Tips to make an estate plan
Dear Readers: Many of you have not created an estate plan. Many others already have estate plans that haven’t been looked at for a long time. When considering your estate plan, the most important decisions to make are who should be your successor trustees, executors, attorneys-in-fact and health care agents.
Rule 1: If the trustees or executors you select aren’t good with their own money, they won’t be any good with yours. We’re not saying they should be well off. It’s qualification enough to live within one’s means.
Rule 2: A trustee of a trust, an executor of a will or an or attorneys-in-fact under a Durable Power of Attorney should be honest, moderately organized and diplomatic, the latter qualification being the most important. An important goal in a trust administration or probate is to get the beneficiaries to cooperate and agree to waive an accounting. This saves everyone time and money.
It’s also important to recognize that sometimes you cannot avoid problems within your family when you are gone. It may be a good idea to name a bank or trust company as trustee, even though there will be added expense. Another alternative is to name a Professional Fiduciary as trustee or executor. Professional Fiduciaries are regulated by the state and they won’t be sloppy about it. Administering trusts and estates is that they do as a career.
Naming health care agents on your Advance Health Care Directive is even more important, as it is a matter of your life and death. To put it bluntly, your health care agent is likely to be called on to tell the doctors to let you live or die. If your health care agent disagrees with your decisions regarding life sustaining treatment, he or she can override your stated wishes, even if you have instructed your physicians to not resuscitate you. They can do this is because you’ll be incapacitated at the time and your doctors don’t want to get sued.
One more point about advance health care directives is if you know what you want done with your remains, add it in.
Len Tillem and Rosie McNichol are elder law attorneys. Contact them at Tillem McNichol & Brown, 846 Broadway, Sonoma, CA 95476, (707) 996-4505, www.lentillem.com.