The Conversations We Avoid: Why Planning Ahead Is the Greatest Gift with Lynn Lambrecht — Full Episode Transcript

I don't want people to live in regret. At the end of the day, people don't have these conversations openly — and I think it's changing a little bit. COVID might have helped change some of it, because the younger generation has actually seen the ramifications. But there's a lot of detail in life, and it's a pain in the butt.

When caregiving feels overwhelming and the system feels impossible to navigate, this is your guide. Here you'll learn ways to navigate long-term care planning, find real support for caregiving, and prepare you for the road ahead. I'm your host, Lindsay Friedman, and now you're not in this alone. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Care Compass. I am here with Lynn Lambrecht, who — I will tell everybody listening — is like one of my favorite people ever. I haven't known her long, but she rose the ranks very quickly because she is amazing. So I'm very excited for everyone to be able to meet her. Welcome, Lynn.

Thank you very much. And I think the reason I rose to the ranks so fast is that I know where Chagrin Falls is.

It is amazing that you knew where Chagrin Falls is — you were so shocked! So you guys are getting our personalities right here. This is gonna be amazing, and we're gonna struggle to keep it within our time. And I haven't even told everyone that you're from The Living Planner. So let's actually get to questions, because you have so much to share. My first question is actually a series of three: who are you, what do you do, and why do you do it?

Who I am is Lynn Lambrecht — a very youthful spirit and a chronologically advancing self, now in Southern California. I have lived in 17 places in 35 years around the world because I was in aviation; I was able to see and work on six continents, and it's been amazing.

What do I do? I work with all of you on contingency planning. I like to look at the what-ifs — one of those wonderful topics people would much prefer to ignore or put off. What I have found makes it so much nicer is knowing I've identified helpers — who are those people I can count on to help me in certain situations? Also, unfortunately, because of the world we live in, we need to have protections in place. We have to make sure information is shared, and we sometimes have to take a whole bunch of actions because there's this thing called life — an administrative side that we are not taught as kids.

It would be a whole lot better in this crazy world of ours if we started looking at life's administrative tasks from a very young age, so they wouldn't catch us off guard. We get to live fully every day, but there's a whole bunch of gunk — and we tend to find out about the gunk when we are sick, or when someone isn't with us anymore, or when there's a natural disaster.

So I'm your contingency person — a proactive cheerleader who wants you to feel comfortable and confident asking questions. Honestly, a lot of the professionals I love and adore, who we need to make sure things are buttoned up, talk in their own language — and I'm just a layperson interpreter, threading that needle very holistically across life.

Why do I do it? Many reasons. I have a servant's heart, and I'm incredibly calm in really lousy situations. I tested that mettle during my aviation years — I volunteered for incident response and was called into duty twice in my twenties with Northwest, and once at United. I saw the after-effects when people hadn't thought things through, shared information, or had things organized — and it broke my heart, because those were the times they deserved to grieve the most.

So I became an absolute pain in the butt with my parents, my older siblings, my friends — and then as I moved around getting promoted, I did it with my staff and my offices. It's become a natural part of who I am: okay, hold on — things went awry. I have what I need. Where are the gaps? Yes, you can go to an attorney, have a financial planner, have insurance — and all the rest. But it's the why that matters, and the information that helps you truly understand, so you can feel confident asking questions of the people who are there to serve you.

It comes from all my little patchwork-quilt pieces of life — my parents when they were each declining in health, friends who had the same thing. It just became natural.

That's great. And what's so hard is we can get an attorney, we can get a financial planner, and they're each going to take little nibbles out of what has to happen. How do you bring it all together? This is a really hard way of doing it because people don't like to talk about it. But our life is going to come to an end — and it could have a pause where we're not fully functioning.

That pause was the reason I did all of my legal documents in my twenties. I'm still flying solo — I haven't been married yet — and I thought, who in the world would understand my craziness of life unless I create a roadmap for them?

And it doesn't even matter, solo or not. Because of you, I've had some of these conversations with my husband — listen, buddy, if something happens to me, you're not gonna know how to find the TV account!

No — because we play to our strengths. That's very natural in partnerships, marriages, business, the whole bit. Then on the business side there's the delegation piece: who do I trust? If you're paying bills and looking at sensitive data, you have to be really careful. So I love combining my business head with my big fluffy heart to have these crazy discussions.

My parents would be laughing — they'd be saying, 'She was a pain in the butt. Talk about Chinese water torture,' because I kept at them from different sides asking different questions. Part of it is I'm curious, and I had skin in that game — big skin. But the other side is we run from it as a society.

