DIY Estate Planning
I try to reserve this space for light and silly musings on whatever crosses my mind, but y’all have pushed me to a more serious topic.
Lately, I have had a spate of people who have come into my law office with wills that a deceased relative has created via a fill-in-the-blanks computer program. Every single one of these has a problem with it.
If you want to cheap out, buy off-brand Cheerios or t-shirts. Don’t fool around with estate planning. You try to save a couple hundred here, it’s going to cost your heirs that couple hundred plus some to fix the DIY goofs you made.
Seriously. I hire an electrician to do electrical work, a plumber to do plumbing, a car mechanic to fix my car. Hire a lawyer to do law work. There’s a reason why law school is three years, and why experienced lawyers call lawyers who have been practicing for less than five years ‘baby lawyers.’ It takes a looooooooooong time to figure this stuff out.
You wouldn’t buy a DIY appendix removal kit. Why would you buy a DIY estate planning kit?
Some major mistakes I’ve seen:
Not waiving bond, and then the named executor not qualifying for the bond. (What’s bond? Not giving away all my hard earned secrets for free, babycakes.)
Not waiving inventory and return, and then the executor has to file a whole bunch of useless paperwork that costs money.
Not indicating per stirpes or per capita[1] and then all hell breaking loose when someone predeceases the person who wrote the will.
Giving someone a house and not talking about who gets the mortgage.
And the signatures—oh my, the signatures. Yes, the notary has to be there when the witnesses sign. Yes, the witnesses on the self-proving affidavit have to be the same witnesses on the body of the will. Don’t understand what I’m talking about? EXACTLY.
You want to give your grandson your car? That’s great. That’s generous. But what happens when you sell that car and buy another. Does it mean that your grandson gets the car you replaced it with or the money you got for selling the car or nothing at all? Bet there’s no fill in the blank for that.
Naming two executors that live eight hundred miles away from each other and not considering how impossible it is to get two signatures on everything.
The list goes on.
The bottom line is that it is cheaper and easier to do things right the first time than to have to fix them on the back end. When you’re gone, your family will be sad. Don’t make them mad at you, too.
[1] Don’t know what these mean? Literally, they mean, respectively, through the stripe and through the head, and explaining further than that would require more column inches than I’m willing to give here. Which is MY POINT.
Buy my book, Devil’s Defense, or the audiobook, and/or find me on Substack.