10 Times to Review Your Estate Plan

The book Financial Jiu-Jitsu: A Fighter's Guide to Conquering Your Finances lists ten times to review your estate plan as follows:

• Change in marital status
• Divorce
• Additions to the family
• Your family faces illness or injury
• You simply change your mind
• Tax laws change
• Nontax laws change
• You receive an inheritance
• You acquire or sell major assets
• You move to another state

A couple thoughts from me:

• Aren't #1 and #2 the same thing? In other words, isn't a divorce a change in marital status? (Yes, I realize that "getting married" is a change too, just saying that divorce should be covered in #1.)
• We had our estate plan done a few years ago and haven't had any of these changes, so we haven't reviewed it for some time. That said, we will want to look over it again in a year or two just to make sure all is as we want it.

How about you? Do you have a will? Do you have other estate planning documents? Do you need to review any of them based on the list above?

Comments

[Everyday Tips]

We have a will (for assigning guardianship mainly) and a trust.

Maybe the divorce part also applied to guardianship. For instance, if I name my brother and his wife guardians of my kids and they divorce, I need to modify my will to dump the sister in law? Or, I leave money and name my son and daughter in law in the will and they divorce? I don't know, maybe if you are over-specific in your plans, you need to modify your will to cut out those that are no longer in the family?

[KH]

My divorce lawyer sent me directly to an estate lawyer after my divorce was finalized. Obviously to make a will, but also because the divorce decree which stipulated various types of support for the children that I had to set up legally.

For example, the divorce decree directed me to have x amount of life insurance that would go to the kids if I died, but the estate plan allowed me to say that I wanted to put it into a trust and depending on the kids' ages when I died, I chose the family members who would be in charge of the money (otherwise it all would have gone to my ex if the kids were minors).

The other thing included in my estate plan was a living will--very important if you don't want to live on as a vegetable (or if you do).