructions. Actually, I didn't know how to get into his computer. My mom had a

subside guy, that's what step side dolls. Yeah, yeah. I mean,

there's just but this was 20 years ago, 20 years ago, like now we have password savers and, you know, different things that can can be helpful. But now we have, like, 234, step, you know, verification processes is crazy, but then I spent, you know, just a good part of a couple weeks with my mom after dad died, just trying to get into the assets they were there, but I couldn't even touch them, and she couldn't get it. Was crazy. So yeah, so many of us are ill prepared for what we're not expecting the unexpected, right? We don't want to talk about we only talk about the cool things that are going to happen in life, and nobody wants to talk about this. But yet, really well planned out scenarios can really avoid a lot of this. So you were talking obviously, great, great planning, you know, you mentioned this next step of just really identifying who they are, these these heirs are, and and who or what assets, you know, where these assets are located, that sort of thing. What's next? What's next? What's next on this webinar that you would normally be given would be the next step?

Well, we see you touched on on this, which is also make sure people can access your records, your email, your get into your computer, get your emails, because nowadays a lot of people are getting a lot of their account statements online, or, you know, via email. So this way people can see those and, you know, get into your accounts, and, you know, notify whoever that what subscriptions need to be canceled, or delivery services need to be canceled. You know, to take over things like, you know, just to take over things so that they don't that the people on the other side of the transaction are not just sending emails that are going on the answer enough to certain point they'll just close the account or whatever, and then that can be a problem in itself.

Yeah. So true, very, very, very true. We all have nowadays. Everything's on. A subscription basis, right? We subscribe to just about everything. So that could absolutely be a problem. What other things would you suggest, like people do that to make sure that they don't have to call you,

those are kind of big ones, like just making sure that that your loved ones have the information about your assets, about how to get into your information about who you want to inherit. I You have to be specific about in the will, what you know, what assets you have, if you actually, I read a lot of wills in my work, and a lot of them don't have mentioned any assets whatsoever. But they, you know, they will say to, you know, they'll list the people that's the important thing, and they'll say the pillar versus getting percentage. I would say, though, that if you have, you know, if you want to avoid fights when it comes to tangible items that have a sentimental value, whether they have any sort of financial value, is either, you know, be very clear in your documents, who's getting what, because that's where things can get nasty in between. You know, people who sensibly love each other and they're fighting over sometimes the stupidest things, because there, there are items that cannot be divided a A, for example, you know, grandma's engagement ring cannot be split up. I mean, it could be, but then it's not the same. Grandma's engagement can't be split up. And then, so who's going to get it? You better be sure to be clearing your documents, and don't just leave it up to they'll figure it out. That's a terrible approach. You know, there it's definitely the old adage of, you know, failing to plan is planning to fail. Not having an estate plan is planning to fail in terms of, I mean, yes, families, some families get along great, and everything goes fine, but, and, and every but everybody thinks their family is going to get along, and some don't. So, you know, just, you know, and obviously I would also say, have that conversation, though, don't just put in the will and leave it for everyone to learn about after, after the fact. You know, it's best to sit down and say, hey, you know I'm doing my I've done my estate plan. And here's what I think is fair. So this way, everyone's hearing it from you, and if they want to complain about it, they complain about to you, and they can get it out in the open. And this way every you know it's all out there, and you know nothing's left unsaid,

yeah, well, well said. I think the family side of all of this is where all the complicated feelings and things happen, you know, you know, there's horror stories to tell. Every family has a horror story. I just think that we all can relate in some way, form or fashion, even if there's not much to divvy up, there are things that, you know, we're, we're asked for, probably in families like, hey, hey, Mom or Dad, if you pass, you know, I'd like this, or grandma and grandpa, this would be really special and and that never end up, you know, with that person, because they don't have the conversation. They don't sit down and talk about it. Or, you know, I know this happens a lot of families Alzheimer's, right? And now, how do you, how do you talk to that person? My grandfather dealt with Alzheimer's for almost five years before passing. And you know what? The memory is gone, right? At least the short term. The long term is solid, usually, but it's like, you know, they're constantly reintroducing themselves and didn't know that you were there, type of thing as it gets progressively worse, I know a lot of families are dealing with that, so I am definitely on the family side, and I love you talking about the communication. You know, as you've you've read, as you said, lots and lots of wills. Maybe dive into that for just a moment. What does a really great will look like? And if we can just start there, let's just start with a will. How could a will be well crafted? You're an attorney, obviously you're not giving blanket statement advice to everyone out there. But in general, what should a good will look like?

