Many people created their estate plan years ago and haven't touched it since. But estate planning law has changed dramatically in that time. The estate tax exemption alone has significantly increased, and the Secure Act fundamentally changed how retirement accounts pass to your children and grandchildren. If your plan predates these changes, it may be working against your family's interests rather than protecting them.

On the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce talk with Westray Veasey, J.D., Chief Fiduciary Counsel and Principal at Trust Company of the South, and Chris Hewitt, J.D., Fiduciary Counsel, about the two biggest changes in estate planning over the past two decades. Together, they explain not just what has changed, but how those changes affect the decisions you make today.

Estate tax exemptions have nearly tripled since 2012, but that doesn't mean smaller estates don't need planning. The real shift now is toward managing income tax consequences when assets transfer to the next generation. Add the Secure Act's 10-year distribution requirement for most beneficiaries who aren't spouses, and retirement accounts become a tax crisis for families who haven't planned for it. 

Beyond the numbers, Westray and Chris address the human side: 

• What happens when you don't have a will
• What to include in a modern estate plan beyond just a will
• Why outdated plans can inadvertently disinherit your spouse
• How business owners need to plan differently as their companies grow
• How to talk with your family about your plan before you're gone

Your estate plan should reflect the law and your life as it is now, not as it was a decade ago. This episode explains what's changed, what you need to do about it and why the Trust Company approach to estate planning makes a difference. 

To help you move from conversation to action, Trust Company has created two companion resources. The Estate Planning Checklist breaks down the tasks you should consider across six categories, from developing your plan to preparing beneficiaries. The Ten Things to Consider When Creating or Updating an Estate Plan provides a foundational overview of the key decisions and conversations you'll need to have. Both are available for download and designed to work alongside your conversations with your estate planning attorney.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

Most people spend hours crafting a will or revising a trust. However, very few have given a moment's thought to what happens to their email, photos, social media accounts or cryptocurrency when they pass away. That oversight can leave loved ones locked out, confused, or scrambling to find critical accounts and information.

On the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce talk with Hannah Baublitz, J.D., General Counsel of Trust Company of the South, for a direct conversation about digital assets and the critical role they should play in your estate plan. Hannah brings over two decades of legal experience to a problem that barely existed when she started her career: the legal reality of managing someone's digital life after they pass away.

North Carolina adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act in 2016, but it remains one of the least understood pieces of estate law. Hannah provides the practical steps anyone can take today, the platforms people actually use (Apple, Meta, Google, Venmo, Etsy) and what happens when you don't plan at all. She explains the three-tier system of access, introduces the concept of a digital executor and addresses the specific challenge of cryptocurrency, where the phrase "not your key, not your coin" takes on urgent meaning.

In the conversation:

• What actually counts as a digital asset, and why it's far broader than most people realize
• The three-tier hierarchy that governs access to your digital accounts after death
• Which online platforms have built-in tools to manage your accounts, and how to set them up
• How to include digital asset language in your power of attorney, trust or will
• The unique challenge of cryptocurrency and why private keys matter
• Best practices for keeping an inventory and updating your plan as technology changes

Your digital accounts are part of your estate, but most people's plans don't address them. This episode covers what you need to do so your family isn't left guessing.

Additional resources are available to support your planning: a Digital Asset Planning Checklist to walk you through creating your inventory and updating your estate documents, plus a Digital Assets blog article that covers the legal framework and specific platform tools.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

Most leadership lessons don't arrive when things are going well. Jamie Sands has carried that view for the better part of three decades, and the moments that made him a better leader were rarely the comfortable ones.

On the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, host Burke Koonce sits down with Rear Admiral (retired) Jamie Sands, USN, former commander of US Naval Special Warfare Command and now president and CEO of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, for a moving conversation on the leadership principles that shaped his career and the work he is doing on behalf of the families of fallen special operations forces.

A 1992 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Sands served for more than three decades in the Navy. His career included combat deployments in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, commands at U.S. Special Operations Command Africa and Naval Service Training Command, a turn as Chief of Staff of U.S. Special Operations Command and his final assignment leading Naval Special Warfare Command and its 10,000 sailors and civilians.

Sands is a sought-after public speaker on leadership and team dynamics. He has delivered keynote presentations at Duke, Georgetown and Yale Universities, works closely with the Duke Lacrosse program and engages regularly with collegiate and high school sports teams. In 2018, Deerfield Academy honored him with its Heritage Award.

