Wealth Planning Blog

With the close of the summer quickly approaching, kids going back to school, and life going back to “normal,” we thought it might be a good time to go back to the basics and discuss why EVERYONE needs an estate plan. While the reasons a person or family needs an estate plan are vast and varied, it is a FACT that everyone needs an estate plan - period. Now, don’t get us wrong, your estate plan may look nothing like the old Last Will and Testament you read of your grandmothers, but that is because today estate planning can be specifically tailored to your goals, the specific assets you need to plan for, and the circumstances surrounding your world.

Whether you are an expert in probate and have dealt with it on multiple occasions or a rookie, we can all agree on one thing: probate kind of sucks and should be and can be avoided. Let’s start with the basics: What is probate? Probate is a Court-guided process whereby a deceased individual’s financial affairs are wrapped up and the Court determines who the proper beneficiaries are of the deceased individual’s estate. The words “court-guided process” should automatically lead you to the accurate assumption that probate can be expensive both in time and money.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of administering someone’s trust estate yet, you are likely to either be involved in such an administration someday, or will have someone administering yours for you in the future. Many trusts being administered today, however, were drafted in the 80’s and 90’s and were never updated or revisited once they were put into place. This leaves children and grandchildren struggling to administer trust estates subject to terms that are either outdated or simply don’t make sense anymore for their families.

March is here, and even with Winter Storm Titan presently passing overhead, March still makes me think of spring and gets me in the mood for spring cleaning. As I was packing up clothes our little one has grown out of and separating stuff to donate, I began to reflect on the past week at work and how most of my meetings involved people who's personal/financial worlds could use some spring cleaning of their own.