Articles

The Gift of Estate Planning - by Vaughan de Kirby

Estate Planning is a gift to those you love most.

The time, money and care you put into your estate plan isn’t for you. Your plan won’t really take effect until you die, at which point money will probably not be high on your list of concerns.

Estate planning is a gift you give to those you love. It is an opportunity to show the most important people in your life that you love them, and that you want to take care of them at one of the most crushingly difficult times in their lives. Estate planning allows you one final chance to care for your family, but in order for it to work, you have to start now.

For an estate plan to work, it must reflect a person’s the current situation—personal, financial, familial and spiritual—at the time of death. But no one knows when that will be, so estate planning must be a continuous process. That’s why a Personal Family Attorney isn’t just some lawyer that you visit once and never see again. Your Personal Family Attorney must be part of the most significant changes in your life—as you have children, as your children get older, as you acquire more assets, even as your outlook on life changes. Your estate plan must change with your life, and your attorney is there to help.

If your estate plan remains the same, it will fail, simple as that. When your estate plan fails, your family must not only cope with losing you, but must also sort through the endless complications of figuring out what you left behind, and what to do with it. They must turn over a great deal of your accumulated wealth to the government and third parties. Rather than leaving them a gift, you will leave them a mess.

This is a nightmare scenario, no question about it. But this nightmare is not a remote possibility. Without an estate plan that changes with your life, it’s an inevitability. Trust me, it happens far too often, and it happens to successful, organized people who have the best of intentions.

So don’t contact a personal family lawyer for yourself. Your estate plan isn’t for you. It’s for those who matter most in your life—those you want to make sure are taken care of when you’re gone.