What happens when a couple splits up and there's important - and valuable - personal property to divide? Can he keep the beat up, albeit classic car in the garage? Can she keep those paintings her great grandma collected? Well, that all depends on the value of those things.
Getting a good valuation and a catalog of all the personal belongings of a couple can put an end to quibbling and outright war between exes. In this podcast, family law attorney Billie Tarascio of Modern Law talks with Frederick A. Schertenlieb, of Estate Management Services on how the process works and why divorcing spouses may want to use it to value - and fairly divide - belongings that the spouses have accumulated during a marriage.
What happens when a couple splits up and there's important - and valuable - personal property to divide? Can he keep the beat up, albeit classic car in the garage? Can she keep those paintings her great grandma collected? Well, that all depends on the value of those things.
Getting a good valuation and a catalog of all the personal belongings of a couple can put an end to quibbling and outright war between exes. In this podcast, family law attorney Billie Tarascio of Modern Law talks with Frederick A. Schertenlieb, of Estate Management Services on how the process works and why divorcing spouses may want to use it to value - and fairly divide - belongings that the spouses have accumulated during a marriage.
Billie Tarascio: [00:00:43] Hi there. This is Billie Tarascio with another episode of the modern divorce podcast. And today I am so excited to be joined by a representative of a state management services. Mr. Fred, Oh, help me with your last name, sir. Schertenlieb love it. Yeah. Yeah. And today we're going to talk about how you can managed to value accurately and keep track of, and divide valuable personal property.
Now, many of you know, in divorce and, and family court judges don't like to touch personal property, right? But Fred sure knows how valuable that can be, how important that can be. And he and his company have a solution for valuing and making recommendations about that property. Cataloguing that property.
Fred, welcome to the show. And tell me a little bit more about what you do.
Fred Schertenlieb: [00:01:33] Sure. Thanks, Billie. It's a pleasure to be with you and talk to you this morning. I am a time retired trust officer I've been in the Valley for almost 40 years. Retired about four years ago from one of the smaller bank trust departments here in town.
But over the course of my career, I've worked for large, small, medium sized. And so my background is really the business development for a personal trust and personal trust administration. So right off the top, I have an awful lot of friends and associates that work for probably every company here in town that represents corporate fiduciaries.
However, I retired about not quite four years ago. And was happy and rape my retirement until a friend of mine by the name of Eban, Eben Bull, who owns estate management services, contacted me and said, you know, Fred, it'd be nice if you would think about joining us now that you're retired. And I said, well, don't you understand what retirement means?
And he said, well, I do. He said, but I don't think you're going to be busy enough to keep yourself, you know, happy and occupied. So he worked on me for about six or eight months. And I reluctantly agreed to do business development for the company. And I'd known the company I'd used the company in the past when I was a trust officer, because what the company basically does, Billie, is they deal with exclusively administration of personal property and real property.
And that's very, very important and helpful and necessary. And the world of trusted fiduciary because of state settlement involves the passage of property either by probate through the court and or trust by a private document, to beneficiaries or in some cases, the heirs at law. And. You know, trust companies and others are great at , distributing cash and securities, but not so much personal property.
So that's what we do. We administer personal property and real property by getting in and identifying it, determining if it has value inventorying it and working on behalf of whoever's entrusted to do the post-test settlement.
Billie Tarascio: [00:03:39] Okay, so, but we're talking about divorce. So when people are getting divorced, one of the things that they struggle with is dividing personal property, things like gun collections or art things that might be very valuable that the family court is just ill equipped to handle.
And so in those circumstances, what do you do?
Fred Schertenlieb: [00:04:04] Yeah. And those circumstances, again, we provide the services that I touched on earlier because we're an independent third party agent. So if you have a client opposing counsel has a client, we're not really represent either one of you exclusive, but we represent the matter at hand before the court.
And in that case as an agent for, basically both of you on behalf of your clients, we're going in with. Permission and agreement by all parties to identify everything that's in question during this divorce proceeding. Primarily the first thing we do is an inventory with photos, so that basically by room the items, the major items, for sure, but in many cases, other small items are identified or inventory and memorialized in our document.
Having said that though, that's not the end of the job, that's just determining. You know what we have and now what's the value. And in a lot of cases to the untrained eye and the uninformed, other than the emotion, involved in the history, there may not be a lot of value. But that's many, many times not the case.
