Estate planning meetings often lead to some pretty morbid conversations about life and death.
“What if I get crushed by a boulder after I leave your office?”
As a professional, I try not to respond with a flippant remark that may come across poorly.
“Around these parts, you are much more likely to be eaten by a bear.”
This leads us to rule number one with regards to avoiding probate – not dying early.
A longer life leads to increased opportunities to perfect your estate plan. A recent New York Times article listed five lifestyle behaviors that positively impact longevity: regular exercise, a healthy diet, foregoing smoking, limiting alcohol and maintaining meaningful relationships. Possessing certain genetic traits linked with longer life spans may also contribute, but that is out of your control.
Hitting all five behaviors for two weeks and bragging about your clean bill of health is not the answer. It is a life-long process involving treadmills, reading ingredients, and not hanging up on your friends.
Comparing your life with understood longevity behaviors allows you to plan accordingly. If genetics and lifestyle are pointing you in a certain direction, then your estate planning may have to recognize that fact.
Drafting a Trust early may be the right move. Setting up transfer-on-death accounts instead of leaving assets under your name alone may be a good idea. An early death may leave many plans undone, including your estate plan.
For those with longevity on their side, here is how it works: You forgot to make that Trust when you turned 50? Make it at 60. Sixty did not work out so well? Try 70. More time (and the ability to conquer procrastination) allows you to fill in your estate planning gaps to avoid probate. You can organize beneficiary statements and ensure financial accounts and real estate pass to heirs by operation of law.
Youth and simple estate plans go hand-in-hand. Couples with young children establish basic wills drafted to name guardians of minor children and direct assets to the surviving spouse and children. These basic wills often remain the default estate plan for a family for decades. This gets tricky if a family member dies young. Deaths occurring between 40 and 65 often present probate issues, because property and assets may not be titled well and Trusts may not have been set up.
Estate planning placed on the back burner during one’s working years can have a negative effect on survivors.
Life insurance is one way to provide heirs with non-probate assets, should something happen during your working years. IRAs and 401Ks also have named beneficiaries, which avoids court intervention. Jointly-held assets would also avoid probate.
Your estate planning attorneys want you to be OK and live a long time. We want to be able to amend your Revocable Trust as many times as it takes to make you happy.
Alan D. Feller, Esq., is managing partner of The Feller Group, located at 625 Route 6, Mahopac. He can be reached at alandfeller@thefellergroup.com.
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