I laugh now living in Southern California — it's 'surf's up, baby, I'm gonna go live it.' I grew up in the Midwest, so we understood some years the crops weren't going to make it — rain, drought, natural things that take away certainty. We've actually grown up in uncertainty, but we try to create certainty, and I get that. It's so much nicer to know you truly do understand a little bit of what needs to be done — and to have the people there to help you when it's needed.

Absolutely. And these decisions are hard to talk about. It is not fun talking about what it's going to be like when I'm incapacitated. What do you want for your end-of-life memorial? What do you want done with your sweatshirts you don't want anymore? They're hard conversations, and I understand that. But I always tell families — and I know you do too — if you don't wrap up your own life, the life that you lived, the moments that you had, even if it's just being incapacitated for a period of time and not being able to make decisions — if you don't make those decisions for yourself and put a nice little bow on it, you're leaving a big ugly dumpster fire for somebody.

You're also leaving people with emotional guilt — they don't know if they've done the right thing. With my parents, who preferred not to discuss any of this, I said, 'You guys, I love you and I want to make sure everything is as it was, because I don't want you coming back from the other side giving me grief. I really want to make sure I'm honoring you the best I can.'

Some of that came from attending so many memorials after incidents, when people didn't know — there was such sadness and emotional regret. I don't want people to live in regret. People probably aren't ready for the likes of me saying, 'Okay, I'm donating my body here, this is what I'm doing with this' — my mother was like, 'Okay, okay.'

We don't have these conversations openly. I think it's changing a little — COVID might have helped, because the younger generation has seen the ramifications. But there's a lot of detail, and it's a pain in the butt. I'm one who likes to grumble infrequently, so I wait until I'm doing my taxes — I put on divisional football games, go through everything, and ask: what's changed? It's just now a process. We don't like our taxes, so how about we do this at the same time?

That's actually a really good point. Death and taxes — I promise you, this is not going to be a wasted plan. It will happen at some point to everyone. Maybe that's what it is — the chasing of immortality. Superstition: if I speak it, it will happen.

Two of my dear, dear friends — one of them said, 'Stop. If anything happens after this, I will blame you.' I started laughing and said, honey, I'm powerful, but I'm not that powerful. All I can say is every time I thought it was going to rain and I brought an umbrella, it never rained. Any time I'm like, 'I'll probably be good today,' it rains. That tends to be how it is.

So drop your superstition — and if you don't have a plan, then it's coming for you.

We're going to go with that! So if somebody does start to want a plan — they're like, okay, these crazy ladies are right, I'm going to die one day — and they come to you, what's step one? What should they be prepared for, and what's the number one thing?

People really want to know: can I do this in a day? And I sit back and go, wow — no. Can you condense that many years into a day? Probably not, because you're going to need some outside people.

First, what I love to do is start with a well-being checkup — a series of questions, like the twenty questions of all the things you don't want to talk about. We just have a good conversation, I record everything, and I look at gaps. I say, okay, we've got some areas to pay attention to, we put that together and send it over, and then we have a follow-up call — because they just felt like they drank from a fire hose. Then we say, okay, what are the top five things — or top two, or top one — you'd like to do? Are you going to do this on your own, or do you want a little help?

Come with an open mind to explore what's in your life now. The state where you live has different protocols and different laws. If you've been married before and it's a blended family, that's different than flying solo, or married with young kids, or kids over eighteen. What are your family dynamics? We look at the unit that you are and peel back the onion on life. I really do try to be gentle and make this fun, even though people prefer not to.

We try to make it fun — creating the awareness is step one, because we don't understand until we're in that space where something has happened. I remember my sister saying, 'Oh my God, I have no idea what medications mom and dad take.' And I have them all. I have copies of their insurance cards — because little miss organization here was the Chinese water torture, drip, drip, dripping on my parents. I collected the data.

In many ways, much of what we do is truly data — and it's on autopilot. It's the extraction that matters: having a moment to slow down and pause, take a look at the things you do every day, and put it in such a way that we can talk about it and make it easier for somebody else.

And that point right there is what makes you so different from all the other planners. When you go to your attorney to get your documents, or your financial planner to make sure everything is in place, they're not saying, 'Hey, what do you do all day long that somebody needs to know about — in your house, with your kids' school, in your office, the charity work you do, the community involvement, the people who count on you?' Our reach in this world is a little beyond ourselves.

It is beyond ourselves — so who are those others impacted by your very being? I laugh and say to some friends, if you don't hear from me in a couple of days, call for a wellness check. So many people are going to have something not accomplished, not followed through — what balls are going to drop if you don't show up one day?

