Four Easy Ways to Review Your Estate Plan
There are many reasons why it is important to keep your estate plan up to date. Changes in family circumstances – such as the birth, death, or marriage of a family member, changes in your financial situation – such as a new job or the sale or purchase of real estate, and changes in the law, all affect your estate planning goals.
It is important that your documents reflect your current life situation and support your long-term goals. Here are four simple things you can do now to protect your family.
- Will. If you have children, make sure you have a will that includes a guardianship clause. This is an easy, inexpensive way to create peace of mind for you and your family, and to ensure that you – not the state – decide who would raise your children in the event of your unplanned death.
- Revocable Living Trust. . Consider creating a revocable trust to better protect your property and your beneficiaries by providing for a more efficient, less expensive, and less public distribution of your assets.
- Divorce clause. Review your wills and trusts to make sure you have a divorce clause to protect you in the event of an unforeseen divorce. This may not be comfortable to consider, but you want to make sure that, if you get divorced, your former spouse’s family members may be removed as beneficiaries, trustees, power holders.
- Beneficiary designations. Review all your life insurance policies and all your retirement accounts to ensure you have the proper beneficiary designations in place. This is especially important if you have a newer job because the person you designated when you had your first job out of school may not be the person you would designate today.
Fournier Legal Services has been a customer-service oriented, technology-based, paperless law firm from the day we opened, and we are uniquely positioned to help our clients navigate the current environment. For any questions related to Business Law or Estate Planning, please contact us by calling 860.670.3535 or emailing info@jeflegal.com.
Joseph E. Fournier is an Attorney and a CPA who has more than twenty years of experience in a variety of business legal matters, including start-ups and company formations, drafting shareholder and operating agreements, contracts, employment law, commercial litigation, tax planning and audit defense, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). He also handles estate planning matters, such as business succession planning, wills, trusts, and probate.