Estate & Legacy Planning

It is seldom a poorly drafted will. Far more often it is a well-drafted will that no longer matches the family it was written for.

Retirement accounts and life insurance pass by beneficiary designation, outside the will entirely. Where those forms were completed a long time ago — in some cases before a marriage, a divorce or the birth of a child — the estate plan on paper and the estate plan in effect have become two different plans. This is among the easiest things to put right, and a review will surface it in an afternoon.

Checking designations and account titling against the documents is unglamorous work with an unusually high ratio of benefit to effort, which is why we do it as a matter of routine rather than on request.

Many people arrive with an estate attorney they trust and no wish to change, and that arrangement works well. We coordinate with them directly, and our role remains what it is in every case: making sure the legal structure and the financial plan point the same way.

Where a family would prefer both under one roof, Woodman & Eaton can take the drafting instead. Both arrangements are common, and neither is a condition of working with us.

Most people who come to us for this already have documents, drafted competently, often a decade or more ago. What they generally have not had since is an occasion to read them alongside the accounts they are meant to govern.

The circumstances that prompt a review are the ordinary ones: children who are now adults, a second marriage, a parent who has died, property bought in another state, or a settled sense that the will no longer describes the family it was written for.

It suits people who would rather their executor inherit a clear instruction than a puzzle, and who would prefer to have this conversation while it remains comfortably hypothetical.

Families supporting a member who will need ongoing care are the clearest case of all, because the structure chosen can affect that person’s eligibility for benefits. Blended families are close behind, since the default rules rarely produce what either parent would choose.

The value of a current estate plan is measured in what your family does not have to work out for themselves. Documents that match the accounts, a trust that has actually been funded, and beneficiary designations that agree with the will together mean that the instructions are clear at the point when clarity is worth the most.

A review every few years is what keeps them current, and it is short. Most of what it finds is straightforward to correct — a designation to update, an account to retitle, a formula drafted under a previous estate tax regime that should be revisited. Corrected in good time, these are administrative matters. Left until later, they become someone else's problem to interpret.

The families who benefit most are rarely those with unusual structures. They are the ones whose ordinary documents were allowed to drift out of line with an ordinary life, and for whom an afternoon’s review restores the whole arrangement to working order.