I have draft emails in my email account that my powers of attorney know about: send this one out if I'm in the hospital, and send this one when I'm gone. I want to make sure there's a notification process, because people count on us — and all of a sudden if we're not there, it's just odd. Some people will be worried, some will be mad — all kinds of emotion come with that.

There are also so many new legislative tricks coming into play. I wrote this crazy book called The Living Planner: What to Prepare Now While You Are Living — pre-planning, what to do at a loss, the ongoing follow-up which is all that admin stuff, plus appendices. Each year I rewrite the beginning, because I talk about the legislative impacts of the last twelve months. We can have the best-laid plans of mice and men, and they get completely shot — what do you mean with my retirement account, with my crypto, with my business? Some of that stuff is completely out of our control — until it's not.

There's so much that is out of our control — which is why a little bit of control helps. If the little bit of control is having a plan for the uncontrollable, it gives you a little relief too. I truly believe in my heart of hearts that people want to do good, and when we're helping someone else at a time we might not be able to direct them, that's a really good thing. Having a plan for these hard things makes it so much easier on the people you love who have to pick up the pieces.

Absolutely. Some people would say I go overboard. My estate planning attorney lectured me last time: 'You've got to find some younger people — your people are getting up there.' I know — I don't have nieces and nephews, I don't have kids, so that becomes the real choice. Each stage of life brings different things.

And one reminder: whenever we plan, it's not once and done. It's an ongoing canvas — as we change, our needs change, the people around us change. We have a bunch of moving parts in life, so I'm unfortunately going to burst your bubble: once it's done, it's not done forever. When you have a baseline, your wishes are honored — you're not letting a court make a decision for you that impacts those you care about. We get to give guidance.

You mentioned it's not done — and people are going, 'I have to do this again?' How often do they have to do this?

That's why I grumble once a year at tax time — I take a peek and see what's changed, not just on the legal side but my daily side. If you have a truly documented legal document, that's absolutely fantastic — you're ahead of most US adults. Bravo. The kick is that sometimes state and national laws change, and that impacts what you've crafted and drafted. Also, we change — we move states. I was the moving person, the little jelly bean popping around, so from age twenty-five when I did my first one to years later, I had many iterations — different states, different jurisdictions, sometimes people who are no longer with us that I had named.

On average I'd say every three to five years. If you have a major life event — retirement, property ownership, partnership changes, those are the top ones that pop to my head — it's time for a review. Sometimes small tweaks can be done; it depends on your attorney — sometimes they want to redo the whole dang thing. Have the conversation and get really clear. I'm the one that sasses with attorneys all day long, and I have an absolute blast helping with that part.

You and I could chit-chat for a day or two, but this feels like a great place to say: you can help with this. For anyone listening, you now know this is a really hard conversation, but Lynn will make it a lot more fun — and gentle — and she comes from such a great place for it. For anyone going, 'Nope, I'm with the majority of the population who has done nothing' — it's okay, but don't let it be too late.

I'd rather it be sooner rather than later, so that you are in control of the conversation — because when emotions are running really high, it's stressful and tough. That's why they encourage us after a big event not to make major decisions in the first year — and sometimes it's even longer. These are decisions that need to be made when you can laugh about what you're talking about. If we're in crisis mode, or doing this with one of our parents when we're in it, it is less funny — we acknowledge that. So come to a point where you can be super open-minded, have great conversations, even giggle a little, and I'll help you very gently through it.

And I do know you can do this nationally with people. So how do they find you?

My website is thelivingplanner.com. If you want to reach out, my official work email is Lynn — L-Y-N-N — at thelivingplanner.com. The Living Planner is on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, all that stuff. My office number, which also receives texts, is 951-400-0590 — leave a message and just say, 'What in the heck are you talking about, lady?' or 'I'd love to talk to you.' I always love to have an initial conversation that is just a conversation, without any commitment.

I will put all that information below. Thank you, my friend, for coming and doing this with me today. I hope we didn't scare you guys — take a deep breath, we were talking about scary stuff, but nobody does it better than you. Truthfully, everybody, if you're listening: this is something you have to do. It's not if, it's when — and Lynn can really hold your hand through it. She's the greatest. Thank you.

Thank you very much for having me, and for having this show to help educate people. The awareness and education — for all of us to know there's a place where we can get information and ask questions, even when it's the heebie-jeebies — you're giving people a gift. Thank you, Lindsay.

Well, thank you. And thanks everyone for listening — we'll see you next time. All right, that's a wrap for today. Until next time, remember: you're not alone. Take things one step at a time, stay centered, and trust your compass. See you next time on LTCareNav's Care Compass.