The Importance of Actually Understanding Your Estate Plan

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hello everyone, this is Robert Mansour, and I wanted to make a brief video today about what it means to "have" an estate plan versus what it means to "understand" your estate plan. Sometimes I get in conversations with clients and they say, "Oh yeah, we have an estate plan," or, "We have a living trust," or, "We have powers of attorney. We have healthcare documents." Then I ask them some questions about those documents and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'll say, "Well what does your estate plan say?" They say, "I don't know." We'll say, "What kind of living trust do you have? What features does it have?" "Oh, we don't know." "When is your power of attorney effective?" "We don't know."

That's not very good, because having an estate plan is great, but if you don't know how to use it, and if your family doesn't know how to use it, your trustees don't know where it is, your healthcare agents wouldn't know the first thing about what to do, that's not very helpful. What I do is I try to help my clients understand not only having an estate plan, but what it actually says. What does their living trust really say? What happens when someone passes away? When are these documents effective? Under what circumstances should they be used?

As a matter of fact, in most cases I ask my clients to bring their trustees and their agents and their executors to the final meeting so I can brief the entire family about what this estate plan says, what it does, how it's used. Answer all questions, because it's nice to have everybody on the team there. So again, ask yourself,  "If I have an estate plan, do I even know what it says?" And shouldn't you?

​So if you want to understand what your estate plan says, or you want to get an estate plan, and really know what you're doing and understand the meaning of the legal tools that you are creating give my office a call and we'll do our best to help you. Thank you very much for watching this video.

If you need help with your estate plan, call us at (661) 414-7100 to see if we can assist you.