While Be Your Own Lawyer helps people represent themselves in court, we’re also here to help people with help on more routine legal matters.
So for a while, we’re going to focus on some other legal topics – ones that don’t involve being in court.
In this, and the next few posts, we’re going to focus on estate planning.
Today, an introduction.
What is estate planning? What is the best way to plan your estate? What does a good estate plan include?
Estate Planning
First, the simple and obvious. Estate planning consists of creating a plan, and the instruments to put that plan into effect, for the disposition of your property, business interests, claims and liabilities upon your death.
Before we go into more detail, please note that our definition did not include tax issues. That is intentional – it is not an oversight.
In 2024 the federal estate tax exclusion is $13.61million. That means you can gift, or convey by way of inheritance that amount of money without paying any estate tax. The people above that threshold will in all probability have estate planning experts that will make arrangements more complex than this forum is prepared to address. So, bottom line – people like you and I are not going to worry about estate taxes, so why talk about it right??
OK – so what we’re really going to look to an estate plan for is to make sure that when we die our stuff goes where we want it to, that there is some attention paid to liabilities we may have, and that our heirs are not subjected to a lot of hassle and problems arising from property we have left.
And there are some other things I want to through in the mix.
We want privacy. How much we had in the bank, how much we paid for a parcel of property, or a car, or a piece of artwork, or how much our coin collection is worth, are none of anyone’s business during our lives….. why should death change that?
We don’t want things to be complicated or expensive. We want to be sure our estate plan accomplishes the results we intended.
So to summarize, without focusing on estate taxes, here’s what we are looking for in an estate plan:
- It should insure that our property goes to the people or places (such as charities) that we designate. We don’t want this to be a maybe…. People to estate plans to be assured that their wishes will be honored.
- Along the same lines, it should be certain… if you want to exclude or include someone that should happen without being concerned about specific laws to the contrary, or the possibility of an estate being contested.
- It should be as fast and painless for the heirs or beneficiaries as possible.
- It should allow your estate to be handled in privacy
- It should be simple in terms of how it works. You should not need expensive attorneys to make it work. You should not need a lot of additional documents or litigation.
Now that we’ve laid out our goals, let’s talk in the next post about what kind of plan will meet all those requirements.