What You Can Do Now to Simplify Your Estate Plan for Your Heirs
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Here's your money briefing for Friday, November 29th. I'm Arianna Aspudu for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for J.R. Whelan. It's not an easy, breezy conversation. But a detailed estate plan can make life after you're gone way easier for your loved ones.
It's just, it's such a shame when families are divided over stuff. And it just, it doesn't have to happen that way. A little planning can really go a long way in making sure that your heirs are provided for and that there's no family acrimony.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal contributor Cheryl Winokur-Monk about it after the break.
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If you don't want your assets to end up in the wrong hands, there are some steps you can take now to make your estate simpler for your heirs. Wall Street Journal contributor Cheryl Winokur-Munk joins me. Cheryl, why is estate planning important?
Why should I create or update an estate plan now?
You work hard to earn money and you gather possessions over your lifetime and you really want your money and your possessions to go to people that you want them to go to. You don't want, for example, your ex-boyfriend or your ex-girlfriend to be the beneficiary of your life insurance because you forgot to change something when you broke up. The whole idea of planning is exactly that, planning, so that you get to be in control to the extent possible.
And you've talked to people who've had those mishaps with their estate planning, right?
It happens all the time because you just really forget about it. A life insurance policy, for example, is really a kind of a set it and forget it because unless you die, you're not using that life insurance policy. So even though you may be paying the premiums, many times you just forget who you actually named as beneficiary 10, 15 years before. You really have to make sure as life events change that you're keeping on top of the things that you have named beneficiaries for.
And one of the first things you mentioned in your story is keeping documents updated. What do you mean by that and how often should they be updated?
So there's no hard and fast rule, but for sure as life events change, a good rule of thumb is to at least consider what your will looks like every five to 10 years or more frequently as life events change. So for example, you could have done a will and within a couple years, One of your trustees passed away or you fell out of touch with that person or something, some other thing changed. A child hit the age of majority or for some reason you wanted to change some of the aspects within that. Well, you came into a lot of money. Five to 10 years is a good rule of thumb, but it's not hard and fast.
Are there any assets that people commonly overlook when estate planning?
One of the things that today is really popular to overlook is digital assets because people don't think of your email account or online photos or your social media accounts as an asset. But in some cases, it really can be. If you're a writer, for example, and you keep your notebooks, so to speak, on your computer and then you pass away, if you haven't accounted for that, you could find that those assets get lost or they end up in hands that you're not happy with.
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