Legacy Assurance Plan: estate plan wishes

Monday, July 10, 2017

Your Estate Plan Caregiver | Working to Make Sure Your Wishes are Honored

Summary: Caregivers and the people for whom they care often have very close contact. This closeness may create a desire in that patient to include a caregiver in his/her estate plan. Whether the caregiver is a relative or a non-relative, this objective can be challenging sometimes, and requires careful estate planning to ensure that the goals are reached.

For many people, they may spend more time with their caregivers than with all of their children and grandchildren combined. Naturally, this closeness of proximity can lead to personal closeness sometimes. In those situations, patient may come to view a caregiver as an extension of his/her family and wanted to include a distribution to the caregiver in his/her estate plan.

If that caregiver is a non-relative, you may decide you want to include him/her in your plan. If that caregiver is a relative, such as a child or a grandchild, your plan may already include that relative, but you might decide you want to honor your relationship with that relative by giving him/her a larger portion of your wealth than your other children/grandchildren.

In this, as with any non-traditional estate plan objective, there are two things that are key: communication and careful planning. In many families, it may be helpful to sit down with all of your immediate family and explain your planning objectives and why they are what they are. Remind your family of all the time and effort your caregiver has expended and selflessness he/she has shown, and explain why it means so much to you to honor that in your plan. The laws in some states have been changed to make estate plan contents much easier for the challenger to win where the beneficiary in dispute is a caregiver. (Illinois, for example, made changes to its laws in 2015 that make it very easy for a relative to win a contest against a caregiver if the distribution the caregiver was to receive amounted to more than $20,000.)

Planning is also vital. If you are planning to create an uneven distribution among relatives (such as favoring a caregiver child/grandchild over other children/grandchildren,) or making a distribution to a non-relative caregiver, there may be ways to increase your odds of accomplishing your goals successfully. In some states, it may help you to use a living trust in your estate plan. In most places, living trusts generally offer more privacy than traditional wills and are generally harder to contest successfully than wills. If you anticipate a challenge (even after communicating with your loved ones,) this tool may be helpful to achieving your goals.

In other states, though, other techniques may be preferable. As noted above, some states (like Illinois in 2015) have altered their laws to make it somewhat difficult for a patient’s plan to reward a caregiver to survive a plan contest. In states like that, your estate planning attorney may have important advice on how to achieve your desires. You may be able to reduce the odds of a successful challenge by creating written documentation that establishes proof that you were competent and that your plan represents your genuine desires, free of any duress, fraud or undue influence. Alternately, your attorney may be able to suggest other options, such as providing a gift to your caregiver during your lifetime, which would avoid the pitfalls of these new laws (as they generally apply only to death transfers...

In the end, this type of plan requires many of the same things that most any plan does: clear communication, careful planning and working with the right experienced estate planning attorney.

This article is published by the Legacy Assurance Plan and is intended for general informational purposes only. Some information may not apply to your situation. It does not, nor is it intended, to constitute legal advice. You should consult with an attorney regarding any specific questions about probate, living probate or other estate planning matters. Legacy Assurance Plan is an estate planning services-company and is not a lawyer or law firm and is not engaged in the practice of law. For more information about this and other estate planning matters visit our website at www.legacyassuranceplan.comwww.legacyassuranceplan.com.

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Legacy Assurance Plan

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Thursday, June 8, 2017

Don’t Rely on Other Mechanisms | Get an Estate Plan to Express Your Wishes

Summary: An estate plan is an important piece of planning that almost everyone needs. Your legacy is too important to leave open to uncertainty and allowing uncertainty to enter the picture when it comes to your estate can lead to stress, expense and perhaps the need for courtroom litigation. By getting a comprehensive plan, you can to do everything possible to minimize these risks and uncertainties.

If you’ve read much about estate planning, you know that just about everyone needs a plan. You may also know that certain groups of people have things in their lives that make planning especially important for them. A couple of these groups can include people with blended families and people with non-traditional relationships. Procrastination can often lead to problems, especially as you get older. A court case decided last year offers a clear illustration of these things and what can go wrong when you don’t plan properly.

Richard’s family situation, in some ways, was not unlike many others. As a young man, he had gone overseas and served in war. He came home, went to college and got married. He and his wife had two children, a son and a daughter. Eventually, he and his wife divorced. Sometime later, he married again and had three more children. He and his second wife also divorced.

In other ways, though, Richard’s situation was not typical. Richard and his second wife eventually reconciled and resumed living together in the summer of 2012. They even discussed remarriage with the reverend of the church where they attended together, but they just never got around to setting a date

In addition to legally remarrying his wife, another thing that Richard didn’t get around to doing was creating an estate plan. By the fall of 2013, Richard became ill and was hospitalized. By mid-December, Richard was seriously ill. At that time, he and his wife had a wedding in the hospital. While the couple’s reverend provided the couple with the sacrament of marriage, there was no marriage license. The reverend had gone ahead with the ceremony to give Richard some “closure” regarding something Richard regretted procrastinating and not completing while he was still healthy.

Less than a week after the ceremony, Richard died. When he died, Richard had no estate plan. Richard’s daughter by his first marriage opened a probate case file. She listed four heirs at law: herself, her brother and her two surviving half-siblings. The wife filed a motion in the case, asking the court to declare her to be Richard’s surviving spouse and, as such, an heir.

The dispute went before an Assistant Clerk of Court, who ruled that, because the marriage wasn’t legal, the wife wasn’t an heir. The wife appealed to Superior Court, but lost again, as that court also ruled that she was merely an ex-spouse.

She took her case all the way to the Court of Appeals, where she finally won. While, under the laws of their state, the reverend committed a misdemeanor by performing the ceremony without the license, that didn’t change the fact that the ceremony complied with all of the requirements of state law. The lack of the license didn’t invalidate their marriage and the wife was legally na heir to her late husband’s estate.

They key to take away from this is: an estate plan could have saved this family all of this time, stress and expense. With an estate plan, Richard could have clearly expressed his intentions for his legacy by stating exactly how much he wanted to leave for his wife, for his children and for everyone in his life. With a will or a living trust, you can leave your wealth to anyone you want… even an ex-spouse. If Richard had a valid estate plan, their marital status might not have been such an important legal issue, because the wife would have been entitled to receive her distribution under Richard’s plan regardless of whether they were legally married or legally divorced.