WHEN GOOD ESTATE PLANS GO BAD

Think of your life as a trip. To get where you are going with less effort, let's say you purchase a car. You spend a lot of time figuring out the make and model. Then you buy it and drive it off the lot and forget about it… right?

Nope. To get the best results out of your car, a major purpose, you change your car's oil every 3000 – 5000 miles. You also invest in maintenance and preventative care throughout the life of your vehicle. If you do not do this you are likely to suffer catastrophic failure at an inconvenient time, or worse.

An estate plan is analogous to your car, since it transports people and causes you care about powered by a lifetime of dreams, work, and assets. Great plans, like great cars, should come with warranties and a dedicated service staff to provide diagnostics and service before they are needed urgently, seems to me.

So what does your attorney, CPA, financial planner offer in terms of a warranty for your planning? Hope you call some day? Wait for the phone to ring?

Ask yourself, how do you know that your plan is current? Does it create Success On Purpose? Do you Sleep Well at Night? A glaring example of this uncertainty is that this year, with the sunset of EGTRRA (Economic Growth and Tax Recovery Act) in 2011, and the current tax code in 2010, many families and spouses face potential estate planning disaster.

Our firm developed CLIENTCARE as the best estate plan warranty you can buy, provided by our top estate planning team. Our clients may select an appropriate maintenance level with consideration of their budget. Our annual maintenance program includes "tune-up" services, like reviews and updates on estate planning documents. Even better, our CLIENTCARE members are entitled to call a paralegal or attorney into our office for that "one quick question" for free depending on which level they subscribe for. For some clients, questions needing research or even a meeting might be covered too.

Each year we provide complimentary seminars, workshops and newsletters to help maintain an estate plan, educate fiduciaries, and ensure that everything is simple and easy for those you love when the time comes for them to put the estate plan into action.

Another way that we continue to protect our members through CLIENTCARE is with the DocuBank card. Members are enrolled you in this electronic registry which stores healthcare legal documents such as living wills, durable powers for health care, burial and funeral instructions, privacy waivers and the like that are then available day or night to your health care providers worldwide. We renew DocuBank membership as part of CLIENTCARE -- to make sure our clients are still protected.

So, participation in our CLIENTCARE program has one purpose - to create peace of mind. A plan is kept up to date, and our clients won't leave unfinished business for loved ones with the confidence that we are here for them as their estate planning firm whenever needed. Always.

Now you know what we do for our clients. Our ClientCare Coordinator is Maggie Allen, and she is ready, willing and able to sign any of our clients up or to discuss benefits at any time. Call her at 425-803-9500 or email her at maggie.allen@brislawnlofton.com to sign up.

Even Hippos Require Succession Planning

Seattle zoo's oldest animal euthanized3/26/2010 8:41:42 AM
Associated Press

SEATTLE — Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo has euthanized its oldest animal — a 47-year-old hippo named Gertie — because of normal, age-related physical decline.

The 5,000-pound (2,268-kilogram) hippo has lived at the zoo since 1966. She had osteoarthritis and despite medication, zoo officials say she was having trouble getting around and was in pain.

Zoo officials say hippos can live up to 49 years in zoos. Their life expectancy is 45 years in the wild.


This short news article was followed by a longer one that covered the ways that the zoo developed as "succession plans" to prepare for changes in their hippo community. It is telling that even zoo keepers face the same issues that we face as business owners – no one lives forever, so to be prepared we must simply tackle the nitty-gritty of succession planning.
For publicly held businesses, succession planning is often the major focus of the Board of Directors. For a family-owned business it is rarely done in advance, resulting in squabbles, liquidity and tax problems, and loss of the key family resource for pennies or nothing.
In today's economy, facing serious changes in the estate tax environment, business owners do not have the luxury of avoiding a succession plan for management and ownership. How many of us will take the required action to go see our lawyer, our CPA, to design a plan? Think about it.

WHY LEGALZOOM.COM IS BETTER THAN AN ATTORNEY

Shocked to hear me, an attorney, utter sacrilege like that? Well, they claim that the documents are prepared by "top attorneys" and that you can "do it yourself" in minutes, for only a few dollars. You can be your own attorney without spending three years in law school, taking the bar, and practicing to learn the real ropes!

I recently had an opportunity to check out some LegalZoom documents. One of my friends did some Wills with simple trust planning for his kids. Each spouse left the estate to the other, but if both were deceased, they had a Common Trust for all kids until they turned 21, then money would split into shares that each child would receive in equal installments at 24, 27, and 30. They even had powers of attorney and all the trimmings.

The documents looked pretty "legal." My friend did the plan himself, in an hour or two on the weekend, and only spent a few hundred dollars. He did this rather than go to an attorney for budget reasons and scheduling difficulty given his business and family activities. That is far better than not covering this important issue, so kudos to my friend.

My take on his efforts? I thought that the documents were good from a simplistic technical perspective. I actually kind of liked them as they were well-written and clean.

How did that work compare to what I or one of my estate planning attorney colleagues would do? They were simple. They were not elegant. They did not demonstrate insight, personalization, awareness of core values important to my friends, how these would be woven into the legal documents, or any meaningful guidance into how a trust would be used by guardians of children to raise them to become the adults their parents would be proud of… How about asset protection for adult children to protect inheritance against divorce or bankruptcy? Forget it.

My friend, his wife and I went through a counseling session to identify their goals and concerns. In that session we identified a surprising number of concerns, ideas, and issues that were simply not part of the LZ Will plan.

Result? I was retained to do a comprehensive plan to address all the things that were not part of the LZ plan. We also looked over their investments, retirement planning, insurance coverage, and the separate inheritances each was to get from their own grandparents and parents. I reached out to my friend's advisers and got their help in relooking all these things to make sure that they were properly handled too.

I believe that the practice of law by a good attorney is about far more than preparation of documents. It is about listening, discerning, and identifying core values. It is about understanding what keeps clients awake at night. Then, it is about pulling together resources to resolve those concerns and to put a plan in place. But, even more important, it is about working to keep that plan tuned up so that as things change, it changes. Documents are simple. Wisdom is harder to come by.

 

Need some documents quick, that you pull together yourself? LegalZoom.com might just be the ticket for you.

Want customized solutions built on experience that you can have confidence in? Give your attorney a call, a check, and a hug when they serve you well.