Probate: What It Is & How To Avoid It—Part 1

Unless you’ve created a proper estate plan when you die many of your assets must first pass through the court process known as probate before those assets can be distributed to your heirs. Like most court proceedings, probate can be time-consuming, costly, and open to the public, and because of this, avoiding probate—and keeping your family out of court—is a central goal of most estate plans.

During probate, the court supervises a number of different legal actions, all of which are aimed at finalizing your affairs and settling your estate. Although we’ll discuss them more in-depth below, probate typically consists of the following processes:

How to Pass Down Your Family Wealth Legacy During The Holidays

As you likely already know, but may not have given much thought about, the most important inheritance you provide is so much more than the money you’ll leave behind, but also includes your values, insights, stories, and experience. And, while those things are being passed on happenstance on the daily, we know that intentionally creating a Family Wealth Legacy requires more than happenstance. That’s why as a Personal Family Lawyer®, part of our unique planning process is to capture your legacy in recorded form through something we call a Family Wealth Legacy Interview.

With Tax Laws in Flux: What Should You Do Now?

Due to the time, it takes to plan and execute some of the financial and estate planning actions we’d support you with, we suggest you start strategizing now. However, please note that we expect to be quite busy with those who do decide to take action before year’s end, so please contact us as soon as possible to get onto the calendar, if you intend to make changes to your estate plan this year.

That way, you’ll have plenty of time to take appropriate action before the end of 2021. In addition, whether you will be impacted by any of these proposed changes or not, if you know that this is the time to get your affairs in order and have trusted guidance to do so, please contact us, your Personal Family Lawyer® as well, so we can get your planning handled before year’s end. Now is the time to get started.

Last week in part one, we discussed the new bill’s proposed changes to tax rates and estate planning vehicles, including several different types of trusts. Here, in part two, we’ll focus on what you should do now, given that the tax law is in flux and we may not have clear answers until close to the end of the year.