Trust This. | By Joseph E. Seagle, Esq. | 👋 Happy Friday! Memorial Day weekend kicks off tonight. Before the cooler hits the porch, take five minutes to thank a veteran in your life — and if your weekend includes a road trip, drive like the rest of America is also driving (because they are). | 🚨 Situation Awareness: Joe is hosting Ask Joe Live, our open Q&A on Florida estate planning and asset protection, on Wednesday, June 3 at 6 PM ET. Register here — bring your questions on land trusts, LLCs, tenancy by the entirety, IRA beneficiary designations, or anything else you've been meaning to ask. | 🚨 Situation Awareness #2: FinCEN released three new FAQs on March 18. In summary, it clarified that reporting companies a) don’t have to file Residential Real Estate Reports during the pending court cases about the law’s enforceability; and b) won’t have to retroactively file reports if the law is ultimately found to be enforceable. So title agents and others have no reason to continue collecting information from buyers and sellers on non-financed residential purchases by trusts and entities until the final court orders come down in the Texas and other cases. |
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| | 1 big thing: A rate hike is back on the table | | Florida real estate investors, private lenders, professional practice owners, and small business operators just got handed a new planning reality: the Federal Reserve's next move may be up, not down. | The big picture | The Philadelphia Fed's Survey of Professional Forecasters — the most-watched consensus tracker among economists — just doubled its Q2 inflation projection. Headline CPI is now pegged at 6% for the quarter, compared to 2.7% just three months ago. Core PCE for the quarter sits at 3.4%. April CPI ran at 3.8% year-over-year, the highest in nearly three years. Producer prices rose 6% YoY — the sharpest jump since December 2022. The driver is energy: the ongoing U.S.–Israel strikes on Iran and an unresolved Strait of Hormuz situation are keeping oil elevated and feeding through to everything else. | Bond markets noticed. The 10-year Treasury yield closed last Friday near 4.57%, the highest in a year. The 30-year bond yield breached 5.1%. According to CME's FedWatch tool, the market now prices roughly a 60% chance that the Fed's benchmark rate is higher by the January 2027 FOMC meeting, with December seen as a coin toss. | Why this reshapes Florida planning | Incoming Fed Chair Kevin Warsh was confirmed this week. His public thesis — that AI productivity will dampen inflation over time — is harder to sell when CPI is running at 3.8% and PPI at 6%. If Warsh has to choose between his thesis and the data, the data usually wins. | What to execute and watch | For Florida real estate investors and private lenders — strip the "rates will fall" assumption out of every pro forma you're underwriting today. Re-run cap rate sensitivity at 7%+ debt. Shorten rate-lock windows. Build in extension language. Adjustable Rate Mortgages coupled with prayers for lower rates in the future will be common. Cash buyers regain real leverage in this environment. For home services businesses — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, painting, carpet cleaning — homeowners who were waiting for a refi to fund a renovation are now waiting longer. Reposition quotes around financing options (HELOCs, contractor financing, phased work) rather than waiting for the rate-cut customer. For licensed professionals — physicians, dentists, attorneys, pharmacists — if you have SBA debt or practice-acquisition financing in the pipeline, lock now or accept the risk that pricing tightens further. Equipment refinance windows are closing.
| The bottom line: The Fed's path is no longer one-directional. Stagflation — slow growth (GDP forecast cut to 2.2%) paired with sticky inflation — is the planning environment for Florida operators through year-end. | Watch for: April FOMC minutes (released Wednesday), the May PCE print, and Warsh's first public communication. |
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| | 2. Mortgage rates pushing toward 7%; and the Fed isn’t driving them | | Florida buyers, sellers, builders, and private lenders have been quietly counting on mortgage rates drifting toward 6%. HousingWire lead analyst Logan Mohtashami just put a flag in the ground: that drift is over for now, and the reason isn't anything happening at the Federal Reserve. | Why it matters: The 30-year fixed mortgage rate closed last week at 6.71%, up 8 basis points on the day. The 10-year Treasury yield — the single biggest input to mortgage pricing — broke above 4.50% Friday and hit 4.58%. Mohtashami's published threshold for housing demand recovery is 6.64%. We just punched through it. Mortgage spreads (the gap between the 30-year mortgage rate and the 10-year yield) have been narrow and helpful — but spreads cannot absorb a sustained yield move much higher than current levels. | What's actually moving the bond market | It's not domestic inflation prints. It's the Iran conflict and the Strait of Hormuz. Each week without resolution, more oil-producing nations hit storage capacity deficits (not shortages … yet), which keeps energy prices elevated and forces traders to price longer-term inflation expectations into Treasuries. Mohtashami's read: even if the Strait reopened today, Fed governors have said it would take months for normal oil supply to return. | How to use this without getting burned | For Florida real estate investors and private mortgage lenders — your underwriting model now has a geopolitical input. Build in scenarios where rates stay above 7% through year-end. Factor in higher expenses of longer holding periods as buyers sit on the sidelines starting in August. Tighten LTVs on speculative refinances. Reprice extension fees on hard-money paper. | For home services businesses and small business owners — the mortgage rate is a proxy for consumer confidence in financing big-ticket work. Expect more "patch it" jobs and fewer "renovate it" jobs through summer. Adjust quote bundles accordingly. | For licensed professionals managing practice real estate — if you've been waiting for a refi window to acquire your own building, the window narrowed. Run the math at current rates and decide whether the operational case still works. | Yes, but: Mortgage spreads are holding for now, and Mortgage Bankers Association purchase applications are still tracking above 2025 levels. The market is bending, not breaking. | Bottom line: Florida housing isn't waiting on the Fed anymore. It's waiting on the Strait of Hormuz, and that's a planning input most operators haven't priced in. | What's next: Watch the 5% threshold on the 10-year yield. If we get there, spreads break and 7%+ mortgages stop being a ceiling and start being a floor. |
