Well, J____ agreed to “let us go” and refund a portion of the funds we had prepaid for services not yet rendered. At the same time, he required us to sign a letter of termination that included the following clauses:

1. You agree to notify all people who were the recipients of your email to me dated 4/15/2008 that because of contents of that email, we have mutually agreed to terminate our working relationship.

   [--Yep. All my fault.]

2. Based upon your decision to proceed with borrowing $________ against the equity in your office building/warehouse to invest those funds in other investments against our advice, we have officially withdrawn our recommendation that you implement the Master Stewardship Plan as designed.

   [--As noted, it appears he can't really abide someone going against his counsel.]

3. You agree that after the termination of your membership, should you choose to show [our] Plan . . . to other professionals/advisors besides your current advisors, that you will black out our company name on anything you distribute to them and you also agree to not verbally or in writing mention my name or the name of our company as developers of the plan.

J____ had expressed the sentiments in this last clause to me several times last week. Indeed, as I wrote to L____, our CPA, last Saturday, “he said he is convinced that if we run his plan by other people, we will ruin his reputation (!!!???).”

I was flabbergasted. If his plan is as great as he kept telling me, then why should he care whether I show it to others? Wouldn’t it actually be a great boon to him to demonstrate how brilliant he is?

But, whatever. I signed his document. It really is irrelevant to any future planner who created this plan. But it still feels absolutely weird.

And we should be free, soon, to pursue new counsel.

I hope I have the energy!

Welcome, visitor!

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Sincerely,

John Holzmann

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under estate planning, legacy planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.