ABC News article confirms why your estate plan is likely to fail
Last week, I was contacted by Alice Gomstyn, a reporter from ABC News who was writing a story about Heath Ledger, who as you’ll recall from my article last week, died with an out of date Will that didn’t mention his daughter Matilda.
Alice’s article confirms what I’ve been saying all along … most lawyers are shockingly clueless when it comes to building meaningful relationships with their clients and making sure their clients’ estate plans will work when their families need them.
Attorney David A. Looney, a lawyer in Akron, Ohio, quoted in the article sadly represents the vast majority of lawyers out there who claim to have relationships with their clients, but when you look a little deeper what you really find is the mere preparation of form documents and nothing more.
It’s left up to the client to contact their lawyer when changes happen in their life or the law and as we’ve seen with Anna Nicole and Heath Ledger that far too often doesn’t happen.
I am keenly aware of this not only because my father in law died with an estate plan that left his assets owned improperly, but because I saw it in my own law practice when I first launched my business.
I’d talk a lot about relationship with my clients, but when I gave my business a good hard look, there was no relationship to be found - my clients signed their documents, took them home and didn’t think about estate planning again.
Once I realized this, I vowed to change it.
Personal Family Lawyers send out a monthly newsletter, this weekly online magazine and review their clients’ plans at least every three years. All this so you don’t have to worry that the planning you spent thousands of dollars on won’t work.
And, most excitingly, we launched our Family Wealth VIP Membership program so clients could really have an ongoing relationship with their personal lawyer without having to worry about hourly fees.
What does this mean?
For clients who participate in our membership program, we review the plan annually instead of every three years and changes to the plan are made at no charge. Plus, we update our clients Family Wealth Inventory annually to ensure that none of the assets end up in the state Department of Unclaimed Property because they are overlooked after death or forced to go through the long, expensive, and unnecessary probate process because they were not titled properly.
Most excitingly, clients on our membership program are able to call us whenever there’s any event in their life that has legal or financial implications and not worry about getting a bill in the mail weeks later. We are able to be our clients’ true personal lawyer for life.
As we say, it’s like having a lawyer in the family. And, it’s one of the most critical relationships you can have if you are serious about building wealth and leaving your family with the guidance of someone you trust after you are gone.
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Why Every Adult Needs to Plan!
Another sad case of a woman on life support who didn’t do any estate planning. Deanna Suzanne Fruggiero is only 31 and not married, so she probably didn’t think it was important. Now, her divorced parents are fighting over who will make decisions about her care. Every adult over the age of 18 must have an Advance Health Care Directive/Living Will in place to state what should happen in this situation. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it because it’s a gift to the people you love!
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The Rich Get Richer - Why Not You?
Monday’s Wall St. Journal article Market Turmoil Creates Opening to Enrich Heirs
highlighted one way the current downturn in the market can be a huge opportunity for the wealthy. This is a fantastic time for you to pass assets on to your heirs at a major discount.
For those of you who aren’t facing estate taxes yet, there’s loads of other opportunities to capitalize on now that will make it more likely that estate taxes will be one of the good problems you have to worry about.
As Seth Godin points out “change (and the fortunes that go with it) is almost always made during the down part of the cycle. It might not be fun, but it’s exciting. (Where do you think Google came from?) The opportunity is to find substantial opportunities (in any field) that deliver real value and have a future. Those jobs/investments/companies/ideas are undervalued right now, but not for long.”
So stop worrying so much about the big, bad recession and whether the market is a bear market or not and start focusing on how you can get yourself into the group of people who can take advantage of the next downturn in a big, bad way yourself.
In fact, why not think about what to do with that tax rebate you’ve got coming?
Here’s some ideas:
1. Invest In Yourself
If you haven’t already, get your financial house in order by meeting with a Personal Family Lawyer, conducting a Family Wealth Inventory and Assessment and giving yourself and your loved ones the gift of knowing you are making the right financial and legal decisions during life and everything will be taken care of if anything happens to you.
2. Invest In Your Business
If you are a business owner, this is the time to invest more in your business, not less. Many people will go out of business during a recession because they get scared and stop investing in their marketing. This is the time to do more, not less. Get creative and get going.
3. Invest in Your Family
If you aren’t a business owner and you’ve got your estate planning in place and up to date, then check out these ways you can invest in your family: max out your 401(k), open up a 529 plan for your kid or fund a retirement account for your kid under 18 who is employed even just a little bit.