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| | | In this weeks’ “Ask Joe” episode of the Trust This podcast, I give some more explanation of the issue of making your living trust a beneficiary of your IRA. | Listen in or watch on your favorite streaming platform. |
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| | 3. When your living trust should — and shouldn’t — be your IRA’s beneficiary | | One of the most common questions we get from Florida clients with a freshly drafted revocable living trust is whether to also make the trust the primary beneficiary of their IRA. The honest answer: sometimes it's the smartest move you can make, and sometimes it's the most expensive mistake in your estate plan. | The big picture: Retirement accounts don't transfer by will, and they don't transfer by trust agreement. They transfer by beneficiary designation form filed with the IRA custodian. Whatever's on that form wins — even when it contradicts your estate documents. | Why it matters: | A surviving spouse named directly as beneficiary can do a spousal rollover and treat the IRA as their own — stretching distributions across their lifetime A trust named as beneficiary forfeits that rollover option in nearly every case Under the SECURE Act (and SECURE 2.0), most non-spouse trust beneficiaries trigger the 10-year payout rule — the entire IRA must be drained within ten years of death Trust-retained IRA income gets taxed at the trust's compressed brackets, where the top rate kicks in around $15,650 of retained income — far faster than at the individual level
| What most people don't know: A trust can still inherit an IRA cleanly if it qualifies as a "see-through" trust under IRS regulations — four specific drafting requirements, all of which the trust agreement must meet by the September 30 of the year following death. Missing one disqualifies the trust and accelerates the entire IRA into a single taxable year. | When naming your trust IS the right call: | Minor children as beneficiaries — Florida law limits direct distributions to minors. A trust controls timing. A beneficiary you don't trust with a lump sum — addiction, immaturity, marital instability, creditor exposure A special-needs beneficiary receiving means-tested government benefits Blended families where you want the surviving spouse to receive income but want children from a prior marriage to receive the remainder
| When naming your trust is usually wrong: | You're married and your spouse is the natural primary beneficiary (but the trust can be named as a contingent beneficiary of the IRA) Your beneficiaries are competent adults you trust The IRA is your primary retirement asset, and tax efficiency matters
| One Florida-specific note: IRAs in Florida already enjoy strong creditor protection under Fla. Stat. § 222.21. That protection generally follows the IRA into an inherited IRA owned by a Florida resident. You don't always need a trust to add the creditor layer — Florida law is doing more work than people realize. | Yes, but if your beneficiary lives in another jurisdiction, you’d need to check that state’s laws to ensure they’re like Florida’s in providing the same creditor protections. | The bottom line: The beneficiary designation form on your IRA is one of the most consequential one-page documents in your entire estate plan. Treat it that way. Review every five years and after every major life event. | Go deeper: Read more on aspirelegal.com. |
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| | 4. Meeting pulses: why your weekly Level 10 is the heartbeat of execution |  | Edward never misses an L10 meeting when he’s in the office. Even he knows how important they are. Plus, the conference room floor is cool for sleeping. |
| If you run an EOS company and the wheels are coming off — missed deadlines, the same arguments every Monday, Rocks that never get done — the diagnosis is usually the same. The meeting pulse has gotten sloppy. | The big idea: meetings are infrastructure, not interruptions | Gino Wickman's Traction lays out three rhythms that, when run consistently, give a small business the operating discipline of a much bigger one: | The weekly Level 10 (L10) meeting — same day, same time, 90 minutes, every department The quarterly meeting — set the next 90-day Rocks, refresh the V/TO The annual planning meeting — two days off-site, reset Vision and three-year picture
| Skip any of the three, and the company drifts. Skip the L10 and the drift compounds weekly. | Why the L10 actually works | The L10 isn't a status meeting. It's a decision-making meeting. The format is fixed: Segue (5), Scorecard review (5), Rock review (5), Customer/Employee headlines (5), To-Do list (5), Issues List (60), Conclude (5). The 60-minute IDS block (Identify, Discuss, Solve) is where the real work happens — issues get named, debated, and resolved with an owner and a date.
| How to keep meetings from becoming a waste of time | Protect the time. The L10 is the most important 90 minutes of your operational week. Treat it like a flight you can't reschedule. Cut to IDS fast. The five-minute headers exist to clear the table. If you're still on the Scorecard at minute 20, you're avoiding the Issues List. One owner, one date per Issue. "We'll figure it out" is not a solution. Either the issue moves to a Rock or some To-Do’s, gets delegated to a separate meeting with a date, or gets killed and removed. Score the meeting honestly. Conclude with a 1–10. Below 8 means the team has feedback. Get it.
| Bottom Line: A business doesn't fail at strategy. It fails at execution. The meeting pulse is execution made visible. | This Week's Challenge: Pick one meeting on your calendar that has drifted into update or blame-storming theater. Reformat it as a 90-minute L10 next week. Same day, same time, going forward. Watch what changes by week four. |
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| | We hope you found this helpful — any feedback is appreciated and can be shared by hitting reply or using the feedback feature below. | Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here. Have an idea or issue to share? Email us. Connect with us using your preferred social media and website links for MyLandTrustee and Aspire Legal Solutions. My Land Trustee mailing address: PO Box 547945, Orlando, FL 32854-7945 Aspire Legal Solution mailing address: PO Box 547934, Orlando, FL 32854-7934 Our physical address: 1901 West Colonial Drive, First Floor, Orlando, FL 32804
| Be on the lookout for our next issue! 👋 |
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