3 Mistakes To Avoid When Planning Your Estate

MISTAKE #1 –Choosing a lawyer who will charge you outrageously high hourly rates for simple services.

Many lawyers will lure you in with “cheap” basic services and then proceed to rack up the fees as they execute planning services which really should have been covered by the flat fee.

When you’re investigating flat fee services from a lawyer, here are some simple questions to ask:
• Are all of your fees flat fees?
• What about ongoing work after the initial completion of my estate plan documents?
• What happens when I call with legal questions 2 years after my planning documents were completed?
• What if the questions are about something other than my estate plan?
You need to be satisfied by the answers you receive to these questions, as they often sneak up on families’ after-the-fact, and can be a major drain on your family’s cash flow.

MISTAKE #2– Not ensuring there is a plan in place for regular communication as your family and the law change.

Here are a couple of the problems I’ve seen in this area.

What happens when things change in your family? When there is no previously agreed upon plan for communication when the laws inevitably change or when your family changes, your estate plan can become useless. Make sure that your lawyer will notify you when, in fact, there are changes to the tax or legal code, and that they keep in regular communication with you otherwise. Most don’t.

Does the planning fee include a regular review of your plan? If not, then you’ll be faced with having to initiate reviews yourself, and having to pay additional fees. In fact, the optimum scenario is when a lawyer will provide you with some sort of “estate planning maintenance” program, or membership program for ongoing services – which will save you money and give you peace-of-mind over the course of your family’s life. With some form of a membership program, you pay a small monthly fee and receive ongoing benefits and have periodic reviews of your plans to make sure they are up to date and will work when your family needs them.

MISTAKE #3– Working with a lawyer who fails to give you a written guarantee, or runs a “Find-and-Replace” documents driven practice.

The toughest thing in the world is to get a lawyer to put a promise of theirs in writing. Do you have a planning lawyer that guarantees their work…in WRITING? Many lawyers run a wills and trust practice as a branch of their “regular” practice. The result for you is that you don’t get an expert in the field and the lawyer looks at your plan like a commodity. They’ll pick Plan “A” from the shelf, change the names and move on. You also want a lawyer who will work with you as a trusted advisor to provide you with a plan that meets all of your goals today, tomorrow and in the future. This includes customizing your estate plan to protect assets that you leave your children from legal challenges in the future. Will your lawyer structure your estate plan so that whatever you leave to your kids will be protected from a lawsuit against them or if they are divorced in the future? How often does the lawyer build that kind of planning into client’s plans? These are essential questions, which too often go unanswered.

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Kinsey Law Group, P.C. was formed to focus on the needs of families.  We are dedicated to assisting you in the areas of Estate Planning and Assisted Reproduction/Surrogacy.  If you have questions or concerns, you’re invited to call 301-968-1630 or send an e-mail any time, without cost or obligation.

Locations: Montgomery County (Bethesda, Maryland); Prince George’s County (Largo, Maryland) and Washington, D.C.

 

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