Jamie has spent his career studying how good leaders are made, finding it's often the hard way. He recounts the moment in BUDS when he decided he was going to be a SEAL, the warrant officer who walked into his office and told him exactly what kind of leader he was failing to be and the four-part command philosophy his own mentor wrote in 2002 that Sands has carried forward through every assignment since. He also describes the cultural change inside the SEAL community around mental health and the founding story of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which traces back to the failed Iran hostage rescue in 1980.

In the conversation:

• Why dignity and respect became the foundation of his command style
• Tim Szymanski's four principles of leadership and how Sands carried them forward
• The distinction between mistakes of judgment and mistakes of character
• How mental health is now discussed inside the SEAL community
• The founding story and ongoing mission of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation

This conversation centers around how good leaders are made, the mentors who shape them and the responsibility that comes with leading people who give everything to the work.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

There's a question every long-running business has to answer: How do you keep doing the work well, year after year, after the founders are gone, the industry has changed and customer expectations have only climbed? Few restaurants in North Carolina have answered it as clearly as The Angus Barn.

On the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce sit down with Van Eure, owner and operator of The Angus Barn, the legendary Raleigh steakhouse her father co-founded more than six decades ago. Eure recounts the restaurant's origin story, her own unlikely path back into the family business after five years teaching school in Kenya and the leadership philosophy that has carried The Angus Barn into its current era.

Most of the conversation centers on what Eure calls real hospitality, the kind that goes well past customer satisfaction into an experience that guests remember for years. She speaks to a hiring process focused on servant-hearted candidates, a service model that gives every employee the authority to resolve a guest issue on the spot and a set of practices that keep the entire team, including the dishwashers, focused on the same guest experience.

In the conversation:

• The difference between customer service and real hospitality
• The hiring philosophy that produces a 4% turnover rate, against a 30% to 40% industry average
• The Opie Test and how it sharpens performance reviews
• Why every manager, including Eure herself, works the dish pit during busy shifts
• Eure's advice on sustainable leadership 

This is a conversation about people, the work of taking care of them and what it takes to do that well for a very long time.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

Every investor who considers alternatives is eventually faced with the same question: Is the added complexity worth it? The honest answer depends on what part of the category you're talking about, how you access it and what you're trying to accomplish with the allocation.

The newest episode of Trust Company Talks takes that question on directly. Hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce are joined by Dr. Greg Brown, Distinguished Professor of Finance at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School and founder and research director of the Institute for Private Capital, for a conversation covering the full breadth of the alternatives category.

Greg has been researching hedge funds, private equity and private credit for more than two decades, and he brings academic rigor to a space often clouded by marketing language. He explains how each category actually behaves inside a portfolio and why the economic case looks quite different for each one.

In this episode:

• The two economic reasons alternatives belong in a portfolio
• Why the median venture fund disappoints while the average fund looks strong
• How hedge fund alpha has decayed as more capital has entered the space
• The redemption pressures currently playing out inside evergreen private credit funds
• What individual investors should weigh before committing capital: liquidity, taxes and due diligence
• Greg's take on alternatives in DC plans and the broader retailization of private markets

For investors, advisors and board members working to make sense of a category that has grown well beyond its original definition, this episode is an hour well spent with one of the foremost academic voices on private markets.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

The assets inside a foundation or endowment were never meant to be spent all at once. They exist to support a mission today and keep supporting it decades from now, which means the way those assets are managed carries real stakes for real communities.

In the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce sit down with Walker Douglas, a CFP and wealth advisor in Trust Company's Greensboro office, for a wide-ranging conversation on what it actually takes to manage these pools of capital well. Walker works closely with nonprofits, foundations and endowments across the state and brings both the technical depth and the boardroom perspective that comes from years of doing this work alongside some of the region's most well-run institutions.

Walker covers the dual mandate at the heart of every endowment—meeting current spending needs while preserving purchasing power for the future—and what that requires from asset allocation, spending policy and governance. He also gets into the concentration risk hiding inside major indices today, and why chasing a benchmark that is effectively 40% in 10 stocks may be the wrong objective for an institution built to last a hundred years.

Their conversation covers: 

• Why 60/40 gave way to 70/30, and when to go more aggressive
• How spending policy smoothing works and why it matters
• What alternatives bring to an endowment portfolio and the complexity they introduce
• How Trust Company approaches governance, performance reviews and donor gifting strategy
• What foundation boards are focused on right now: fundraising, revenue diversification and AI
• Walker's single piece of advice for any board managing assets for the long term

Whether you manage one of these relationships or sit on the board overseeing it, this episode covers a lot of ground.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

The estate tax exemption is now the highest it's ever been. For a lot of families, that's created a sense of breathing room. Chris Sutherland, senior wealth advisor and principal in Trust Company's Charlotte office, would push back on that.

