If have you ever dealt with a parent's or loved one's estate, financial affairs or Michigan probate, you most likely know what a pain it is to administer their estate, clean up their affairs, and locate important documents and records. I wanted to provide you some straightforward easily digestible advice on how make sure you don't leave your loved ones in a lurch.First and foremost, you must get organized. You should begin creating a list of all your assets, liabilities, accounts, passwords. Compile all of your records in one place and make sure they are safe and that your proposed personal representative, trustee, or whoever will handle you affairs when you pass, knows where to locate your documents.
The next step is to identify what your goals are with regard to when you become incapacitated or pass away. Do you want to protect your assets in case you go into a Michigan nursing home? Do you want to protect your children from poor financial choices with your inheritance? Do you want to avoid the hassle, stress, cost of Michigan probate? Do you want to provide for your pets to be taken care of and not euthanized? There are many difficult decisions to take into account. We can provide you a list of some of the items to think about with regard to Michigan estate planning. Just contact us using the contact form on this page.
Third, you need to select your team of advisors including your Michigan estate planning lawyer or Michigan elder law attorney. Your attorney will assist you, along with your accountant and financial professional in matching the legal environment to your goals to create an individualized Michigan estate plan to meet your goals. Through meeting with your Michigan estate planning professionals, you will have a Michigan estate plan that may include living trusts, wills, general durable powers of attorney, health care powers of attorney, HIPAA authorizations and living wills. Though Michigan statute does not recognize a living will.
Next, there should be a review of how your assets are titled. For example, who is the beneficiary of your life insurance? Should it be titled into the trusts or should the life insurance go outright to beneficiaries? What about the IRA's and 401k's? These are all questions and items that will be reviewed with your Michigan estate planning attorney and the rest of your estate planning team.
Next, it is important to speak with all of your family members about what decisions you made and how your Michigan estate plan will be implemented and how it will take effect. If our clients are interested, we have a "family meeting" where we have our clients bring in any family members or children to answer any questions in a round table format so that all of the loved ones and beneficiaries are on the same page.
Last, you need to review your estate plan annually once completed. There can be changes in your family situation, changes in Michigan or Federal law, or changes in the tax laws. Any changes could have drastic effects on your estate plan. We bring our clients in every year as a part of our Foundations program to ensure that their estate plan is just effective the day they signed there documents as it is the day the the documents take effect.
The key to Michigan estate planning is taking action. You can't wait until the day you need an estate plan to start thinking about estate planning.
-Christopher J. Berry, Esq.
Michigan Estate Planning Attorney
