Addiitional Questions About Your Estate Plan

In our previous post we shared three important questions about estate plans that people often don't consider.

Here are some additional questions, all of which are relevant to estate planning and can be addressed in your estate plan:

• What happens if you all die in plane crash, where will your assets go?
• What can you do to protect assets for your disabled child?
• Can your son who you haven’t spoken to in years contest your Will?
• Who will take care of your dog after you die?
• Where should you keep your estate planning documents?
• When do you want life support to be pulled?

Do I need to do estate planning with an attorney?

Most people will benefit from a properly drafted estate plan. Even if a person has modest assets, the other documents created in the estate planning process, such as the durable power of attorney for financial matters, and the durable power of attorney for health care, are of great benefit in assisting a person's family in administering his or her affairs should he or she become ill or incapacitated. Beyond that, a will, or in many cases, a trust, is very helpful in creating an orderly way for assets to pass when someone dies.

As far as using an attorney is concerned, while it is true that many of the documents that an estate planning attorney will use can be found in very simple form in a bookstore or online, these documents, when used by a non-lawyer, will not be able to encompass the complexities of particular individual situations, and may contain \"boiler plate\" language that is not at all what the person intended. In addition, these forms may not even be valid in the state where the person using them resides.