Being named executor of someone’s estate is often viewed as an honor. It means the person who created the will trusted you to handle their affairs and carry out their wishes after death. But once the process begins, many executors discover that the role involves far more than distributing belongings or closing a few bank accounts.
Owning a new home brings new responsibilities and new opportunities to ensure that your estate plan reflects your life today. From reviewing how your home is titled to checking that your plans for loved ones are clear, we can help you take practical steps to protect what matters most.
Adopting a stewardship mindset, as in stewarding family wealth, shifts conversations about estate planning and inheritance from consumption to long-term preservation, from entitlement to responsibility, and from instant gratification to legacy. In estate planning, raising stewards rather than mere beneficiaries can reshape how families approach intergenerational wealth.
If postsecondary education is in your family’s future, the following tools can be excellent additions to your estate plan to help provide for education needs.
If you are facing a serious medical diagnosis, follow these tips on crucial documents that will enable you to take back control of your future, ensure that your wishes are honored, and prevent difficult decisions about finances, healthcare, and guardianship from falling to your loved ones during a crisis.
While your estate plan may describe in detail who will receive big-ticket items, your loved ones may argue over small nostalgic items that you unintentionally omitted. To prevent family strife and forestall bickering among your loved ones, you also need to think in a big-picture way about the little things in your estate.
Among the numerous types of trusts aimed at fulfilling different estate planning purposes, an inheritor’s trust is specially designed to help protect an inheritance.
If you and your partner choose not to marry, you must have an estate plan tailored to your individual situation. Without an estate plan, your partner generally has no legal authority to make decisions for you if you become injured or incapacitated (unable to manage your own affairs) or to inherit from you when you pass away.
An estate plan can ensure that a foster child is legally protected and provided for on your terms. With it, you can ensure that your foster child is yours in the eyes of the law every bit as much as in your heart.
Parents generally try to treat all their children fairly. We often assume that fairness means leaving an equal inheritance to each child. However, “fair” does not always mean “equal.”