Estate Planning Attorney Williamsburg: 4 Common Mistakes To Avoid

Estate planning is all about ensuring your assets, interests, and loved ones are well protected and taken care of long after you are gone. However, due to both lack of oversight and to financial planning mistakes, you can unintentionally diminish the financial legacy you leave behind if you’re not careful. Mistakes are actually very common. If you are in or around Williamsburg, working with an estate planning attorney such as Walt Zaremba of Zaremba Law can help protect you from the following mistakes.

Don’t let your financial wishes become impeded by poor planning or other mistakes, including:

#1: Financial Procrastination

Few people take stock and consider their life, and mortality, with a long-term financial perspective. In particular, young people often mistakenly assume that wills, powers of attorney, etc. are all documents they won’t have to worry about until they are elderly. However, the result of procrastination in creating a legal estate plan is that, as of 2017, 58% of U.S. adults lack estate plan documents such as wills or living trusts.

Probably the biggest mistake people make is that they simply don’t make an estate plan in the first place. What does this specifically mean for people financially? It means, among other things, that you are A) letting the state determine how your assets are allocated, B) leaves your elder care desires unspecified, for if you become incapacitated in some way, and C) it burdens your children and other potential heirs to determining how your estate is to be divvied up, which often causes familial strife. At a bare minimum, everyone should at least have a will and a financial power of attorney dictating who is legally mandated to make decisions on your behalf should be become incapacitated.

Your estate plan should also have a living will, which specifies your end-of-life medical care preferences, to relieve your loved ones from the burden of guessing what you would have wanted.

#2: Unnecessarily Triggering Estate Tax

When wealthy people die, they may inadvertently create a taxable event for their heirs without proper planning. While you could go out and study the laws and craft a plan for yourself, it’s best to work with a professional estate planning lawyer to help you plan your estate with potential exemptions and financial strategies that can help ensure that your beneficiaries receive the bulk of your estate.

#3: Naming Your Children As Joint Owners of Your Assets

Another common mistake people make with estate planning is assigning one’s children as joint owners of your assets. Doing so may give their credits access to your estate! It’s better to instead give your child power of attorney and make them a payable-on-death beneficiary of your brokerage accounts to keep the money from being siphoned away from them by their creditors.

#4: Not Updating Wills & Other Documents Regularly

Many of the people who do make an estate plan fail to update it regularly. An estate plan is not something you do once when you are 40 and then forget about it. It’s crucial that you continue to update your estate plan following events including births, deaths, marriage, etc. If you have an estate plan but it hasn’t been updated in five or so years, it’s a good idea to review it with your family and certainly with your lawyer.