When You’re Gone…Your Estate Should be Easy

If there is anything that should be of primary concern when you put together your Estate Plan it would be to make things easy on your loved ones when you are gone. After all, one primary purposes of an Estate Plan is to carry you’re your wishes and desires in the easiest way possible without ambiguity and with love. Making it easy for your loved ones isn’t difficult if it is built into the planning process.

Often times there are conflicts among family members…outside of your wishes and desires. It just happens within families…its part of life. This conflict can be escalated or diffused based on how your Estate Plan is designed. We highly recommend that this should be a major consideration when putting your plan together.

Sometimes the friction is the unavoidable result of family members arguing over their portions of the estate. This can be avoided or eliminated with a very clear, well defined Estate Plan that lists all of your tangible and intangible assets and who specifically will inherit these as a part of your wishes. However, there are other reasons friction can exist at this time…often times because of personal issues among family members. These are generally more complicated to handle but can be effectively handled in your planning efforts as well.   

For example, you can define how you would like to see certain relationships as part of your last wishes. By defining these out in a very specific manner you can share your thoughts and feelings with your loved ones and allow them to see how deeply you feel about their relationships with one another. Then by being very purposeful and specific about how you and why you are distributing your assets in a certain way you can help alleviate many conflicts and misunderstandings.

If you would like things to go as smoothly as possible for your family, there are a few things you should know about estate planning, as The Register-Guard discussed in "Final farewell needs to fare well."

As you probably know by now, if you don’t have an estate plan, or beneficiary designations, or no surviving joint owners, your estate will go through probate court. A judge will appoint someone to be your personal representative and your assets will be distributed, according to the laws of your state. You and your family won’t have any choice in the matter. This is one of the primary ways to actually “create” conflict among family members because the court has no idea what your true wishes are so your assets end up being distributed according to the judge’s analysis.

Even if you have created a will your estate still has to go through probate.  However, with a will you get to decide who your personal representative will be and how your property will be distributed. Being a personal representative can be difficult, so many families need to hire attorneys to help get through the probate process.

The most efficient way to avoid all this from happening is to invest the time to create a detailed Estate Plan that will allow you to specifically distribute your assets to your loved ones…and explain why you are doing what you are doing. This is usually accomplished by creating and funding a Revocable Living Trust. This does not have to go through probate. And with a trust you still get to decide who will be in charge of managing the process and how all of your assets will be distributed. We believe this is the best method of Estate Planning to avoid the conflicts among family members and to see your wishes are carried out the way you want.