Do You Need Lawyers for Estate Planning?
An estate plan lets you care for your loved ones after death. You’d want to have a properly constructed estate plan that can provide your heirs your hard-earned money and assets. Any mistake will cost time and money for your beneficiaries as they fight through probate court to receive their inheritance.
This is why you need experienced lawyers for estate planning: to ensure that your estate is able to provide for your loved ones according to your wishes. Call our experienced estate planning attorneys in St George UT at Boyack Christiansen Legal Solutions by calling 435-375-3960 to get started with your estate plan today.
Advantages of Having Lawyers for Estate Planning
There are ways that you can create an estate plan by yourself. However, your best bet is always to hire an estate planning lawyer. A tiny mistake can cause your loved ones to miss out on their inheritance or give your assets to someone you did not intend.
There are plenty of good reasons why you should have an estate plan, and having trusted lawyers for estate planning prepare it instead of carrying it out yourself will ensure that your loved ones experience these benefits
Your Beneficiaries Spend Less Money
You may want to create your estate plan by yourself to save on the attorney fees. You may be tempted to just download the forms online and fill them out yourself.
No template can capture the essence of a perfect estate plan. If you make a mistake, there’s a chance that the court won’t recognize your documents.
Your heirs will end up spending more money to fix your mistakes and hiring an estate planning attorney anyway. As this is happening, they won’t be able to get even a cent of their inheritance, which counters the point of an estate plan, which is to financially support your beneficiaries.
Our trusted St George estate planning attorneys can help you create an estate plan that can avoid probate and save your loved ones some money – making inheritance easy for them.
State Laws are Complicated
The US Constitution does say that legal documents have to be recognizable between states. However, there are minute details that vary from state-to-state. State laws can be very particular with who cannot be named in your trust or your will.
You may be thinking that you can simply search all the state laws up when you do it yourself. If you miss something that doesn’t come up on the search engines, it can spell trouble for your beneficiaries.
Our knowledgeable St George lawyers for estate planning know the state and federal laws that apply to your case. If you want your estate plan to abide by the letter of the law, call us now!
It’s Better that your Plan is Tailored to Your Needs
The guides and forms available online are meant to be easily digestible, so they need to be short and simple. The downside is that they cannot capture the complexity of your situation.
There are certain situations, such as being childless, having a recent divorce, or owning real estate in multiple states, among many others, that require specific wording in your estate documents. Otherwise, the IRS or the state’s revenue department can take a sizable amount of your estate.
No estate plan is the same, and no online document can account for all situations. Our skilled St George estate attorneys can take a look at your case and determine how to create your estate plan to fit your needs. Call our office to get started on an estate plan that is tailored for you!
You Cannot Risk Your Estate Plan
Your estate plan is the only way you can ensure that everything you’ve worked for goes to the people you love. If you’re a do-it-yourself-er, you might be tempted to “have a go” at creating your own estate plan using tools available online. But however simple it may seem, the planning process (usually) is not! You’ll have to understand many technical rules and address them skillfully.
Recognize that when you are incapacitated or dead, you don’t get a “do over.” You can’t monitor the process after the fact.
Finally, appreciate the high stakes. A bad strategy can burden your family and needlessly strip thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars from your estate. It’s not just the fees, taxes, and creditor issues, it’s that your loved ones will have to clean up the mess.
Why Work With Our St George Estate Planning Attorneys
Now that you understand why you need lawyers for estate planning, you may be wondering how you can know which estate planning attorney you can trust.
There are a lot of other issues other than just the estate planning documents that may need to be considered in creating your estate plan. These could include debt you are carrying, the makeup of your assets – particularly investment accounts, and retirement accounts. You may also have potential tax issues to consider when setting up a trust or drafting a will.
More than knowledge, your lawyers for estate planning should also possess certain qualities that make them shine above the rest. If you’re looking at prospective attorneys, here’s some qualities that you should look for:
Extensive Experience
Experience is indeed the greatest teacher. An attorney who has been practicing law for many years has a deeper understanding of how estate planning works. Additionally, a person with many years of experience, but in various crafts as well, has a unique perspective that fits well into estate planning. Sometimes there may be a financial tool that would accomplish your estate planning goals in a way that would minimize what you have to pay out-of-pocket.
Our estate planning attorneys have been practicing for many years while also involved in life insurance and securities. Their extensive experience in estate planning and such provides a deep insight into how your estate plan should be crafted to fulfill your last wishes.
As an example, we have a client who has a net worth in excess of $2 million. We were able to take $1.8 million of this money and, using financial products, distribute this to her grandkids without the need of any estate planning documents and with no out-of-pocket costs to her.
Compassionate Representation
Our Utah estate planning attorney in St George has been inside the courtroom countless times. We have litigated trusts and the application of various trust languages. We have undertaken probates of people who had done no planning and have seen the devastation and family problems it can cause. For these reasons, we are passionate about estate planning and seek to help and do the best job we can for their clients.
When do you need to see your estate planning lawyer again?
Congratulations! You have an estate plan. You are done. You have a nice, new, shiny binder full of paperwork that you may or may not understand. You, or your attorney, have sent deeds off to the various County recorders’ offices to change title. You have even gone down to the bank and changed your bank accounts into the name of the trust, or other estate planning vehicle that you may have set up. So now what?
Here are times we recommend that you schedule a meeting with your estate planning attorney:
- Have a regular annual sit-down with your estate planning attorney.
One of the most expensive and difficult things for many people is not having reviewed their estate plan on a regular basis.
After one spouse passes away and there have been substantial changes, it can be time consuming and expensive to restore things to the original intent of the plan. It may involve the costs and delays of probate. Many of these expenses can be avoided with regular plan reviews and updates.
2. A substantial change in the circumstances of your life warrants a meeting with your estate planning attorney.
These include events such as death or adoption of a child, the death of a spouse, the acquisition of new significant assets, or the desire to divest yourself of assets or change asset classification such as liquidating a home to purchase an RV.
3. You should also review your estate plan if your planning was done while you still had minor children.
Perhaps you should amend and name one of your children as successor trustee.
4. If there has been a significant change in the lives of one of your children you should review your plan.
Many times, a child develops difficulties, such as addiction, divorce, or bankruptcy that may require some adjustments to your estate plan.
This will prevent your assets from being wasted or seized by being given outright to that particular child out of the trust upon your death.
Get a Consultation with our St George Estate Planning Lawyers!
There are online self-help resources for estate planning you can read up on if you want to do your own estate planning. There are a lot more risks and downsides to this compared to hiring an estate planning attorney. Not to mention the potential thousands of dollars your beneficiaries will shoulder to correct your mistake just because you want to save a few bucks from hiring an attorney.
Don’t let that happen to your loved ones. Take action now.
We would like to offer you a estate planning consultation as a gift for taking the time to consider our propositions and ideas. Call our St George Utah law firm to avail of this and get started on planning your estate!
