For anyone living today, they know that there are no ways they evade taxes and death at some point in life. This saying is just meant to remind you that time to come up with proper plans for your estate has come if you don’t want to leave it in the wrong hands once you die. In case you die before you have planned your estate properly, you risk leaving to the wrong beneficiaries such as the estate attorney or even the state treasurer. As long as you have done estate planning, you are still in control over who gets what portion of the estate and so on.
Creating or writing a will is the top step any estate planner begins with before they move on to the other steps. Once a person dies before they have written a will on how the estate would be distributed, the state comes in to dispose of it as it deems good. In most countries, blood relationships are some of the state’s schemes that determine how the estate would be distributed. The will is so powerful that even if the state wished to give the estate to someone else for certain reasons, it would not be able to go against the written will.
It is important to ensure you have a reliable person in mind who will play the execution role and you should write their name down in that will. One thing you need to know is that the executor plays a quite significant role in the demise of the estate owner in ensuring the distribution is done as the owner wished when they were alive. It happens that the executor may be not in a good condition to distribute the estate or they may die, and in this case, you should have an alternate in mind and write their name down. When a time comes to name the alternate, you find most people naming their spouses or even one of the most responsible children.
You should ensure that all the life policies you own are listed properly in that will. In most countries around the world, you won’t find people who just list their life insurance policies and they don’t mention their beneficiaries in writing, if they want to have a thorough estate planning. In this section, it would also be important to consider writing down your face value, cash value as well as the ownership of every insurance policy you have.
Although estate planning is meant to ensure things flow well after you are long gone, doing it is quite overwhelming. With the estate planning attorneys available today, you should not find an estate planning a distressing job. It is important to ensure that your wishes, as well as interests, are what the estate planning lawyer would want to implement.