Estate Planning Check-In

Every year our attorneys like to check in with our estate planning clients and provide them with some tips and insights that they might find helpful. Here are the tips we’ve shared this year:

1.    If you have a revocable trust, make sure that you have let your homeowners’ insurance know. We highly recommend that you add your trust as an additional insured on your policy.

2.    Also, for those of you with a revocable trust, if you have bought real estate or opened new investment accounts recently, talk to us about getting those new assets into your trust so that they can avoid probate.

3.    We know we say this a lot, but it’s so important!  Keep your beneficiaries up to date on your life insurance, investment accounts, and bank accounts (remember that you can make checking and savings accounts Payable on Death, too!) so that they can avoid probate, as well.

4.    If you or your beneficiaries have had any deaths, births, marriages, or divorces, your Will and/or Trust may need to be updated. This also goes for if anything has happened to your fiduciaries in important roles in your estate planning – Executors, Trustees, Healthcare and Financial Powers of Attorney, etc. — if they have passed away or are no longer in a position to be able to serve in this role, these documents need to be updated.

5.    If you have concerns about current or future substance abuse with any of your beneficiaries, we can include provisions in your estate planning documents that address this situation, which can really help to protect your beneficiaries from making poor choices with their inheritance.

If you have any questions about estate planning, are ready to get estate documents in place, or would like to update existing documents, don’t hesitate to contact our office at 615-800-4747.