Whatever you do - invest it in your future and be one of the rich who get richer this time around.
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Heath Ledger Estate Planning Out of Date and No Mention of Daughter Matilda or Her Mother Michelle Williams in Will
We saw the same thing recently when Anna Nicole Smith died and her Will left everything to her deceased son, made no mention of her baby daughter Danielynn or her long-time life/love partner Howard K. Stern, who stuck by her through all of her ups and downs for years prior to her death.Heath’s parents have publicly assured that Matilda will be well taken care of and she’s likely to be deemed a pretermitted heir or omitted heir anyway, which would mean she’ll end up inheriting Heath’s estate and a Los Angeles Court has established Dannielynn as Anna Nicole’s sole heir, so in the end the kids will be taken care of but those results only tell part of the story.
First off, neither Michelle Williams, Matilda’s mother, nor Howard K. Stern, Anna Nicole’s long-time partner, were provided for and the law doesn’t make any provision for unmarried partners. Would Heath and Anna really have wanted Michelle and Howard to get nothing?
Second, while Matilda and Dannielynn will ultimately inherit from their parents due to the pretermitted heir laws noted above, Heath and Anna lost out on the chance to decide the terms under which their babies would receive the money they left behind and to name who would take care of that money until the received it.
Even wealthy celebrities are victim of the current mindset that estate planning is about form documents that can be prepared once and never looked at again. As these cases highlight, that’s incorrect.
The truth of the matter is that estate planning really has very little to do with form documents. Think about this: standard estate planning form documents can be purchased on the internet for a couple hundred bucks, completed with the help of a do it yourself kit for only $13.50 or you could spend $2,750 to have the forms prepared for you by an Arizona lawyer who calls himself the Estate Planning Doctor.
Here’s the amazing thing . . . whether you spend $13.50 or $2,750.00, at the end of the day all you end up with is documents that in many cases won’t work when your family needs them.
What you want when it comes to estate planning is not a set of form documents. What you want is a relationship with a personal lawyer who is going to guide you to make the best decision throughout your lifetime, be there for your family when you can’t be, and make sure your estate plan stays up to date so when you have a new baby, they know about it, the baby gets added to your plan and your plan works when your family needs it.
© 2008 Alexis Martin Neely
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The Launch of the Intrepid Entrepreneur
Once again, another celebrity has died with an out of date estate plan. This week’s article helps you understand why a set of form documents aren’t the best bet for your family, just like they weren’t for Heath Ledger’s family.
In addition, you are going to start to see a change here at the Family Wealth Secrets online magazine - notably, all the future articles will be focused specifically on building your Family Wealth and passing it on after you are gone.
That’s right, no more articles about personal development, what’s going on in my life, or my experiences as an entrepreneur.
I’ve launched a new blog - The Intrepid Entrepreneur - for those of you who want more of that. And, it’s a real deal blog, not an e-zine, not an online magazine, not an e-newsletter.
What’s the difference, you ask?
Well, I’ve been spending lots of time thinking about that myself because while I blog, I don’t feel like a real blogger because I don’t believe very many people come to any of my sites looking for updates, I’ve got very few people subscribed to my blog feeds and hardly anyone ever comments.
There are thousands of people signed up to receive my online magazines, but that’s me sending an email out to your inbox saying here’s some information - eat it up. If you look at the blogs of two of my favorite bloggers - Penelope Trunk & Tim Ferriss - you’ll see that they’ve got a whole conversation going on their blogs. They post, people comment, they respond - it’s a community.
As a blogger, I imagine people will keep coming back to my blog to get fed instead of me spoon feeding the message (force-feeding?) into your inbox. You’ll be reading past posts, laughing, crying, and most excitedly, leaving comments so it will become more of a community, more of a conversation.
Plus, it will give me an outlet for writing about everything happening in my life. I’ve been sneaking some of it into my Family Wealth Secrets and Law Business Secrets online magazines, but it’s really not the right forum for it.
So, I’ve decided I’m going to write about just Family Wealth stuff on the Family Wealth Secrets and just Law Business stuff at Law Business Secrets and I might even invite guest hosts to write articles on those sites, but if you want to get the real nitty gritty on what’s going on in my life, with my businesses and how one woman raises two kids, builds three businesses, writes a NY Times bestseller, becomes the next Suze Orman and realizes every other dream she’s ever had, you’ll just have to subscribe to the RSS feed at my blog, The Intrepid Entrepreneur - because now I’m a real deal blogger.
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