The importance of a detailed estate plan

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

​Hello, everyone. This is Robert Mansour, and today I wanted to shoot a brief video about the importance of a detailed estate plan. When I say detailed, I'm not just talking about lots of legalese. I'm speaking about an estate plan that handles many of life's circumstances that you may not expect. For example, what to do if there's fighting among the children, what to do with your real estate. What if there's a disagreement about what to do with your real estate? What if one of your children has an alcoholism problem or one of your children is a spendthrift, can't handle money? Who is going to be the trustee of your trust, and who is going to be the second person in line after that? What if you have co-trustees? What if there's a disagreement among those co-trustees?

The reason I'm bringing all this up is because many times clients come to my office and we work on the estate plan, and I ask them, "Well, what if this happens, and what if this happens, and what if this happens?" They invariably say, "Oh, my goodness. I didn't even think about all that." Here's the thing - The more detailed your plan is and the more issues it addresses, at least as close to completely as possible, the less problems you're likely to have on the back end.

Sometimes if there is a disagreement in the family or there is a question about how to handle something or what to do with the family's real estate, etc., if the estate plan addresses that issue, it makes it much less likely that it's going to be a problem. Let's say one of the children has an alcoholism problem and there's a question about how to distribute money to that individual. Are there provisions in the estate plan that address that situation? How and when does that individual, no matter what their challenge might be, whether it's a spendthrift that can't handle their money, a daughter-in-law or a son-in-law who might get their hands on the money, alcoholism, etc. The more detailed your estate plan is, the less likely you're going to have a problem on the back end.

You see, the trustees that you pick, they really want specific instructions about what to do and how to do it. If you leave too much to the imagination, sometimes that can lead to a problem. Now there are some families where everybody gets along famously and there's absolutely zero chance of anything going wrong, or perhaps a sole beneficiary; one child is going to be the beneficiary and nothing more. Then you might be able to get away with more general instructions, but generally speaking, the more beneficiaries there are, the more issues there might be, the more detailed you want that plan to be so that it addresses that issue - so it's less problematic for the family after you pass away.

This has been Robert Mansour talking to you about having a very detailed estate plan and the benefits of doing so. Thanks for watching.

If you need help with your estate plan, give us a call at (661) 414-7100.