Ten Life Events That Signal It’s Time to Review Your Estate Plan - Part 1

Maybe you thought that creating a Will or Trust is something you can do once and then your family and assets are protected forever after. It seems to be how most lawyers structure their services, so it wouldn’t be surprising if you did think this. You work with your lawyer, they draft documents, you bring them home in a binder or notebook, put them on a shelf or in a drawer, and you never hear from them again. Estate plan, done. But, it’s not, and thinking of it that way could leave your family with a big mess when something happens to you.

In reality, life events can drastically affect your estate plan and even cause your plan not to work in the way you intended. To make sure your plan remains up to date throughout your life, we recommend reviewing your plan at a minimum of every three years. Because we are so passionate about this, we offer to review our clients' plans every three years for free.

Protect Your Family From Wealth's Dark Side with a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust

When you create your estate plan, the idea that one of your adult children would ever use their inheritance to bankroll a cult is probably something you’d never dream of, much less anticipate. Yet that’s exactly what 40-year-old Clare Bronfman, heiress to the multi-billion-dollar Seagram’s fortune, did with hers. In the end, her inheritance — and the power that came with it — led her down a dark path that seems almost too outlandish to be true.

In May of 2019, Clare pled guilty to felony charges of harboring an illegal alien and fraudulent use of a deceased person’s identity as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors. The charges stem from her role as an executive board member of Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ee-um), a group that prosecutors described as a “deeply manipulative pyramid scheme” that forced some of its members to endure slave-like conditions and even have sex with the group’s leader and founder, Keith Raniere.

Had she gone to trial for her involvement with Nxivm, Clare would have faced up to 25 years in prison. But given her plea, on September 30, 2020, she was only sentenced to 6 years, 9 months in prison. Following Clare’s plea, Raniere, 58, was found guilty in June on seven felony counts, including racketeering and sex trafficking. On October 27, 2020, Raniere was sentenced to 120 years incarceration in federal prison and a $1.75 million fine. His conviction comes following a six-week trial that exposed the world to Nxivm’s sordid inner workings and put wealth’s dark side on full display.

Protect Your Children's Inheritance with a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust (LAPT)

As a parent, you’re likely hoping to leave your children an inheritance. In fact, doing so may be one of the primary factors motivating your life’s work. But without taking the proper precautions, the wealth you pass on is at serious risk of being accidentally lost or squandered due to common life events, such as divorce, serious debt, devastating illness, and unfortunate accidents.

In some cases, a sudden inheritance windfall can even wind up doing your kids more harm than good.

Three Simple Mistakes That Can Derail Your Estate Plan

While it might seem simple enough to put together a trust online or have your tax attorney prepare your will, it can be very difficult to create an estate plan that works without the proper training and experience. What might seem like minor details to the inexperienced eye can often have major effects on your plan’s final outcome.

More often than not, clients who meet with us to review a DIY plan find out that instead of saving money on their estate plan, they’ve actually cost themselves much more by buying a plan that has mistakes or does not take tax consequences into account. And if these mistakes or tax consequences aren’t caught by you while you’re alive and well, your loved ones will be the ones paying the price to resolve them after you’re gone.

Here are the three biggest mistakes we see when reviewing DIY and low-cost estate plans:

Keep the Government and Lawsuit Happy Opportunists Away From Your Children’s Inheritance

If you have a current estate plan, we’ll bet you plan to leave your assets to your children outright and unprotected by age 35, or maybe a little later. Go take a look at your estate plan, and see what it does right now. And, if you don’t have an estate plan, and you have kids or other people you care about, contact us today and let’s get that handled for you.

If you do have a plan and it distributes your assets outright to your kids -- even in stages, over time, some at 25, then half of what’s left at 30, and balance at 35 (or something along those lines), you’ve overlooked an incredibly valuable gift you can give your children (and the rest of your descendants for generations); a gift that only you can give them. And a gift that, once you’ve died and left them their inheritance outright, is lost and cannot be reclaimed.

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