Ensuring a Plan Will Accomplish What It’s Meant to

Share this post

Steps to Take in Ensuring A Plan

Your estate plan is much more likely to be successful when you recognize and avoid the most common mistakes and take some key actions that often are overlooked. Most estate planners will tell you that the same estate planning mistakes and oversights recur with frequency, whether an estate is worth a billion dollars, a few hundred thousand dollars, or something in between. Ensuring a plan is accomplishing its goals in crucial to its success.

Steps to Take in Ensuring A Plan

There are several ways people can work in ensuring a plan will accomplish what it’s meant to. We want to guarantee that the goals you set actually come to pass.

counseling attorney
  1. Work with a counseling-oriented attorney as opposed to a word-processing attorney. Unfortunately, most estate planning is little more than word-processing. You don’t need a professional advisor for that. The professional’s value comes from counsel and advice based on knowledge, wisdom, and experience. Plans are built for people with specific situations and circumstances — they are not merely stacks of paper.
  2. Be sure to coordinate the advice of your attorney with your other professional advisors — your financial advisor, CPA, insurance advisor, and others. As a business owner, you are best served when all your advisors work together as a team on your behalf.
  3. Establish a formal updating and plan maintenance program. There is constant change in your family and financial circumstances. Tax laws and other laws change every year in ways that will impact many estate plans. In addition, your advisors’ experience and expertise change along with planning techniques. Without updating, your plan won’t work the way you intended it to. Without a formal updating and maintenance program, it’s easy to let your plan sit on a shelf and forget about it.
  4. Ensure that your wisdom and experience is passed along with your financial wealth. In many families, the parents have an abundance of wisdom that has been earned the hard way — through trials and errors. Most business owners have lived through blood, sweat, and tears. Why not share what you’ve learned along the way, and help your loved ones avoid making the same mistakes you did? By preparing your children and grandchildren or other beneficiaries to receive your wealth, your wisdom can help make your money a benefit instead of the burden that it often becomes. Statistics tell us that most financial windfalls (including inheritances and businesses) disappear within 18 months. By passing wisdom along with the financial wealth, you can help your family not become one of those statistics.

For those considering making changes to their estate plan or need to set up a will or trust, contact our Chicago Illinois estate attorneys at Anthony J. Madonia & Associates.