Mostly, you are working through referrals.
More and more individuals have Web sites. If you're
seeing a lot of things about corporate law or litigation,
and then some little byline in there somewhere about
wills and estate planning, you probably figure that's
not their primary focus. All parts of the law have
become niche planning. Obviously, with a big full-service
firm, you're going to get somebody from their probate
and estates department.
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What preparations should be made before going to an attorney? |
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| Plan for your heirs |
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 Understand
the basics of what documents might be necessary and
the types of questions that you're going to be asked
to fill in on documents. Everybody probably would
have already thought of the "who" questions
-- the names and addresses of anybody who might be
named and have a role in the estate plan, the ages
of the children, the feelings of the estate owner
toward the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries' capabilities
of handling money directly, who might be an executor,
who might be a trustee -- just getting a few basics
like that really handles the entire fact finding in
advance.
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What does a will cover and what doesn't it cover? |
A will covers things owned by an individual or anything made payable to the estate. So, if you designate (something as part of) the estate or a trust under the will, or designate the estate as the beneficiary of life insurance or a pension, it's covered under the will. Sometimes you'd do this, but ordinarily you wouldn't or you have probate. There's nothing else that gets distributed under the will. All those other things -- life insurance, pensions, IRAs, 401(k) plans, payable-at-death accounts -- are all distributed by contract to named beneficiaries. Joint property with rights of survivorship automatically goes to the joint tenant. A lot of times parents and grandparents will do this with bank accounts. They'll make (their children) joint owners, which has its own set of problems, and that's done often without any advice, and sometimes it's dangerous.
Anybody who hasn't taken a couple of semesters of estate planning and/or had a lot of years of experience wouldn't have any clue about this stuff. Only by accident could they get it right.
What was kind of interesting in the survey that you did was something like 14 percent wrote down their own will instructions. I've actually seen some Internet and some software packages that give people some good education, but 14 percent of people who had wills wrote them down themselves, at least with your respondents. That was pretty surprising. If I were in a foxhole in Afghanistan and heard someone yell "incoming," I might start scribbling a will down, but there's no reason for anyone else to be doing that.
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