You've heard of situations where somebody bought a painting , at a flea market and they sold it for a couple million dollars. Well, those are extreme situations, but they do exist in the real world as well. And in some cases, not only estates, as I mentioned, but in divorce matters, they have those types of things or they've have them.
And more importantly, they don't realize the value. And obviously it's key. And trying to work through a divorce settlement to get agreement. And one of the best ways to get agreement is to have impartiality and experts with determining value so that you know, where the starting point is, you know, how level the playing field is.
And you can go from there in terms of really equitably and as, as fairly and clearly as possible, settling the matter, basically on behalf of your client, but also, opposing counsel on behalf of them. Their client at the same time.
Billie Tarascio: [00:06:10] I think that that is so key. What you just said is so crucial, like in order to get a settlement or a good, fair ruling, you need information.
And most of us just don't have enough information about personal property. What's there, how much it's worth, and so are you all the company that determines the value or are you working with appraisers?
Fred Schertenlieb: [00:06:31] No. No. We in our 10 years of existence, Billie, what we've done is we have worked with and vetted outside professionals just like professionals seek us out, but we seek out other professionals that are specialists in their area.
And there are many, many personal property appraisers, what we call tangible personal property. But then there's subsets of that, where there's all sorts of collectibles that have value that require a specialized appraiser. Over the course of my time with the company, I've seen just a little bit of it where we've had collectible cars where we've had antique furniture, we've had all sorts of things that.
The average regular garden variety appraiser could probably a fix a value to, but is it accurate? What's the basis for their knowledge and determining the value. So in the course of providing our service, we become a resource for our clients and that if there are services that are needed in the way of appraisals we know who to contact.
They, again, work independently. They don't work for us. We bring them in and as kind of a sub-agent. And we use them exclusively for the services that we identify that they need to be tasked with. But they're done then after that, and we're never, ever. Using that same party to sell the property on behalf of the client, if that's the route they need to go.
Because I'm assuming that in many cases you see where the clients aren't going to split everything down the middle and you get this and you get that. Ultimately sometimes the best remedy is to determine value and then to sell it for best, highest, fair market price and split the proceeds. So if that's the case, if that's the avenue to get this resolved that in many cases we'll use other parties that we've vetted for selling that personal property, but never, ever the appraisers that we're using for determining value.
Billie Tarascio: [00:08:32] Fantastic. Do you also create reports? Of what's there and she'll let you. Okay. All right. Fantastic.
Fred Schertenlieb: [00:08:41] Absolutely. You've touched on a great question and that is one of our mainstays of all of our services.
Our suite of services is doing an inventory. That is with photos and that has kind of cataloged and documented by items and by room. So not only are we just providing photos, but we're putting them in context of what the item is, where it's located and then determining, or based on what the items are.
If values need to be determined, those can be used to identify those items for determining value. Now from there, there's no substitute for the appraiser to see the items. They're not going to do it from photos. But the point is the photos are a starting point for providing to you and providing to, let's say, opposing counsel on behalf of your clients, where's their starting point.
What do we have there? And maybe we can, you know, get past some disputes by saying here's the snapshot literally of everything. Now let's go from there. What's going to be the disposition. And, and that helps work for it's a settlement, hopefully, because now we're not just guessing at what's there and further we may not need to be in a situation where we don't want to guess relative to value. But starting point as if photographed it memorialized inventory by room of all items.
Billie Tarascio: [00:10:03] Well, that's also fantastic for people who are worried about someone getting rid of their stuff, which unfortunately does happen in divorce.
So if you get that catalog and then some things missing, then you kind of, you kind of know at least, you know, what was missing and you can make a better or more proper waste claim. So this is...
Fred Schertenlieb: [00:10:24] we, we basically can help the client work backwards on. And when they say, well, if something's missing, look, I have a photograph of something that is, you know, shows it here.
Where is it? And by the way, I want to mention that we're not going in alone. We have teams. And generally we're sending a team of two people, not only to protect our clients who enlister our services, but to protect ourselves so that, you know, we are certainly demonstrating and carrying out the independent, impartial nature of our services.
Billie Tarascio: [00:10:57] Well, thank you so much for your time today, Fred, this has been a fantastic episode of the podcast. I appreciate it. And we will link to your company's website and let everybody know where they can find you. Thank you so much for joining us.
Fred Schertenlieb: [00:11:11] Thank you, Billie it's a pleasure, thank you.