Articles Posted in Estate Planning

Since no two people are the same, the approach you take to creating your first estate plan will not be identical to anyone else’s. The most important thing to remember is that you should take action as soon as possible. Drafting a comprehensive estate plan can give both you and your loved ones peace of mind — and there’s nothing more valuable than that.

Once you create an estate plan, it’s easy to assume that you can keep it the same for the rest of your life.

Estate planning early in your life is not the same as estate planning later in life. For example, there is a big difference between creating your first estate plan in your 20s and altering your plan when you reach your 60s or 70s.

As soon as one begins looking into estate planning and creating a plan to leave property to heirs and beneficiaries, it doesn’t take long to run up against the looming possibility of probate. When an estate passes through probate, the state assumes an individual’s estate and distributes it, but at great potential expense to the value of the estate and significantly increasing the amount of time that beneficiaries must wait to receive anything.

There are many different challenging situations that come up when you are creating an estate plan. For adults who haven’t had children, there are some unique obstacles that must be faced. In many cases, these individuals might think that they don’t need an estate plan, but this is far from the truth.

Robin Williams was THE comedian if you are a Gen-Xer like me. We grew up watching Mork & Mindy. And those of us who live in Boulder have, since his death, gone by the Mork & Mindy house and said our farewells there. What do we have to criticize about Robin Williams’ Estate? First, let me make my motives clear.

Most of us think, “thick stack of legal papers”? Ugh! “No, thank you!” But when it comes to estate planning, it’s just the opposite. You see, legal problems in estates are often caused not by bad estate planning, but by Failure-To-Plan (“FTP”), even in estates where the person or couple thought they’d done everything right.

Online or DIY Rather Than ProfessionalsThere are dozens upon dozens of websites that will profess to offer you just the right discounted estate planning documents… Internet sites can provide you with documents but no actual advice that fits you in the context of your specific financial and personal life. What happens when the laws change? Does the document create an unnecessary tax if the state and federal law diverge substantially? Also, use an experienced estate attorney. Forbes.com

F Forbes recently shared its list of 7 Major Errors in Estate Planning. I’d like to share them, one at a time, with comments, and then add a couple they missed. Rather than swamp you with a treatise, here’s one that I really feel passionate about.

When people think of technology, they think of a fast-paced, growing field. When they think of the law, they tend to think of stagnant printed volumes of laws stacked together in a library. The difference between the pace of technological development in space technology and estate planning technology is not as great as many imagine.