OverPressure Podcast Matthew Meredith & Austin

The Overpressure Podcast’s latest episode features Matthew, a Houston-based attorney who works in estate planning, business structuring, and tax strategy. His route into the field was anything but direct. He spent three and a half years as a pre-med student before a paper cut during a summer organic chemistry class made him realize he didn’t even like blood. He closed the book, walked out, moved to Houston, and finished a business degree. His roommate there, a former Wall Street trader, overheard Matthew wanting a job like his and asked whether he had any money. Matthew had student loan money, so they opened a brokerage account. A few years later he was licensed and working as a proprietary equities trader in Boca Raton during the 2008 crash, buying put options against Lehman Brothers while slowly realizing that his job would disappear along with it. The best material isn’t the career detour, though it’s a great one. It’s why he went to law school. After the crash he moved into wealth management, first in bank-style advising and then running a region for Capital One Investing, and he kept seeing the same problem. A client’s CPA, attorney, and financial advisor each did their own work, but none of them worked together, and the client was left passing messages between them. He also saw where the industry was going. Computer models would make charging 2% to manage assets hard to justify, and family offices, where all of a client’s professionals sit in the same room, were on the rise. Advisors who couldn’t also offer tax and estate planning, he decided, would be pushed out. Law school was his way to stop sending away work he knew how to do. Today his practice is more legal than financial, but it’s built on the same idea: bring every part of a client’s plan together. Quick gems from the episode: → Every plan he builds starts with one question: if you die today, what happens? For many clients, it’s the first time anyone has asked. The answer also gives him a complete inventory of everything they own. → He argues that incapacity is worse than death. In his nightmare scenario, you wake up after an accident to find your business gone, your vendor relationships lost, and your savings spent because your spouse had no legal authority to step in. → Not everyone needs a trust, he says, but everyone needs some plan to stay out of probate. In a community property state like Texas, half of a married couple’s house doesn’t automatically pass to the surviving spouse. Basic planning to avoid that typically costs $6,000 to $12,000, and more as things get complex. → He has seen more families torn apart by estate plans that looked perfect on paper than by the lack of a plan. In one case, a mother named her two children, who had never gotten along, as co-trustees in hopes it would bring them together. Three years later nothing had been settled and the lawsuits had begun. → A business owned by one person with no succession plan generally goes through probate. Operations stop until a court gives someone authority, and he has seen such businesses sell for about 30 cents on the dollar. His fix is to have a trust own the business, often through a Wyoming holding company, so that privacy, control, and succession are all part of the same structure. → The best time to set up a trust isn’t while you’re still in survival mode, when every dollar should go into the business. Once there’s real value to protect, put a trust in place, and form every future company with the trust as its owner from the start so you never have to redo the filings. → A series LLC can hold dozens of properties with each one shielded from lawsuits against the others, but only in states that recognize that structure. Doing business in a state that doesn’t can expose every property to a single lawsuit. → The S corp election became a trend, and he now sees many owners switching back because the added compliance wasn’t worth it at their income level. → A revocable trust is essentially an extension of you, and you can change it whenever you want. An irrevocable trust protects assets precisely because you no longer own them, a point he illustrates with a Jurassic Park reference: try to keep too much control and the IRS tells you that you didn’t say the magic word. → On taxes, his view is that most people are already paying the money. The question is whether it goes to the IRS or into an investment such as oil and gas that they actually own, but that requires capital available to invest and a strategy repeated year after year. The thread connecting a pre-med student who couldn’t stand blood, a trader who watched Lehman fall from the inside, and an attorney determined to make every part of a family’s plan work together is what makes this conversation land. It isn’t a dry legal lecture. It’s an argument that the hard questions about death, disability, and control are the ones that actually protect what you’ve built and the people you built it for. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.