One of
the more difficult aspects of working with clients to develop their estate plan
is helping clients become comfortable discussing their goals and concerns for
what happens to their estate after they pass away. This comfort is important
because it is impossible to draft documents that truly achieve the client's
goals when the client is unable to articulate those goals. Once clients have an
estate plan it is also important that they become comfortable discussing that
plan with those people whom they have trusted with its administration.
After
going through the initial process of creating an estate plan, many clients put
those documents in the drawer and never mention them to their children to the
people they have named in the documents to make decisions, except perhaps to
tell them where the documents are located. This failure to discuss the client’s posthumous wishes can cause unexpected difficulties in
administering an estate and hurt feelings of beneficiaries who do not understand
why their parents made certain choices. For example, a client may choose to
provide that assets are held in trust for their grandchildren as opposed to
making gifts to their children. This may leave the children wondering if
they've done something that made their parents reluctant to trust them, when
the clients goal was to remove the burden of saving for college costs from
their children in order to make their lives easier.
In
another scenario, a client may choose one child over the others to act as
Successor Trustee. While the parent’s goal was to appoint the
child who could most efficiently administer the estate, perhaps due to
geographic location or flexibility of their schedule, the children are left
wondering what they did “wrong.”
The reasons
clients have for distributing their wealth the way they do are as disparate as
the number of estate plans. By taking the time to discuss an estate plan with
the successor designees and beneficiaries who will be administering benefits
from that plan, clients provide guidance and clarity that helps their loved
ones achieve the clients' underlying goals.
Estate
planning is a ongoing process and communication is a major part of the process.
While clients may not wish for their beneficiaries to know the full scope of
the bequests made in their documents, by taking the time to discuss the scope
and reasoning behind an estate plan clients can influence the lives of their
beneficiaries with more than the monetary impact of their gifts.
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