The Three Biggest Estate Planning Mistakes (Part 1)
It is perfectly natural for people to want to control what they spend on any product or service. Most of the time we can. We can buy store brand products in place of the more expensive name brands. We can forego that international vacation and stay home instead, renting a condo on the beach or the mountains.
In other settings, we can’t control the cost. One injection, an infusion of a cancer drug can be $30,000.
Estate planning is one of those services that affords opportunities to control cost. How you control your spending on estate planning documents can either be productive or it can prove to be catastrophic. The damage often does not become apparent until it is too late to fix the problem. If so, that sort of mistake can lead to heartbreak and an additional financial burden on your family in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The purpose of this three-part article is to help you avoid these mistakes in your own planning. We want you to be the hero of your family’s story, a blessing to your family, not a burden.
The DIY Document
The most expensive documents we deal with are the ones a client got for free.
It bears repeating. The most expensive documents we see are the ones that were originally free to the user. The combination of a simplistic form filled with blanks, a document meant to work in all fifty (50) states, and a person who has no experience completing and signing a Texas will, is a recipe for disaster.
The most complicated cases we handle often begin with a simple form that was found on the internet or purchased at a local office supply store.
Lisa’s Story
Lisa is a long-time family friend. When her mother passed away, I was honored that she called me to probate her mother’s Will. Lisa is one of seven children, all born to her father and mother’s marriage of fifty-five years. One of her siblings, a sister, lived with her mother. She has special needs and was totally dependent on their mother for support. When the family brought the original Will to my office, the only one not in attendance with this sister.
Other than their grief at the loss of their only surviving parent, the six who were present in my office were most concerned about providing for the ongoing welfare of their sister. Not only did they want to help their sister, but their mother’s Will also contained some vague language about wanting the executor to see first to the needs of her special child.
Lisa explained that they had taken a screenshot of an online Wil, and she had typed it up for her mother to sign. She signed it in the presence of two witnesses and a notary public. As do-it-yourself documents go, it was a fine attempt by Lisa and her mother.
After the meeting I had an opportunity to study the Will more carefully. But the problems with her Will quickly became obvious. First, Lisa and her mom did not know that they could attach to her Will an affidavit containing the witnesses’ testimony. It is called a self-proving affidavit, because its presence enables the Will to prove itself. Ordinarily, the absence of this affidavit would not have been fatal, but her mother executed this Will in 1990; more than 30 years before her death. Try as we might, we were unable to locate either of the witnesses or the notary. Without their testimony we had no way to prove that this document was in fact her mother’s Will.
So we had to proceed to probate court with no Will and one of the heirs who could not afford to accept her inheritance. To do so would disqualify her from continuing