In the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce sit down with Chris for a conversation that covers what the recent legislation actually did, why Chris puts the word "permanent" in quotes and why some folks who were on the doorstep of major gifting decisions stopped moving once the urgency disappeared.

Chris also introduces the idea of reverse estate planning, where those who did smart work moving assets out of their estate years ago, when exemptions were much lower, may now want to bring some of those assets back to capture a step-up in basis. And he lays out what everyone should be reviewing on a regular basis, whether or not they have a taxable estate.

The conversation touches on:

• Why the estate tax exemption being "permanent" still requires planning, and what post-2028 might look like
• Reverse estate planning and when it makes sense to bring assets back into the estate
• Asset titling, beneficiary designations and asset location as annual review items
• Generation-skipping trusts, qualified charitable distributions and Roth conversions
• Insurance reviews and the long-term care conversation
• Working with younger generations on trust basics and personal finance

If tax season has you wondering whether your own plan still fits, this episode is a good place to start.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

2025 rewarded equity investors, but it was not a straight line.

In this episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce are joined by Trust Company of the South Chief Investment Officer Dan Tolomay to recap what drove markets last year and frame the investment outlook for 2026.

Dan breaks down key themes that shaped markets in 2025, what may matter in 2026, and focuses on how Trust Company uses valuation discipline and diversification to manage risk. The group also reflects on the spring "Liberation Day" sell-off and the quick rebound that followed, reinforcing Dan's reminder that "volatility travels in packs" and that a durable allocation matters most when markets move quickly.

The conversation touches on:

• Why international led in 2025, and how currency moves mattered
• What "Magnificent Seven" concentration means for index exposure
• What past market leaders can teach investors now
• What valuation discipline looks like when prices are stretched
• Why big down days and big up days often cluster
• Allocation considerations for retirees and long-term investors
• Why planning beats forecasting

Listen for a practical look at what worked in 2025, the questions investors are carrying into 2026 and how to think about diversification and valuation discipline when markets feel uncertain, especially for retirees and pre-retirees managing portfolio risk.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

If it feels like housing has become a harder math problem, you're not imagining it. Prices moved up, rates followed and the homes that used to serve first-time buyers and move-up families are not being built in the same volume.

In the newest episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce talk with Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and co-owner of Parrott Ryan Advisors, about what is really driving the affordability crunch and what might realistically help. 

This conversation stays practical. It covers why the problem is mostly a supply problem, why local rules matter so much, why the post-2008 building pipeline never fully recovered and why quick fixes can create new problems. They also explore the longer-term impact of delayed homeownership on wealth building, plus one policy idea that could help free up inventory by reducing friction for long-time owners who want to downsize.

The conversation touches on:

• Why housing affordability is mostly a supply problem
• Where the middle of the market is falling short, and who gets squeezed
• The early cost drivers, including land, permitting and approvals
• How post-2008 changes reshaped building and lending
• Why some rent limits can reduce new construction and upkeep
• A case for updating capital gains rules on home sales
• What rate outlooks could mean for buyers holding off

Listen to the episode to hear Jim's clear take on what is keeping housing tight, and what could help loosen it.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.

AI headlines, meme stocks, crypto and mega-cap tech have all been front and center this year. For long-term investors, the harder question is what actually deserves a place in a disciplined portfolio.

In a new episode of Trust Company Talks, hosts Bill Noble and Burke Koonce sit down with Wes Crill, Senior Client Solutions Director and Vice President at Dimensional Fund Advisors, to sort through the noise and return to core principles.

Wes shares how he's thinking about the themes investors are asking about most right now, including AI-driven market concentration, the role of traditional investment premiums and the questions surrounding small caps. He also discusses how research helps separate signal from noise in a year filled with new products, rapid narratives and shifting expectations.

The conversation touches on:

• AI's influence on market behavior and investor expectations
• How concentrated performance shapes the broader discussion
• What research shows about premiums across different markets
• Where speculation shows up in headlines and portfolios
• How investors can stay grounded when new products or trends emerge

Wes closes with a simple message for investors in an anxious, headline-heavy year: broad diversification, clear goals and steady implementation tend to matter more than the latest market story.

Trust Company Talks is a production of Trust Company of the South, one of the premier wealth management firms in the Southeast. Trust Company is a privately held firm based in Greensboro, NC, with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. You can find more episodes of Trust Company Talks on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Receive the episodes as soon as they premiere by subscribing today.