Estate Planning
Estate planning involves developing a strategy to deal with your assets and investments after you die. It aims to provide peace of mind for you and your loved ones, ensuring that your assets are passed on to your beneficiaries in the most simple and effective way. One of the hardest times for any family is when a major pillar of the household has fallen through demise or being incapacitated.
Positive Outcomes of Estate Planning
As expressed in the paragraph above, it is even harder when the particular individual has left wealth or estates unplanned for the descendants. This leads to squabbles among family members who each feel entitled to a part of the cake. Now Estate Planning has developed strategies to tackle situations like dis which turns out to be positive otherwise called benefits.
1. Peace For Everyone
This is perhaps the most important aspect of estate planning, ensuring that you have planned your wealth when it comes to inheritance ensures that you not only have a peace of mind but that there is peace in your family. This is of more value than the wealth itself working towards maintaining relationships. Peace in the family ensures that people are able to work in contentment even after you are gone.
2. Having Goals Met
One of the many options when it comes to estate planning is creating a living trust that is flexible enough to have your goals met. It is an ideal time to ensure that some of the unfinished tasks in the family are done on your part. A living trust allows you to stipulate the conditions of an inheritance and provides a clause that only when a certain task is fulfilled, can a person have access to wealth from the deceased. This allows you as the person making the will to have the upper hand when it comes to safeguarding the interests of the family as well as your own.
3. Best Decision-Making:
Estate planning allows you to make very good decisions concerning your property since an estate planning Lawyer is involved. It is the duty of the Lawyerto take the client through all the available options and finally recommend the best for execution.
4. Ensuring Growth in Posterity:
This is also one of the best ways to ensure that your property is used and run by capable persons. A will like the living trust allows you absolute power to put a well capable person in charge of the estate in case you are not available in any way. It also ensures that you have total control of who gets the property.
Element of Estate Planning
There are four main elements of estate planning, which include drawing up a will, a living will and healthcare power of attorney, a financial power of attorney, and in some cases, a trust.
Wills
A will outline your wishes for the assets that you own at your passing. It allows you to name the people to whom you wish you give these assets, and without one, your assets will immediately go to your first family member. Having a will in place will give you peace of mind knowing that your assets are going to whom you want them to and knowing that your financial affairs are in order. It will also mitigate the risk of an administrative mess for those left behind.
Healthcare Directive and Living Will
A Healthcare Power of Attorney (HPOA) is a signed legal document in which you name a single person as your healthcare decision maker in the event that you can’t make decisions yourself. A living will, also known as an advanced medical directive, outlines your wishes regarding medical care in the event that you are incapacitated, terminally ill, or unable to communicate. This is a statement of your wishes as they relate to decisions about life support and any kind of life-sustaining medical intervention that you want or don’t want.
Financial Power of Attorney
A Financial Power of Attorney outlines who you want to make your financial decisions on your behalf should you become incapacitated. Without this document, no one will have the authority to step in and handle bill-paying, investment decisions, and other financial matters. You don’t want these things left up to the courts; therefore it’s imperative to give that authority to the person that you select. Like the Healthcare Power of Attorney, it’ best to get this document at the same time as your will.
Get help
If you would like to learn more about the necessity of estate planning, any one of our estate planning attorneys would be happy to assist you.
