Estate Planning
Estate Planning
Estate Planning simply means planning for who will get your property and assets after you, protecting your hard-earned wealth for generations to come. You can care for your loved ones and protect them from potentially difficult legal processes by planning for the future of your estate now. Creating a will and trust today will give you peace of mind knowing you’ve avoided costly probate litigation in the future, enabling your loved ones to be cared for and to carry out your wishes after you’re gone.
"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."
- Pablo Picasso
Wills & Trusts
If you don’t prepare a will, trust, or other document to govern your property when you’re gone, you risk passing on to your loved ones a potentially complicated and expensive legal process with your estate.
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To make things easier for your loved ones, you can prepare a simple will, signed and witnessed in accordance with state law. Creating a will is relatively inexpensive and can potentially give you all the control you want over your estate when you pass. A will alone, however, does have to be probated, or approved through the court, to be valid.
To avoid probate, you can create a trust in addition to a will. A trust is more adaptable than a will since it continues to exist after its creator dies. A trust is an independent entity managed by a “trustee” for the benefit of people named as “beneficiaries”. A trust avoids probate and some of the messes that might come with it (like contested wills), and provides much more flexibility in how assets are used.
