Our new Estate Planning Questionnaire for Individuals

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
​Hello everyone, this is Rob Mansour and we're going to take a look at the individual's estate planning questionnaire. I'm gonna give you a quick tour, and this tour might help you when you're actually filling out the questionnaire yourself. So you'll notice that the questionnaire has six pages, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 at the top. And every so often you're gonna find some general instructions for you to follow. Don't worry if you can't answer all the questions.  Just do your best. Here in this first page you'll enter the date of your consultation, how you learned about my office, how do you want your name to appear in the legal documents. And, if you choose to put a middle name or not, put a middle name, that's your decision, best phone number to reach you, your best email address that you check frequently.  Also, a copy of your completed questionnaire will be sent to that email and your best mailing address down here. Now, at the bottom of every page of the questionnaire, you'll notice that there's a button that says "Save. If you click on that button, it will allow you to save your progress where you are in the questionnaire, and you can enter, enter your email here - When you click on that link, you'll be able to pick up where you left off. So that is sometimes helpful. The questionnaire itself shouldn't take you, you know, too long, maybe about 20

Asks if you're divorced, if you, if you have any special situation that we need to be aware of, if you're a widow or a widower, if you have any pre-existing documents, you can indicate them here. And otherwise you could just click that you don't have any prior documents. We'll continue to the next page.

Now, here is where we ask you about beneficiaries - who is going to inherit your estate? And here is where you'd indicate if you have any children, and if you do, you can click on yes. Now, you'll notice if you click on yes, there are points in the questionnaire where you will be provided with more details depending on how you answer the questions. So if you say that you do not have any children, well then that dialogue will not engage. But if you put that you do have children, you'll notice that you can add their names and their birth dates right here. Also, you can add children by clicking on add child right here.

Here it talks about how your estate will distribute. So you should read that carefully and add any information that you think is important. Any special issues affecting your beneficiaries should be listed here.  How you want your kids or your beneficiaries to inherit from you. Again, you may not have all the answers to this and just go ahead and do your best. Then of course is the apocalypse section where if all the beneficiaries you've listed are no longer with us for some reason, where would you want your estate to go?

Now you'll notice many times in the questionnaire I will actually provide a sample response to assist you. So you might want to take a look at those as well. Now, let's go to the next page. Here you will list your successor trustees. These are the people in charge of your trust if you can't handle things anymore. So let's say for example, you're disabled, you're incapacitated, you got into a car accident, you're in the hospital. There may be times when somebody needs to take over and this could take several years if you're very sick.

When people when think about trustees, they tend to think this is the person who's distributing my estate. And that is true. But this person is also going to be the one handling your estate in the event you cannot handle it anymore. And so you'll notice here you can enter the name of the trustee as well as their relationship to you. You can also add successor trustees by clicking on this button right here.

And then you'll name your executors. These are the people in charge of your will and your will is a backup to your living trust and the person in charge is called your executor. Here it asks if you have any minor children in case we need to name guardians for those minor children. Let's go to the next page here. This page here asks you about who's going to make healthcare decisions for you if you cannot, and any special instructions you wanna leave about that and power of attorney.

This is the person who gets to act on your behalf in the event that you cannot act for some reason or another, such as incapacity. So this is not the same as your trustee, although it is often the same person and you just go ahead and indicate their name and their relationship to you right here. And then you click add agent if you want to add additional people. And then on the last page of the questionnaire, we ask more detailed questions about your assets. And again, depending on how you answer it will open additional information. So here it says, do you have any real estate including your primary residence? If you click yes, it will ask you to list your real estate. And then you can always add real estate by clicking the add property button. And the same goes for all of the other assets and asset classes on this page.

And then there's just some general information here to learn more about your goals and any other information you'd like us to learn. If you wanna upload any documents to the questionnaire, you can upload them here or drag the files to this section of the questionnaire. And then once you submit, you will get a confirmation page that contains all your responses. You can print that page also. All of the documents are, all of your answers rather, will be emailed to you and emailed to us so that we have all of that information. Again, just do your very best on this questionnaire because the more information we have, the more productive that initial meeting will be. Thank you very much. I hope you found this quick video helpful and we look forward to meeting with you.