Well, I should preface by saying, Don't do it yourself. I know there is the temptation to you make a will with using chatgpt, which is a great service, or one of these, you know, state plan in a box type of thing. I hate those. I've seen too many stories of people where the person decided to save some money by doing it, doing it himself or herself. And yeah, there's savings on the front end, but it can often lead to a lot of issues on the back end, whether it's, you know, there are ambiguities. They have hire an attorney to clear them up. You have, you might. Might not clear. Be clear about things with who the heirs are, then they fight. There could be tax implications if there's enough money on the table. So it's definitely worth spending the little extra money to have an attorney do it right. I think the just the key to a good estate plan is that it's clear. It is clear that of what, who is getting what? Yeah, I was explaining to a friend of mine recently who asked me, who you know she's, she's a successful business. Her husband's a professional. They have, they have, you know, kids ranging in age from toddler to, you know, late teens. And I said legal documents should are things that you you do, but you know you don't want to look at them, but you have to make sure that they're that they're done right, and they're supposed to envision the ways worst case scenario of what happens in the worst case scenario, including fighting. You want to head those things off, and you you just want to just be clear about what happens and who gets what. And there's it can be a simple will, you know, I've seen some, you know, one or two page wills that cover all the bases very easily. And then other wills that go again, very, very specific. So, like I said, going back to if you have a lot of tangible items that are of sentimental value. And, you know, people really want those, a good will will really address those on a granular level. So it's really, it's all about, it's about having clarity.


I love that. Where would you suggest people get started? I mean, how did they find a good estate planning attorney. I know a lot of attorneys can draft a will, but just like you said, I mean, you can get templates, you can get chat GPT, you know, and basically, you know, a general attorney could probably draft a will, but that's that's not someone who has a specialty who really knows what they're doing. What would you what would you suggest you've been in this business for a long time. How would they go about finding the right person to draft will or trust and help them with their estate planning? Well,

the day and age of general practitioners is over. It's, it's, there are very few left there. They there are a few, I'm sure, in the smaller towns where they're one of the few attorneys left in town that do it, but I think every I can't think of any attorneys I know they're general practitioners. They usually have one or two specialties. So you definitely want someone who specializes in that field, in that area of law nowadays, fortunately, with with Zoom and remote signing and, you know, notaries that can come meet you wherever you are. You don't necessarily have to have someone in your hometown. Someone's their license in your state should be good. You know, if you have a professional that can refer someone that they already know whether you're you know most accountants know state state plumbing attorneys because they happen to be off enough to work hand in hand on stuff or financial advisors all know probated estate planning attorneys ask a professional who knows? Who knows? And they all do. I happen to know, and a lot of them across the country, so people can feel free to reach out to me, and I can make referral if they want, and but definitely go with someone who likes it, specializes in that and comes with referrals from people who have first time experience with that attorney.

Wonderful. Appreciate your advice. Today. It's been a fantastic conversation. You know, I've been in the financial planning industry for years and years and years, and never have I ever crossed someone who has such a specialty as you. But you know, if they didn't do great planning, meaning the ones who had the assets, they don't know the heirs or and you're missing where the assets are located, or any of these things, they didn't have a great will, and there's all sorts of family problems involved in this, and they need to reach out to you. Obviously, you know, you get a lot of referrals from estate planning attorneys, as you mentioned, but if somebody wants to reach out to you directly and ask you for services, what's the best place they can reach you at? Is it emails? It phone? Is it website you want? You let us know how

best to reach me. Sorry, best I reach me. I'd say email, which is m Zwick at assets international.com so it's my first initial last name at company name.com or I'm very active on LinkedIn, and I must have been the first Michaels wick to get on there many years ago, because my, I believe linkedin.com/michaels, wick, I'm easy I'm easy to find. I'm pretty active there. It's I'm usually posting at least once a week, sometimes five days a week. It's just depends. I'm pretty active on there, so I mean easy to find, and I'm. Regularly checking my my inbox on there as well.

Awesome. Thanks for being here. If there's anything else you'd like to drop to listeners today, it would be helpful to them, to other individuals in the financial planning industry. What would be that one piece of advice?

Just be prepared. You know, prepare yourself, because, you know, an estate plan is an act of love. It is. It's something that you're leaving behind for your loved ones after you leave this world. And you know you don't want to leave, you know you don't want to leave them a lump of coal, leave them, leave them a good plan, do the right thing for them, and and you don't want to curse you after you, after you're gone.

That's right. I love that. Yes, be prepared. It's it's interesting because I, again, I spent years and years as a financial advisor, and saw so many families struggle, fight, miscommunicate about money. And this is a big one. This is a big one. I see it at all levels. It doesn't matter the amount of money one makes or not. There's always some type of stress, and it's well, actually one of the reasons why I wrote my book, marry and Grow Rich. If you haven't picked up a copy of this, you can get it at marrying Grow Rich book.com. Again, if you want to hit up Michael, please reach out to him. It sounds like he's a treasure trove of knowledge around this context, and definitely be prepared and be ready for, for, for the transition. In fact, we're in the generation right the greatest asset transfer in history is happening right before our eyes. So Michael, it's pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you again for being here. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me absolutely and again. Remember live life on purpose together until next time. We'll see you then you.

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