How Will You Shape Your Family’s Future and Your Legacy?
Maybe you think contacting an Estate Planning Attorney would mean you take yourself too seriously. After all, your life is simple, straightforward and not fussy, right? Your finances are adequate—enough money to pay your bills. But only “rich” people need estate plans—so why would you need one?
Well, here’s the thing. Unexpected illness or death happen to everyone, not just the wealthy—and they are serious business. They have a way of leaving even the simplest of lives and assets a complicated mess. And who picks up the pieces of this mess? The stressed or grieving family.
This does not have to be your family or your legacy. You can do right by your loved ones. You can make a plan.
Yours is the power to shape and design your future, to craft a positive and enduring legacy. Will your hallmark be intentional organization, responsibility, and foresight? Or will there be chaos, acrimony, and uncertainty born of neglect? If you desire a positive outcome, you must plan for it—and an Estate Planning Attorney at Promise Law can help you create the best plan for your situation.
THE BENEFIT OF A PLAN
A well-thought-out plan ensures that you and your loved ones will be fully cared for—no matter what life brings. It expresses your important wishes about your care during your lifetime, directs how your property and assets are passed on to your selected beneficiaries, and makes clear who you trust to implement these important decisions. To be most effective, your plan must contain clear instructions so your loved ones can understand and follow your wishes.
In many ways, planning is about efficiency. The decision to pay attention to planning today provides an enormous amount of clarity tomorrow and every day afterward. As an added benefit, planning is less expensive and time-consuming when you do it with your Estate Planning Attorney than it would be for your family to scramble up a solution in the midst of a crisis. Your personal leadership and proactive approach to planning can positively impact your loved ones, as well as benefitting the causes you care about and your community. The Components of a Plan
THE COMPONENTS OF A PLAN
Any good plan will include an advance medical directive and a durable property power of attorney. These powerful tools ensure that someone you trust will be granted legal authority to manage your medical and financial affairs during any period when you cannot.
A good plan also requires either crafting a will or forming a trust. It’s impossible for us to say which of these is best for you prior to a personal consultation. Promise Law’s approach is to educate you toward picking the best plan for your family based on your unique values, your finances, and other circumstances particular to your life. Only when you fully consider your situation in light of the benefits and tradeoffs of will-based plans and trust-based plans can you make the decisions that are right for you.
To learn more about the issues and considerations involved in planning, and which documents you’ll need in order to implement your plan, click here to visit our FAQ page.
HOW TO BEGIN THE PROCESS
Your process with Promise Law begins with a free, informative workshop – The 7 Hazards to Your Estate Plan. You can click here to register. The Workshop is presented by one of our Estate Planning Attorneys and explains key concepts in estate planning, the types of documents involved, the impact of asset ownership on your plan, and how to protect your assets from the risk of long-term care.
After attending the Workshop, you will receive a free consultation. This Vision Meeting™ is a conversation where we learn about your family, your assets, and anything else important in crafting your plan. We review key concepts from the Workshop to further clarify your values. If you have existing estate planning documents, we will also audit them to see if they align with your values.
Most Workshop participants choose to move forward with this free consultation. There is no obligation to do so, however, just as there is no obligation to retain Promise Law at the end of your free consultation. We just want to help. Contact us today.
FREE PROBATE & ADMINISTRATION WORKSHOP
Join us for our Probate & Administration workshop for a complimentary consultation with an attorney (a $600 value). To register for this live, virtual workshop, pick the date and time that works best for you below.
ESTATE PLANNING FAQ
Yes. Whether you have $5,000 or $5 million, you need to figure out who will manage those funds when you’re alive but can’t do so yourself because of long illness or dementia, and you need a way to be clear about who you want to inherit at your death. By the way, the less stuff you think you have, the less you can afford to get it wrong.
Wills only control what happens to your assets (stuff) when you die (i.e. no help for you now), and asset ownership rules trump a will (we talk about this at length in our free workshop – the 7 Hazards to Your Estate Plan). An informed, comprehensive plan includes tools for managing your medical and financial affairs during your lifetime and reviews the stuff you own and how you own it to make sure everything is coordinated to work with your will.
No. The joint owner can only help on the account where they’re named. If any legal or financial matter needs to be handled outside the account and you cannot do it yourself (for example, your tax return needs to be signed, your house needs to be sold, or your signature is needed to file for an insurance claim), your family will have to go to court and ask for the judge’s permission to act for your benefit (to become your conservator). Also, the joint owner is presumed to be – well – an owner, so the assets in the account may be subject to their creditors. Plus, or maybe another minus, this easy and cheap approach may result in disinheriting beneficiaries under your will or trust because the surviving owner(s) automatically own all of the account when you die and they do not have to share it with your intended beneficiaries.
A trust is a legal entity that holds and manages your assets (stuff). The document you sign to create the trust (the trust agreement) says who manages the stuff (the “trustee”) and who benefits from the stuff (the “beneficiaries”) during your lifetime and at your death.
No. After you’ve created your trust you must ask your bank (and other institutions) to change the title of accounts currently in your name and rename them to your trust. Sometimes, rather than retitle an account, the trust is made the pay on death beneficiary. Either way, this process involves contacting these institutions and companies and completing forms to update your accounts with them. If you’re working with an experienced estate planning attorney, you will receive explicit guidance on how to manage each asset to ensure it coordinates with your plan. Also, not all stuff can initially be retitled into a trust so the funding process must be done with expert guidance.
It depends on the type of trust. With a revocable trust – the most common type of trust our clients want – you have full benefit and use of your stuff in the trust, with married couples being able to decide what limits on the surviving spouse’s use occur at the death of the first. With an irrevocable trust you give up the right to get your stuff out of the trust forever.
The tradeoff for giving up access to your stuff is the benefit of protecting your stuff. Irrevocable trusts come in lots of varieties and can have lots of purposes. At Promise Law we create Asset Protection trusts. These types of irrevocable trusts create a firewall around your stuff: the protection is immediate for future general creditors (like from a lawsuit for someone getting injured on your property) and for Medicaid Long Term Care and will be a penalty-free transfer for Medicaid.
The above significant protections, even in the face of important caveats, are why people elect to create an Asset Protection trust. An Asset Protection trust may be funded with assets that the creator doesn’t want to liquidate and intends to preserve to share with beneficiaries at their death (family home, vacation property, an investment account used only for its income, etc.). They know that whatever they’ve put in the Asset Protection trust is protected.
Whether it’s a revocable trust or an Asset Protection trust, you can serve as your own trustee and can also change who manages your trust and who inherits from the trust at your death. After your death, the trust is managed by the successor trustee you selected, and your beneficiaries receive their inheritance as you directed in the trust, whether outright or held in further trust.
A trust is a more robust planning tool than a will because a trust provides asset management during your lifetime as well as directs how your estate is to be managed and distributed after your death. No one planning tool fits everyone: pros and cons exist for each type of plan. Promise Law believes that you should be informed about all the issues and options in planning and that you will be empowered to decide which one is better for you and your family. The best fit depends on your individual circumstances plus your personal goals and preferences.
If properly funded at their creation and carefully managed throughout your lifetime, trusts are hands down the best vehicle for seamless transition and management of your stuff if you become incapacitated during your lifetime. At your death, the successor trustee doesn’t have to file anything with the court and as a result the trust administration process is more efficient than with a will going through Probate. Trusts are also more flexible and forgiving if you should have updated the trust, perhaps to take into account a change in a beneficiary’s health, but did not or could not do so, before your death. If there are any issues with a will, you must go to court to untangle them. A similar issue with a trust can frequently be handled privately, quickly, and with less expense.